The Brain and the Cultural Animal

Small Foreword

Those of you who have read my articles and essays in MySpace or other blogs I participate, or I used to have, may recognize the following article regarding its content. If you have read it already, feel free to skip it. The reason why I include it here in another modified way is because the articles of these series will eventually form part of a book I’m going to write in a more concise, formal and academic manner. The second reason to include it is because it is a stepping stone to a broader picture regarding memetics, economics, politics, ethics and spirituality.

(c) 2009-2010, Pedro M. Rosario Barbosa
Some Rights Reserved
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Investigating Synesthesia

"C-sharp is green." What the heck?! What does it mean that C-sharp (a sound) is green? The identification of a sound with a color can happen to a particular kind of synesthete. When he or she hears a sound, it will evoke a color. There is a "blending of the senses", which is the meaning of the word "synesthesia" (??? = together; ???????? = sensation).

One very interesting form of synesthesia is the number-color synesthesia. Some synesthetes would claim that two is red, or that five is green, or that seven is yellow. The relationship between number and color can vary among synesthetes, though.

This was a very strange phenomenon for some scientists, and they made all kinds of theories about it. One of them was that synesthetes were talking metaphorically. For example, men sometimes refer to attractive women as "hot babes". They are neither hot, nor babies. Vilayanur Ramachandran, who has studied this phenomenon extensively, did not seem to agree with this sort of explanation. If it were a metaphor, why wouldn’t synesthetes recognize what they say as metaphor? They seem to understand the notion of metaphor pretty well. It may be argued, for instance, that their mental relationship between two separate sensations can be every-day metaphoric such as when we say that "cheese is sharp". But Ramachandran asked: "Why then would you use a tactile adjective to describe taste? Is this not a mix of categories?"

Another explanation is that number-color synestetes were playing with magnets when they were children. They may subconsciously remember that seven was purple or that five was green, and so on. So, when synesthetes look at numbers, they remember the color of the magnets they used to play with. This didn’t make any sense either. Rama knew pretty well that the first research ever made on synesthesia was carried out by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Sir Douglas Galton, who was half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He discovered that synesthesia runs in families. So, Ramachandran reasoned: "Would we have to assume now that playing with magnets runs in families too? This doesn’t make any sense. There has to be another explanation."

First, he wanted to show that the phenomenon is real, so he devised a visual experiment. Here it is:

Now, this experiment looks confusing, but here’s the idea: look at the five and the twos. They are mirror images of each other, which is the reason why it looks so messy to look at them. Measure the time it takes you to find a regular figure such as a triangle of a circle. I am not a synesthete, so I had some hard time trying to find it until a minute or so later. However, a number-color synesthete would find it relatively fast (in a few seconds), and would say something like: "Look! It’s a red triangle with a green background. It’s jumping out at me." Indeed, he or she would be correct.

This could not be explained by remembering magnets, or metaphor. It is a very real phenomena, they were literally seeing colors along with the numbers. But why did such phenomena exist? Ramachandran’s hypothesis is that the way the brain is arranged can explain it. Look at this picture of the brain.

There is a sector of the brain called the "fusiform gyrus" where there is a region called the "grapheme area" (green in the illustration of the brain), which associates certain shapes with numbers. For example, if you have grown up in the time of the Roman Empire, your brain would have associated the number seven with this sign "VII" in the grapheme area. In our society, which uses Indo-Arabic Numbers, we associate the number seven with the sign "7", and that is what the grapheme area records. The usual number-color synesthete would see a color when he or she sees "7", but will not if you show him or her "VII", which indicates that the grapheme area is involved in the phenomenon.

Now, you will notice in the illustration that there is a red area almost touching the grapheme area. This red region is called the "V4", which is the primary region where visual color is processed in the brain. Ramachandran theorized that the most prominent form of number-color synesthesia is due to the "closer-than-usual" contact between grapheme area and the V4, and when a number-color synesthete looks at a number, inevitably it evokes a color.

From Synesthesia to Higher-Level Abstraction

However, there is another kind of number-color synesthete. For instance, there are some of them who not only will say that 1 is red, 2 is green, 3 is yellow, and so on, but will also see I as red, II as green, III as yellow. And also they will also say that January is red, February is green, March is yellow; or that Monday is red, Tuesday is green, etc. The common denominator of these cases is that apparently this kind of synesthesia treats number in a more abstract and ordinal manner.

This means that the "crosswiring" in these cases does not occur in the V4 and the grapheme area, but occurs in the higher-level of brain processes.

According to Ramachandran’s theory, a higher level process related to numbers takes place in a region known as the Temporal-Parietal-Occipital junction (or TPO junction), far from the fusiform gyrus. The reason he suspected it, has to do with the fact that when that region of the brain is damaged the patient suffers from dyscalculia: he or she is not able to add or multiply, except by huge instances of memorization. He or she has a hard time subtracting and it is practically impossible for him or her to divide.

However, the TPO junction is next to the angular gyrus, the place where we conceptualize colors (cells which deal with color processing, and carry out a higher process than the number-grapheme area). Ramachandran makes a very important point in this whole discussion.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but just think of something like a number. There is nothing more abstract than a number. Five pigs, five donkeys, five hairs, even five tones — all very different, but with fiveness in common (Ramachandran, 2003, pp. 83-84).

For him, the TPO junction plays a role in that abstraction. Hence, these synesthetes are called by him "higher synesthetes". Due to the interconnectivity that we see in the illustration of the brain above (Illustration 1), in some cases there can be certain mixes of lower-level synesthesia and higher-level ones.

Being Closet Synesthetes and the Origins of Language

Now, Ramachandran reaches a key point in his exposition on synesthesia: he is going to show us that we are all closet synesthetes, because we are in "denial" about our synesthesia.

Wofgang Khöle designed this experiment and usually asked the public which figure they would associate with the sound "booba"and "kiki". Generally 98% of the people in the public will say that the name of the figure in the left is "kiki" while the other would be "booba". Now, why does this happen? Because our brain is biased to associate certain images with certain sounds. The bias is not arbitrary. Think for instance about the way your mouth and tongue shapes when you pronounce the word "booba": the tongue and lips curve. The same with "kiki", the corner of the figure associated with "kiki" makes us think of crystals that shatter, evoking sharpness, and the way the tongue behaves when we pronounce "kiki" seems sharp too.

This is Ramachandran’s starting point regarding his proposal on a theory on the origins of language. If you think about the "booba" and "kiki" experiments, although the relationships between sound and vision is not arbitrary, we have to admit that they really have nothing in common, because visual appearance is different from sound. The relationship is carried out in our brain, it is the result of how our brain is set up.

Yet, to be able to develop language, we have to conceptualize, we need to abstract. Our primordial conceptuation or abstraction takes place in our mind, where, perhaps, the TPO junction and the anglular gyrus play a role. This is possible because the angular gyrus, which deals with abstract concepts, is located in the "crossroads" (as Ramachandran describes it) between the parietal lobe of the brain (which deals with touch proprioception), the temporal lobe (which deals with hearing), and the occipital lobe (which deals with vision). One of the things that have been discovered about people with systemic damage to the angular gyrus is not just that they cannot perform simple arithmetic, but also the majority cannot do "booba/kiki" experiment.

Another thing they cannot do is understand metaphor. Think about it, what is a metaphor? A metaphor is the association of two very different concepts which belong to very different conceptual realms. An example of a metaphor can be found in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

[The light] is in the East,
and Juliet is the Sun.

As Ramachandran says, with a bit of sense of humor, that this passage does not say that Juliet is a big ball of fire, but that Juliet is "bright" or "radiant" like the Sun. People with systemic damage to the angular gyrus will not get that. They will ask: "But Juliet is not a giant sphere made out of plasma in a state of fusion".

Why does this happen? Our brain is also pre-disposed to conceptualize, even when we are not aware of it. There have been stroke patients who lose concepts, they are not able to grasp them anymore. Some of them lose the concept of "tools", they cannot conceive something as a tool (screwdriver, for instance). So, if our brain is pre-disposed to concepts, then it can associate those concepts in a certain way. The visual and audio relationship that is shown in the "booba/kiki" experiment illustrates the beginning of abstraction by association. Metaphor illustrates that not only sounds and vision can be abstracted and associated, but also concepts already formed in our mind can be associated among themselves.

The process of conceptuation is important before language development. If we are not able to have abstract concepts, we cannot refer to objects collectively through concepts. We would not be able to say that "Fifi is a dog" if we have no concept of what a dog is.

Now, there is lexicon involved with language too. For that purpose let’s look at the following illustration:

We develop words to refer to objects. However, how were the first words formed? Ramachandran theorizes that we have a biological bias to associate certain sounds with certain visual shapes. The first words must have been sounds that our brain associated with certain traits of objects. This is all you need in evolution, because once that dynamic begins, there is a "bootstrapping" from the original bias: we are then able to associate words, create neologisms, establish associations among words and so on. As languages evolve, the words we have now in different languages are the result of millions of years since certain primitive communities made language from the original linguistic (visual and sound) bias.

Lexicon is not everything. With our own lips we tend to mimic in certain ways the objects we are looking at. For instance, Ramachandran wants you to notice the shape of your mouth when you say "teeny weeny", "diminutive", "un peu". Now do the same with "enormous", "large", "grand". In both of these cases your lips, tongue and mouth shape themselves to "synesthetically" mimic the size of the object you are looking at.

In our brain, this is due to the part that controls the mouth in the Broca’s area (which deals with language) along with visual appearance in the fusiform gyrus, which also communicates with the auditory cortex. But this is not all. Remember this illustration we showed in Part V?

Remember when we talked about Darwin’s observation that some people clench and unclench their jaw when they are cutting with scissors, and that this is probably due to the fact that in our primordial motor cortex (the right in the illustration) the jaw is close to the thumb and the index fingers? We know that the face of the homunculus is the other way around, the jaw is close to the fingers and hands, while the eye of the homunculus is further away. Ramachandran calls "synkinesia" the phenomenon of the mouth and jaw mimicking the motion of the hands.

Now, think about what this implies linguistically. Haven’t you noticed that sometimes you have the tendency to make gestures with your hands as you speak or to describe things that you see? For instance, when you describe something tiny, don’t you use your thumb and index finger just to say, look it is "teeny weeny", "un peu", "pequeñito", "diminutive". Your fingers are imitating what your mouth is doing, which at the same time it synesthetically mimics the object that is being referred to.

So, Ramachandran is talking about a multi-directional bootstrapping going on in the brain.

Social Signs which Confirm the Synesthetic Bootstrapping Theory of Language

There are some signs that Ramachandran’s "synesthetic bootstrapping theory" of language is going exactly in the right direction, although I think it is not yet complete. I’m going to use two examples. These are my examples, not Ramachandran’s, but they illustrate how well formulated is this theory.

The Emergence of Sign Language

In the end of the 1970s, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua created a program to teach hearing-impaired children a conventional sign language. However, in the process of carrying out the program, children immediately began communicating in a new language, which was originally a sort of "pidgin" (as linguists call it), where there is no formalized language yet with all of its proper grammar. This was known as "Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragüense". One generation later, the children developed a completely new proper syntax and formal language which today is called "Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense".

As you can see here, there is connection between motor areas of the brain that deal with facial expressions and hand motion, or synkinesia at its best. There are two simultaneous activities we see here: a synesthetic and a synkinetic mimic of facial expressions and the gestures of the hands. However, due to their hearing impairment, they are not able to enunciate as effectively as hearing people (though many do a great job to be as effective enunciators as they can be).

This reveals some things regarding language. If we remember Part VII, we become aware of the fact that consciousness are realized when a human being grows within a community. We develop a moral conscience, and we develop a conception of selves distinct from our own. Apparently, not only consciousness is realized in community, but also language development. María No Name was not raised in a community of hearing-impaired people. The hearing-impaired children of Managua were formed within a hearing-impaired community which created first a pidgin, and then in a single generation, developed a whole new sign language.

If you look at the way the children mimic visual objects in their use of the sign language, they reveal primordial biases. This destroys the way average people conceive language as something formed for hundreds or thousands of years. Quite the contrary, languages can appear spontaneously, and if pidgins are created in one generation, the formalized language appears in the next. This has been shown to be true regarding creole languages in the South Pacific (including the Philippines and Hawai’i), and in the case of African slaves brought to America from different nations who interacted among themselves and with Native peoples, along with Spanish, English, French and Portuguese (depending on the region).

The Origins of Writing

The origins of writing reflect how a theory of spoken language can be applied to writing. Look at the following two illustrations. The first shows the "evolution" of the letter "aleph" in Hebrew; the second, the evolution of Sumerian language from a pictographic "star" to the cuneiform sign for "god".

In the first illustration, in the left we find the very first primitive character of "aleph". As you can see, it is the shape of an ox’s head, with eye and horns. At the extreme right, you see the modern Hebrew version of aleph, almost unrecognizable from the original. In the middle, you notice that if you take a good look at the third character (from left to right), it resembles a lot to a leaning letter "A". In fact, the Greek and Hebrew have a "common ancestor" (so-to-speak). The word "aleph" also evolved into the word "alpha" which is represented exactly like its Latin version: "A". It is also unrecognizable from the original.

The second illustration represents the evolution from a pictograph character of ancient Sumer, which represents an idea, not a letter. Yet, this character gradually evolved to represent the concept of "god", since gods live in the sky.

In both of these examples, we can see that there is an initial bias between what is being visualized and what is written. The best example of this is the famous Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. In both of these cases, in the beginning of the use of letters to be pronounced when read, or in the beginning of the use of pictographs, there is an effort to mimic in writing what the objects visually look like. From then on, through a long process, for many different cultural reasons, the original characters changed until they are almost unrecognizable from the original.

It seems almost like the way Ramachandran says that language originally evolved from an initial bias of vision, sound, and mouth movements. The languages we have today resemble very little to the original, but seem to derive from that original bias, the original mimicking of vision, sound and writing.

A Complete Theory of Language is Needed

There is something lacking in Ramachandran’s account for language. We need to separate two sorts of abstraction. Following Edmund Husserl, we can call one "sensible abstraction", which means that we can abstract from sensible objects and conceptualize material concepts (i.e. concepts which refer to sensible or material objects). However, there is another sort of abstraction, which we will call "categorial abstraction". This confusion between two forms of abstraction is due to the often empiricist or psychological conception of numbers as being somehow a form of abstraction from sensible objects themselves.

In reality, sensible objects do not appear to us as just individual objects, but they are organized as states-of-affairs: there is a computer in front of me, there is a book beside me, there is this glass of water on the table, and so on. The way these objects appear depend greatly on how they are "related" by our mental acts: as a set of objects, as seven objects in front of me, as the first thing I find, etc. If you notice, the "sets", "seven", "first", etc. are not sensibly given to us. They do not appear in a sensible manner. They are abstract categories which are constituted using sensible objects as basis. This is what Husserl called "categorial intuition". When our mind gets rid of the sensible component of the sets, or the seven, or the first, etc. (categorial abstraction), we are able to manage numbers in pure abstraction without taking into consideration any sort of material concepts. We don’t talk about four chairs added to five chairs will give us nine chairs, but about "4+5=9" without any reference to sensible objects.

A similar, but not identical, form of abstraction is involved in the way we formulate propositions about these objects and states-of-affairs, and the way they are organized hierarchically so that the propositions make sense, and that these propositions can be organized logically. Mathematical logic has shown that you can also get rid of sensible components of propositions and discover a priori new logical laws and theorems without making any reference to sensible objects.

Formal categories (sets, cardinal numbers, ordinal numbers, relations, etc.) and meaning categories (disjunction, conjunction, forms of plural, etc.) involve a very different process than just abstracting from sensible experience as Ramachandran suggests. Rama is going the right path, but he needs to account for this too. Only this way, not only we are able to explain the process of conceptuation from sensible experience, but also what is often called the Chomsky’s proposal of the syntactic tree, and the Nativist conception of language.

References

Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: how the mind creates language. NY: Harper Perennial.

Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: the modern denial of human nature. US: Viking Penguin.

Pinker, S. (2007). The stuff of thought: language as a window into human nature. US: Viking Penguin.

Ramachandran, V. S. (2003). The emerging mind. UK: BBC — Profile Books.

Ramachandran, V. S. & Hubbard, E. M. (2001) Synaesthesia — a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8. 12, 3-34.

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