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Rudy Garns

Neuroscience: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain w/ Terrence Deacon - 0 views

www.childrenofthecode.org/...deacon.htm

azb brains deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • We suspected that the areas in human brains where we find language connections would be quite different in monkey brains. The surprise was that, as far as we could tell, the plan was the same plan. The way these areas were connected, even areas that we identified as language areas, or the correspondent areas in monkeys, had the same kinds of connections.
  • embryology changes over the course of evolution and that changes the resultant
  • self organization. A lot of the information that goes into building brains is not actually there in the genes. It’s sort of cooked up or whipped up on the fly as brains develop. So, if one is to explain how a very complicated organ like the brain actually evolved, changed it’s function to be able to do something like language, one has to understand it through this very complicated prism of self organization and a kind of mini-evolution process that goes on as brains develop in which cells essentially compete with each other for nutrients.
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  • Language has changed the environments in which brains have evolved.
  • I think that the connections are different because the brain is bigger and because not all parts expanded at the same rate.
  • We undoubtedly passed through not maybe one stage of what you might call a proto language but probably many proto languages, many forms of this linguistic symbolic communication system over the course of our evolution, all of them leaving somewhat of a trace.
  • I think clearly early language-like behavior had to involve much less vocalization because the brains that preceded us, mammal brains, are not well suited to organizing sound in precise, discrete and rapidly produced learned sequences.
  • I look at us as an African ape that’s been tweaked just enough to be able to do this radically unnatural kind of activity: language.
  • It turns out that very likely our ancestors, the australopithecines, and of course before them, had, like other mammals, a relatively disconnected control of the larynx and even of the tongue, to some extent. By that I mean that there was probably not much voluntary control over vocalization and certainly not at the level at which you could stop and start it on a dime, so to speak, with very little effort associated with it. 
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    The following interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003.
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

johnhawks.net/...deacon.html

azb deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08 - Cached
  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
  • Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08
     
    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon on the symbolic species - 0 views

newlearningonline.com/...page-3

azb brains deacon evolution human-evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought—symbolic representation
  • [In] indexical association, [t]he word (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with similar objects from past experiences) and their past correlations enable the word to bring the object to mind .
  • [T]he major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the use of words ... [T]he first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since.
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  • [S]ymbolic reference itself must have been the prime mover for the prefrontalization of the brain in hominid evolution. Language has given rise to a brain which is strongly biased to employ the one mode of associative learning that is most critical to it.
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s
Rudy Garns

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain - 0 views

www.hum.au.dk/...krc-coevol.pdf

brain deacon evolution language pinker

shared by Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08 - No Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08
     
    The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain: A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon). (Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20) Ken Ramshøj Christensen Department of English, University of Aarhus
Rudy Garns

Talking Heads - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...970810.10calvint.html

azb baldwin calvin deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 01 Sep 08
     
    "Our brains are well suited for language. But how did they get that way." Calvin's review of Deacon in the NYRB
Rudy Garns

Symbolic Species Conference 2007 - 0 views

symbolicspecies.com/?The_2006_conference:Speakers_and_abstracts_2006:Terrence_Deacon_2006

azb brains deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - No Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    Deacons' suggested reading for the conference
Rudy Garns

Colour, is it in the brain? - 0 views

neuroanthropology.net/...colour-is-it-in-the-brain

azb color deacon evolution language vision

shared by Rudy Garns on 04 Sep 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 04 Sep 08
     
    "Language requires the coordination of perceptually grounded categories with a socially-negotiated set of shared linguistic conventions to express them; i.e. language is based on shared groups of meanings that arise from our perceptual interaction with the external world and the way in which we convey that relationship to other human beings. Deacon's opinion is that neurological predispositions and socio-ecological constraints sponsored the development and evolution of language, and that the subsequent feedback system gave rise to a complex coevolution of the two. Founded neurological determinism within evolutionary and socio-ecological boundaries drives the core of his argument." « Neuroanthropology
Rudy Garns

William H. Calvinreview of T. W. Deacon's THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997) - 0 views

williamcalvin.com/...1997DeaconBkRevNYT.htm

calvin deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08 - Cached
  • This pattern-hunger doesn't require even average intelligence, nor is it limited to speech. Deaf children can do the same four levels of pattern discovery by observing body movements -- but only if they are immersed in a fluent sign-language environment, and equally early in the first few years of life.
  • flexibility during life (learning and creativity) eventually helps to reward genetic variations leading in a similar functional direction. This form-follows-function principle has been known for a century but it's still poorly appreciated.
  • a slow convergence in copying errors toward written recipes with a combination of ingredients, amounts, times, temperatures, and assembly procedures that -- with some common-sense tweaking -- will satisfy "good taste."
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  • The Baldwin effect allows unrecorded tweaking from flexible behavior to secondarily drag along relevant genes ("recipe items") in the long run; it's Darwinian but at one remove. Thus relevant gene combinations "fill in" behind the behavioral advance.
  • "The Baldwinian perspective suggests... that the first stone tools were manufactured by australopithecines, and that the transition to Homo was in part a consequence rather than the cause.... The large brains, stone tools, reduction in dentition, better opposability of thumb and fingers, and more complete bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed [in behavior].... Another way to look at this is to say that many of the physical traits that distinguish modern human bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations."
  • But selection favoring language need not be via the success of language per se
  • the nonlanguage task of remembering who owes what to whom sets you up for understanding structured sentences. They carry over into linguistic argument structure (those word categories involving actors, recipients, beneficiaries, and so forth), which provide major clues to understanding a story-like sentence about who did what to whom.
  • Rudy Garns on 31 Aug 08
     
    NYT
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