John Hawks, prominent anthropologist and leader of the Neandertal Anti-defamation League, made some interesting comments in reviewing the article Language processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind adults, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(Early online) by Marina Bedny, et al. See John Hawks Weblog for his review, Language bootstrapping the brain.
Professor Hawks notes that “language itself is surprisingly voracious in its ability to consume brain resources and redirect development.” This tells us the human brain is quite plastic, at least at certain stages of development, since the visual cortex is one of the most highly specialized of the ‘higher’ brain regions. I first learned of this high degree of specialization, in scientific terms, from a book concentrating on color vision: A Vision of the Brain by the prominent brain-scientist Semir Zeki. It’s a book well worth the read for an understanding of how the brain is being explored and an understanding of the results of that exploration circa 1993.
There is a quote in Language bootstrapping the brain summarizing the results of an experiment at MIT in the late 1990s in which the scientists operated on the brains of ferrets and connected the nerves from the retinas to the auditory regions. The ferrets, surprisingly enough, could see and their auditory regions became organized in the way of the typical ferret’s visual cortex.
At the time, Michael Merzenich, a leading plasticity researcher at UCSF, called this experiment “The most compelling demonstration you could have that experience shapes the brain.” Our mental hardware wasn’t hard at all.
Hawks engages in “informed speculation,” including:
Language has sharp elbows. It muscles its way into the brain, crowding out other neural functions. Language has the most powerful weapons at hand — a baby’s first word prompts an entire language community to pull the dopamine and serotonin levers of emotion and attention.
A function that was strongly specified by genetics, patterned early in brain development, would not plant itself in spare neurons like a weed in a vacant lot. Only a system that bootstraps itself upon experiencing language inputs could have such plasticity. The structure of the language environment fosters the development of the classic language areas, biased to appear in those particular places by prenatal developmental trajectories, but not built according to a genetic blueprint.
The blind subjects tell us that the ground for language processing is almost as fertile elsewhere in the cortex. Many brain areas have the genetic equipment to recruit and organize neurons into useful circuits for language processing. Language development is developmentally robust because it can rely on a rich language environment, not because of genetic standardization. The basic problems of language evolution must be explained by showing how robust language communities emerged. I don’t preclude genetics, far from it — weaker language environments may have become stronger because of evolutionary change. But that evolution must have been substantially domain-general, because language processing is not specifically canalized by genetics.
Quite a reasonable speculation. A baby is born into a community of shared knowledge, knowledge not only of ‘intellectual’ matters but also of physical skills and emotions appropriate to the community’s life and so much more. There is clearly genetic predisposition to learning language but language must be learned and must be learned in a community of language-using human beings. I suspect that the same would be true of the related and additional skills of literacy proper, the use of written languages and the ways in which our abstract reasoning abilities can be both unleashed and focused. We might conjecture that a literacy is also a bootstrapping operation and it takes generations to develop higher levels of literacy. Once lost, it will take a number of generations to regain the levels of literacy which are necessary to modern science as well as other parts of Western Civilization.
Yet, there might be built-in predispositions which can over-power even the use of language. By at least the 1960s, Richard Gregory, British brain-scientist, was warning (with television and the movies in mind?) that the visual systems in humans are so important over the long-term in gathering food and finding reproductive opportunities that they will awaken at strong stimuli and grab resources so that other regions of the brain, especially those of higher thought, will be shut down while the new stimuli is evaluated. Television and movies are a potential danger to proper development and use of our minds, but the modern tendency to place colorful, glossy pictures even in mathematics textbooks would seem to be a gratuitous opening to mind-damage.
Our minds grow in the context of particular communities. Not that mind or what it does is inherently ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’. Those peoples who are developing civilizations, that is — higher minds, are moving across the same objectively existing plain, though not all are bound to start the journey nor to move in reasonable directions at all times. We can say each human tradition will have its own treasures of books or music or art or factories or farms or stores of blood-drenched weapons which it can pass on along with knowledge of how it use those treasures, in ways morally well-ordered or ill-ordered. As John Henry Newman told us, our words mediate and store and — far too often — deform our beliefs, even those which refer to the greatest truths. When we try to stubbornly hold on to words and concepts from an earlier time, when those words and concepts are no longer appropriate, we deform even the greatest truths by forcing them into old wineskins. For the greatest truths always show up as new wine, not matter how ancient their first appearance in human thought.
A living tradition will adjust to new knowledge of the world when appropriate, forming new words or redefining old words and injecting new concepts into the thinking processes of its adherents, including those who adhere in less conscious or less aware ways. If a tradition isn’t truly alive, its language and concepts will still invade the minds in formation within its domain, rigidifying rather than imparting life. If a tradition is in formation, its language and concepts will be ill-formed and fluid, allowing great freedom to creative thinkers and artists and doers of all sorts but leaving many minds in a barbaric state, that is, a state of confusion and disorder. A society in such a barbaric state may well destroy those creative thinkers and doers. It may well destroy itself, even if it’s embedded in a great tradition of civilization.
For some comments by Professor Hawks on the relationship between language and concepts, see John Hawks Weblog for the essay Number as cognitive technology. Professor Hawks proposes that numbers are technology, an ‘invention’ of an important sort, a use of a pre-existing but simple concept of ‘number’, rather than being a new concept which develops in the human mind as human knowledge grew. I have a problem with this only because my view of the mind leaves me with great difficulty in distinguishing between technology and concepts or — more generally — between our understanding/use of the world and our minds. After all, I’ve taken the Thomistic claim, “Things are true,” and expanded it to, “Truths are thing-like.”
What does this all mean? In this essay, Preliminary Thoughts on the Evolution of the Human Mind, I talk about multiple levels of development of the mind. The human brain evolved on the species level and then mind develops over various levels of scale on the cultural and individual level. We shouldn’t really think these levels are fully separable. They don’t overlap so much as they interact and interpenetrate each other but that’s a very complicated and complex issue and beyond the scope of this short essay.
We can make greater sense of human nature and how it came and comes into being by letting ourselves be guided by the views of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. So many years ago, he observed that human beings are organisms, developing in ways appropriate to organisms — by way of active response to their environments. The brain-scientist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman has even claimed that Aquinas, out of all major thinkers, provides the best general guidance for modern science. I would suggest that even Darwin’s thoughts would have been not different but more coherent and richer if he’d been a Thomistic thinker. See What is Mind?: Is Christian Morality a Natural Morality? and succeeding essays with the major title What is Mind? for my review of and responses to Professor Freeman’s book, How Brains Make Up Their Minds.