3 ms·
>Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language.4 Patie
by mrjangles 5y ago
>Research on adult individuals with aphasia has demonstrated that math, theory of mind, and many other cognitive abilities are independent from language.4 Patients with severe language impairments perform comparably to the rest of us when *asked* to complete arithmetic tasks, reason about people’s intentions, determine physical causes of actions, or decide whether a drawing depicts a real-life event.
Ok something is weird here. How were they *asked* to do these things if they have no language skills. Is the author brushing over the fact that they still had language skills, but they were not as good as they used to be? In which case all her conclusions about what we can do without any language skills are irrelevant as they don't apply, which would explain why she brushes over this point, I guess.
- inter_netuser 5y agoNearly all of such studies are on stroke/trauma victims. What weirds me out is that they completely disregard that no stroke/trauma victims are identical, but I guess they try their best to derive some insights on this rather heterogenous population. These are hard experiments to run. I fear that as soon as we figure out how dolphins speak we are going to run such gruesome experiments, only intentional and controlled, on intelligent life.
- fourtrees 5y agoI'm not sure exactly what constitutes a 'severe language impairment'; there are lots of aphasias out there that only affect very specific parts of the whole language/writing system in the brain. They could be comprehend normally, but have trouble producing (on some level) speech or vice versa. If could comprehend spoken language without difficult, they could 'easily' complete tasks that didn't require those neural connections. Without knowing what the specific symptoms were, this is kind of a moot point.