Human brains, parameters and devices

Noam Chomsky proposed his ■→Language Acquisition Device to explain human language learning. People are most flexible to acquire language until some 14 years old; nobody is able merely to memorize language, and there has to be a logical capacity that works in the process. We can name it a device.

Dictionaries have a device for something devised, or a faculty that devises. Everyday language yet has a device for a thing that could be operated externally, from the outside. Association with such governance could not be my ideal.

Most of the 20th century, people insisted on specialization. Researchers had to work the particular, or were rejected as unscientific. Linguistics was separate from psychology, as neurology was from endocrine knowledge. Human speech was stated to belong with two brain areas, ■→Broca and ■→Wernicke.

Let us view Wernicke and Broca along with brain gnostic areas. ■→Henry Gray had the type of tissue for “psychic”.

Why name the areas “gnostic” or “psychic”? For the senses, as hearing, eyesight, or touch, the brain uses primarily two types of tissue. The primary sensory cortex receives sense data. It works very similar in most people. It is with the secondary sensory cortex that a primary area “translates” sense data into “brain codes” that work in thinking. These may be very different among people.

The secondary cortex is called “psychic” or “gnostic” because it has sensory knowledge the way a particular person has developed it. The Greek word gnosis means knowledge. The word gnostic derives from it. A baker view to bread is different from the look a buyer gives it. A painter may appreciate a landscape in tint, and a farmer in crops. Two bakers, artists, or farmers are likely to have two individual pictures. To an extent, human sensory knowledge is person-specific and psychological.

Broca and Wernicke do not work in isolation. They work with brain broader cytostructure. We derive the word shape “cyto-” from Greek, for a bodily cell. Wernicke works with parietal, occipital, and temporal types of gray matter.

These major brain areas do not work as standalone “units” either, and humans have evolved language in earthly reality. Without any thought to time and space, human languages would become so different that maybe we would not have them for human anymore.

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I prefer the notion of a human language faculty, over the Language Acquisition Device. Language skill needs the brain entire, and that regardless of age.

Feel welcome to read,
■→1. Neurophysiology of feedback

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Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Poems
Life | Love | Nature | Time and Eternity

We are well into the 21st century now. Language and psychology have gotten along together well, as psycholinguistics. The discipline emerged in the second half of the 20th century, heart and reason against behaviorism. Even if our knowledge on human brains and languages is very general, we can comprehend this simple argument.

The brain does not have a singular superior structure we could call “the boss”. Brains make inner networks. One time, one network or its part is more active. Another time, it is another network or part of a network.

Whether to invoke a soul, a personality, or brain ■→epiphenomenon (when extremely tired), the human person orients and re-orients for own activity without a permanently dominant gyrus or sulcus. To entertain a political metaphor, brain structures would be more of a democracy. There is no king or queen tissue to preside.

The above is neither to ■→refute, nor to ■→aver on spirituality. As a broken leg is no proof the human never could walk, brain injury is no evidence there is nothing more to human heads than tissue. The other way round, runner or dancer legs are no evidence the person could walk just anywhere. As a vista is not the true landscape, human thought is not an immortal or eternal mind.

Brains make inner networks within human individual experience, also for purely intellectual experience. There is no universal way to see, hear, feel, or think, and behaviorist methods, that is, stimulation, may provide fragmentary features — yet unable to explain proficient language skill. Quality would be too much to give up on.

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Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Poems
Life | Love | Nature | Time and Eternity

This is why I do not see sense in recognizing “devices” in the brain and scanning them for parameters. Proficiency can be attained only via learning, never via a physiological or physical mend. Infant brain scans for example, cannot tell anything about the very same person’s language skill in just a few years. Feel welcome to read:
■→Apples on noses.

There is yet sense to make logic that human brains can use. Here is some grammar tactics for American English,
■→Grammar Weblog, Travel in Grammar.

■→This text is also avaialble in Polish.

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