Neuroscience: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain w/ Terrence Deacon - 0 views
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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.
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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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I think that the connections are different because the brain is bigger and because not all parts expanded at the same rate.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.