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I have a conjecture, that we understand language primarily through proprioception. So when we see and hear someone talking, we mirror and model their muscle mo
by retrac 3y ago
I have a conjecture, that we understand language primarily through proprioception. So when we see and hear someone talking, we mirror and model their muscle movements, and we understand it fundamentally, in terms of our own body moving. I suspect proprioception plays a role in abstract thinking, too. Conceptual metaphors are movement based, as if our hands were manipulating thoughts. We pick ideas apart, reassemble them, sort through them, toss them out.
- ghusbands 3y agoBlind people understand language perfectly well, which rules out your conjecture. [ETA: Yes, this is a response to "see and hear", which should perhaps be "see or hear", and because "we mirror and model their muscle movements" implies more than just vocals/sound.]
- syntaxfree 3y agoYou’re able to capture a whole world of proximity relations through echolocation.
- 4gotunameagain 3y agoI assume you mean by auditory information. Echolocation pertains specifically to the use of echoes to determine location, which would not help at all in this case, with the granularity required. Even assuming that auditory information it is, I am unsure if it enables mimicry as much as visual information, which apart from being our predominant sense, it gives clear clue as to which movement led to which action/sound
- mathgradthrow 3y agoproprioception is separate from vision.
- retrac 3y agoI must have expressed it poorly, because my conjecture seems to apply equally to blind people. Looking back, maybe it's because I wrote "see and hear"? Just an artifact of my perspective as a hard-of-hearing person who relies heavily on lipreading. I suspect when blind people hear speech, or read with braille, they mirror the muscle movements involved, as if they were speaking the words themselves. Sight isn't required for that. Neither is hearing. The deaf-blind can learn sign language through feeling the motion of the signs. I suspect it all works the same way, hearing language, seeing language, feeling language acted out physically - the audience understands it by acting out the same motions themselves, internally.
- metanonsense 3y agoYou should read „A thousand brains“ by Jeff Hawkins (if you haven’t already done so). A large part of their theory is that the brain has evolved to orient and move in a 3D world and that this is the basis of our abstract thinking.
- agumonkey 3y agoPersonal anecdote, there's a lot of your nervous system that is indeed simulating other personas in your head. And the closer you get the deeper the mirroring (children, spouse). After some catastrophic events, whenever I was smiling, the shape was altered, and took how my ex was smiling (very different facial structure) and triggered hallucinations of her face onto mine and other various emotions. It happens whenever (at various intensities) I mirror her smile.
- Tarq0n 3y agoDifferent people have different kinds of cognition. For instance this Joseph Conrad quote from the article: “My job as a writer of fiction is to make you see, to appeal as accurately as possible to the visible, and that is everything.” is amusingly wrong to the many aphantastic people on Hacker News.
- Teever 3y agoBut do you think that means that aphanastic people are less likely to enjoy the books written by this author?
- piombisallow 3y agoSounds like a dumb conjecture, how do you explain reading and talking on the phone then?
- retrac 3y ago> reading We learn to read aloud, and there's usually a long transitional period of subvocalization. And even people who can read silently, if they want to very carefully understand something, often subvocalize it - even moving the lips silently. My conjecture is this process never goes away entirely. > talking on the phone Same mechanism. We hear the sounds and imagine ourselves making the muscle motions to produce such sounds.
- MiddleMan5 3y agoThis comment is disrespectful and dismissive and goes against the community guidelines. Please refrain from personal attacks on other community members
- cyrillite 3y agoWell, there is often a good correlation between things which make socialising difficult and things which appear to make aspects of spatial reasoning difficult.