Theory of Mind and Deaf Signers
Log into the Stanford system, then you can follow the link:
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=4&hid=8&sid=bea825b0-2349-4c92-afbd-6a9cf5226de8%40SRCSM1
This paper is a scientific look at the Nicaraguan Sign Language phenomena, which is, of course, the one we've referenced a few times in class. It looks at the development and abilities of children and adults who were exposed to formal sign language at different ages and how they score on various tests. One of them is the theory of mind test, which aims to determine how well an individual understands the difference between their own mind and the minds of others. In young children for example, they sometimes don't have very marked theory of mind abilities, thinking that what's in their heads is the same as what's in mommy and daddy's head as well. As might be expected, native or early-exposure signers do better with these sorts of things than signers who were exposed to sign language later in life. (For an example of one test in theory of mind, look here).
As the article asks, "By what process do deaf children build a ToM [Theory of Mind] in the absence of formal language exposure? What ToM abilities are robust enough to develop in situations of late language exposure?" These questions seem very interesting, and fairly central and applicable to our class. I'm not sure exactly, but there seem to be a couple ways that children can build ToM. If they are raised in a typical environment with language, they probably build ToM by learning through verbal interaction with their parents and siblings that what exists in their mind is not the same as what exists in others' minds. Verbs like "think, dream, imagine, wonder" are indicators of theory of mind, and when children begin to use these, I suspect that their scores on ToM tests would also go up. For children not raised in a normally lingual environment have to figure out ToM through introspection to their own thoughts, and observations about the world around them (visual ones, since most of these "language-less" children are deaf children raised without formal sign language.) However, one can imagine how difficult this would be, especially since sometimes people behave one way but are actually thinking something different. In a world without explanations and language, a child might not always realize through facial expression alone, for example, that somebody is doing something unwillingly.
There's also the question of whether or not ToM tests are sensitive enough to the range of expression in late-sign-learners, because as one might imagine, individual people and families have come up with a huge variety of expressive gestures and signs. From the article I learned that some use facial expression to indicate something like "confusion" in another person by expressing a confused look on the face. Can ToM tests be sensitive to expressions like this which may indeed indicate underlying ToM ability that's not explicitly shown in what formal sign language these people do know. Alternatively, there might be certain conditioned responses such as laughing when somebody falls over that are just conditioned responses to a stimulus without a real underlying mental understanding of other people's mental states. As the article notes, "Gesture and facial expression could equally sometimes be over-interpreted."
A small aside which I may explore further later (by reading the original study): "They
came to this situation at different ages spanning
development before, during and after those maturational
points at which the critical period for language
acquisition is said to be in effect (exposure before
6 years for native abilities and not later than
10 years for near native abilities – e.g., Newport,
Bavelier, & Neville, 2001; Senghas & Coppola, 2001)." This would be an example that Lera has countered in class, showing a steady decline in language acquisition abilities with age rather than sharply defined windows around particular ages.
The article goes on to assert that it may be true that there are "critical periods" (more on that later) for acquisition of ToM ability.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
The Branches of Language Innateness Theories
My purpose in this next set of blog posts will be to do some preliminary research paper probing. While starting to write on a topic without yet having a thesis or solidified stance is a little awkward, I’m hoping that these explorations into language innateness theories will give me a well-read background into the topic of my paper, while giving the reader a chance to set me straight if I’ve come to a preliminary faulty conclusion, and a chance for education about the vast theories of language innateness beyond Lera, Pinker, and Chomsky.
I’ve chosen to examine language innateness because it’s the subject area of class that seems to be the least settled and most controversial. I could, of course, be entirely wrong in that assertion, but for me personally, I don’t have a problem accepting that language affects thought, thought affects language, thoughts are made in language at least sometimes, language shapes abilities (perfect pitch and Mandarin). After considering split-brain patients, patients with hemispherectomies, patients with massive stroke damage, and their ensuing recoveries in language-related areas, I’m also convinced of the amazing plasticity of the human brain, and willing to accept the notion that language does not have to be localized to any specific structures in the brain, that the “seat” of language (if something that specific could ever be pinned down) is more of a mobile wheelchair than a permanent throne. I hope to cover Chomsky, Pinker, Boroditsky, Jerry Fodor, Michael Tomasello, possibly Elizabeth Bates and Catherine Snow as well.
Noam Chomsky
While very active politically and in other cognitive disciplines, Chomsky essentially is the first foundational thinker on language in the twentieth century, at least beyond B.F. Skinner. Chomsky's language theories began as anti-Skinnerian, that is, anti-radical behaviorism. Behaviorism, as applied to language, argues that everything is a behavior, and that behaviors can be described and analyzed scientifically without reference to internal physiological events or undefined, questionable constructs such as the mind. Skinner, inventor of the famous Skinner box (or operant conditioning chamber) used to study operant or classical conditioning, took behaviorism further, into radical behaviorism. Radical behaviorism had the advantage that it could accept unobservable, private events like thought.
Instead of just a behavior as Skinner proposed in his book Verbal Behavior, Chomsky proposes that language has certain innate characteristics, particularly his famous universal grammar that allows children to generalize the grammatical rules of their language to an extent far greater than is possible through what they are exposed to alone. His universal grammar seems to suggest that a great deal of language is innate and there only need be a few switches thrown during the course of development before fully-fledged language emerges, such as whether you need an explicit subject as in English, or if the subject is sometimes optional, as in Spanish. This, as I understand, is essentially his "Principles and Parameters" approach. Recently (1995) Chomsky has revised some of his former theories in the Minimalist Program, keeping the central concepts of generative grammar, but emphasizing instead the economy of the design of language learning.
Further analysis of Chomsky's theories would require a look at evidence and counter-evidence for his theories. Perhaps in my final paper, I might examine the case studies of the Nicaraguan sign language phenomena by Judy Kegl, or alternatively, the Piraha people of Brazil who were studied by Daniel Everett and apparently are a counter-example to universal grammar. I hope to go deeper into Chomsky's theories, and explore those of the other aformentioned language theorists as well.
I’ve chosen to examine language innateness because it’s the subject area of class that seems to be the least settled and most controversial. I could, of course, be entirely wrong in that assertion, but for me personally, I don’t have a problem accepting that language affects thought, thought affects language, thoughts are made in language at least sometimes, language shapes abilities (perfect pitch and Mandarin). After considering split-brain patients, patients with hemispherectomies, patients with massive stroke damage, and their ensuing recoveries in language-related areas, I’m also convinced of the amazing plasticity of the human brain, and willing to accept the notion that language does not have to be localized to any specific structures in the brain, that the “seat” of language (if something that specific could ever be pinned down) is more of a mobile wheelchair than a permanent throne. I hope to cover Chomsky, Pinker, Boroditsky, Jerry Fodor, Michael Tomasello, possibly Elizabeth Bates and Catherine Snow as well.
Noam Chomsky
While very active politically and in other cognitive disciplines, Chomsky essentially is the first foundational thinker on language in the twentieth century, at least beyond B.F. Skinner. Chomsky's language theories began as anti-Skinnerian, that is, anti-radical behaviorism. Behaviorism, as applied to language, argues that everything is a behavior, and that behaviors can be described and analyzed scientifically without reference to internal physiological events or undefined, questionable constructs such as the mind. Skinner, inventor of the famous Skinner box (or operant conditioning chamber) used to study operant or classical conditioning, took behaviorism further, into radical behaviorism. Radical behaviorism had the advantage that it could accept unobservable, private events like thought.
Instead of just a behavior as Skinner proposed in his book Verbal Behavior, Chomsky proposes that language has certain innate characteristics, particularly his famous universal grammar that allows children to generalize the grammatical rules of their language to an extent far greater than is possible through what they are exposed to alone. His universal grammar seems to suggest that a great deal of language is innate and there only need be a few switches thrown during the course of development before fully-fledged language emerges, such as whether you need an explicit subject as in English, or if the subject is sometimes optional, as in Spanish. This, as I understand, is essentially his "Principles and Parameters" approach. Recently (1995) Chomsky has revised some of his former theories in the Minimalist Program, keeping the central concepts of generative grammar, but emphasizing instead the economy of the design of language learning.
Further analysis of Chomsky's theories would require a look at evidence and counter-evidence for his theories. Perhaps in my final paper, I might examine the case studies of the Nicaraguan sign language phenomena by Judy Kegl, or alternatively, the Piraha people of Brazil who were studied by Daniel Everett and apparently are a counter-example to universal grammar. I hope to go deeper into Chomsky's theories, and explore those of the other aformentioned language theorists as well.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
My New Language, all you need is a symphonic voice
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
Music as a language. This article relates some anecdotes of "Here are tales of a man possessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music after being struck by lightning, of another whose epileptic seizure created permanent music “playing” inside his head, of an eminent musicologist (the English conductor Clive Wearing) whose musical powers were unimpaired even though amnesia blotted out everything else, and of a severely retarded man able to recall hundreds of operas and play Debussy from ear after hearing it once." This got me thinking about the origins of music, and how they might be related to language. From these stories, it seems it is something that our mind spends quite a bit of resources on. Evolutionarily, music as we know it seems to be a rather recent invention, a by-product of human intellect. How did it get there? Why? As the article asks why "meaningless vibrations have such an effect on our mental state."
My roomate and I often compare elaborate pieces of classical music to novels: they both lend themselves to analysis in similar ways. For example, the overall tone of a book or a piece of music can be described as hopeful, gloomy, excited. Both can be complex, simple, elaborate, or eloquent in their overall perception by the reader/listener. There are motifs that are revisited. In language, certain phrases have what is described as a "lyrical" quality. Poetry lends itself to a certain rhythm. Certain languages in particular have elaborate use of different tonalities in pronunciation to differentiate words, as in Mandarin. In music, different instruments or instrument sections are often played off one another as if they were characters in a narrative: they echo one another, they contrast one another, and sometimes they all work together in harmony.
Because of all these similarities, I suspect that the evolutionary "fluke" of music is directly related to language. Music, I think, could also potentially be used as its own language. The reason it probably has not been used as such yet is because any human who has functioning ears and voice finds those to be a more convenient mode of expression than finding a piano or whipping out a flute every time he or she wants to express something to another person. However, consider how musical our language could be if we had vocal chords that could produce all the tones, dynamics, and timbres of a symphony simultaneously, as a symphony could. Tongues would clearly be unnecessary, and this hypothetical language would instead sound like compositions of music rather than the mechanical clicks, hisses, and bursts of words as we know them.
Dynamics would largely be the same, with higher volume used for emphasis, in times of great emotion, or when communicating over a large area. Tonal shifts would, of course, be far more elaborate than in any language currently spoken. The speed at which one note shifts to another, the type of shift (a gradual slide like a trombone, or a pure interval like a piano), and the tonal interval (a first, a third, an octave) could all be different communicative devices. The real power of a language like this (which is essentially present in great orchestral compositions) is the simultaneity of communication possible. That is, with dozens or hundreds of musicians, playing scores of different instruments, there are simultaneous levels to every instant of a piece of music. Some sections are silent, this means something. Some are voiced, this means something else. Some are excited and carry the melody; some voice occasional bass notes which ground the melody; some pulse the tempo; some simply add a flourish here and there. Every instrument can be used for a variety of purposes, and favoring one over the other in different circumstances would be analogous to the level of formality that we use in speech. In more formal situations, it would be proper to follow the expected norms (have the violins carry the tune, the basses throb the underlying foundation), but in more informal situations one could experiment with new combinations; people could find more efficient ways of expressing things, and thus a musical shift would emerge just as lingual shifts (new words are born, old words die) happen in our spoken language.
Music and language share so many aspects, I'm fairly sure we would not have music were it not for our lingual abilities. If there be scientific work in this area, I'd love to hear about it.
Music as a language. This article relates some anecdotes of "Here are tales of a man possessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music after being struck by lightning, of another whose epileptic seizure created permanent music “playing” inside his head, of an eminent musicologist (the English conductor Clive Wearing) whose musical powers were unimpaired even though amnesia blotted out everything else, and of a severely retarded man able to recall hundreds of operas and play Debussy from ear after hearing it once." This got me thinking about the origins of music, and how they might be related to language. From these stories, it seems it is something that our mind spends quite a bit of resources on. Evolutionarily, music as we know it seems to be a rather recent invention, a by-product of human intellect. How did it get there? Why? As the article asks why "meaningless vibrations have such an effect on our mental state."
My roomate and I often compare elaborate pieces of classical music to novels: they both lend themselves to analysis in similar ways. For example, the overall tone of a book or a piece of music can be described as hopeful, gloomy, excited. Both can be complex, simple, elaborate, or eloquent in their overall perception by the reader/listener. There are motifs that are revisited. In language, certain phrases have what is described as a "lyrical" quality. Poetry lends itself to a certain rhythm. Certain languages in particular have elaborate use of different tonalities in pronunciation to differentiate words, as in Mandarin. In music, different instruments or instrument sections are often played off one another as if they were characters in a narrative: they echo one another, they contrast one another, and sometimes they all work together in harmony.
Because of all these similarities, I suspect that the evolutionary "fluke" of music is directly related to language. Music, I think, could also potentially be used as its own language. The reason it probably has not been used as such yet is because any human who has functioning ears and voice finds those to be a more convenient mode of expression than finding a piano or whipping out a flute every time he or she wants to express something to another person. However, consider how musical our language could be if we had vocal chords that could produce all the tones, dynamics, and timbres of a symphony simultaneously, as a symphony could. Tongues would clearly be unnecessary, and this hypothetical language would instead sound like compositions of music rather than the mechanical clicks, hisses, and bursts of words as we know them.
Dynamics would largely be the same, with higher volume used for emphasis, in times of great emotion, or when communicating over a large area. Tonal shifts would, of course, be far more elaborate than in any language currently spoken. The speed at which one note shifts to another, the type of shift (a gradual slide like a trombone, or a pure interval like a piano), and the tonal interval (a first, a third, an octave) could all be different communicative devices. The real power of a language like this (which is essentially present in great orchestral compositions) is the simultaneity of communication possible. That is, with dozens or hundreds of musicians, playing scores of different instruments, there are simultaneous levels to every instant of a piece of music. Some sections are silent, this means something. Some are voiced, this means something else. Some are excited and carry the melody; some voice occasional bass notes which ground the melody; some pulse the tempo; some simply add a flourish here and there. Every instrument can be used for a variety of purposes, and favoring one over the other in different circumstances would be analogous to the level of formality that we use in speech. In more formal situations, it would be proper to follow the expected norms (have the violins carry the tune, the basses throb the underlying foundation), but in more informal situations one could experiment with new combinations; people could find more efficient ways of expressing things, and thus a musical shift would emerge just as lingual shifts (new words are born, old words die) happen in our spoken language.
Music and language share so many aspects, I'm fairly sure we would not have music were it not for our lingual abilities. If there be scientific work in this area, I'd love to hear about it.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Animal Language? New Encounters; War.
Australian Scientists Say Humpback Whales Have Their Own Language
So it seems chimpanzees aren't the only ones... But upon further investigation it looks like the chimps win in the language competition. "The scientists identified at least 34 distinctive sounds made by these remarkable ocean creatures" the article states. 34 distinctive sounds is far fewer than the 200+ communicative actions that Washoe could make. While it may be exciting to think of whales and their gargantuan brains as these incredible philosophers of the deep, the evidence is still too thin to make that conclusion.
Sometimes, you need universal language made for a fairly comical read. It talks of oil companies who are penetrating South American rain forests, reaching villages that have been mostly undisturbed. While it may be a rude awakening to the Westernized world for these villages, the oil companies use megaphones and a phrase book to make certain things clear such as "We haven't come here to look for women. We have women in our own village."
This also makes me wonder about these tribes or villages and what they are thinking of heavy machines crashing through the forest. These Peruvian tribes, which are described as "people living in isolated Amazonian forests" are presumably fairly primitive with regards to industrialization, and they may have not even seen motorized vehicles before. When exposing new people to new things, these oil companies are the introducers and they thus have the power to shape the language of the tribes they encounter. If this tribe has never seen something like a car or truck before, they might make up some word that is a combination of existing words in their language ("rolling box" or something), or the bringers of these novel objects will introduce new vocabulary for their new objects. I bet these oil-seekers never expected to have the power to shape a tribe's language for all time.
So how good of a window IS language into human nature? Language as Human Insight: Our Many Words for Fighting When a language has such a plethora of synonyms for one aspect, one word, one idea, it seems to show that that language, those speakers, value or care about that idea very much. This article emphasizes the wide range of words we have for fighting. Is fighting inherent in human nature; is it really that central and important? Over the course of our evolutionary history, it seems that there would be an advantage to those who would (if they could) kill off all their neighbors and take their resources rather than work together for a common cause. As time has proceeded, the groups banding together for common protection of each other and common attack on others have grown larger. No longer is it a Feudal unit of peasants and lord, but it's an entire country that's invading other countries for their resources. We've learned it's not always necessary to kill everybody, but we really haven't come that far.
So it seems chimpanzees aren't the only ones... But upon further investigation it looks like the chimps win in the language competition. "The scientists identified at least 34 distinctive sounds made by these remarkable ocean creatures" the article states. 34 distinctive sounds is far fewer than the 200+ communicative actions that Washoe could make. While it may be exciting to think of whales and their gargantuan brains as these incredible philosophers of the deep, the evidence is still too thin to make that conclusion.
Sometimes, you need universal language made for a fairly comical read. It talks of oil companies who are penetrating South American rain forests, reaching villages that have been mostly undisturbed. While it may be a rude awakening to the Westernized world for these villages, the oil companies use megaphones and a phrase book to make certain things clear such as "We haven't come here to look for women. We have women in our own village."
This also makes me wonder about these tribes or villages and what they are thinking of heavy machines crashing through the forest. These Peruvian tribes, which are described as "people living in isolated Amazonian forests" are presumably fairly primitive with regards to industrialization, and they may have not even seen motorized vehicles before. When exposing new people to new things, these oil companies are the introducers and they thus have the power to shape the language of the tribes they encounter. If this tribe has never seen something like a car or truck before, they might make up some word that is a combination of existing words in their language ("rolling box" or something), or the bringers of these novel objects will introduce new vocabulary for their new objects. I bet these oil-seekers never expected to have the power to shape a tribe's language for all time.
So how good of a window IS language into human nature? Language as Human Insight: Our Many Words for Fighting When a language has such a plethora of synonyms for one aspect, one word, one idea, it seems to show that that language, those speakers, value or care about that idea very much. This article emphasizes the wide range of words we have for fighting. Is fighting inherent in human nature; is it really that central and important? Over the course of our evolutionary history, it seems that there would be an advantage to those who would (if they could) kill off all their neighbors and take their resources rather than work together for a common cause. As time has proceeded, the groups banding together for common protection of each other and common attack on others have grown larger. No longer is it a Feudal unit of peasants and lord, but it's an entire country that's invading other countries for their resources. We've learned it's not always necessary to kill everybody, but we really haven't come that far.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Book Reviews, Learning New Languages Through the Internet
It looks like the jury's starting to come back on Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought and things look pretty favorable for our East-coast counter-theorist. Pinker examines language, 'facts' and truths in 'The Stuff of Thought' portrays the new book as insightful, and packed with interesting information. Mind your language, professor also hails it in largely glorifying terms, though admits that "the Harvard professor demonstrates a frustrating reluctance to go from A to B if there's any chance of a detour to Z." I'm busily listening to the book myself in my free time (audio CDs if anybody wants to borrow them...), and can definitely attest to this latter point. It truly is a very interesting, enlightening book, but is also very complicated and is sometimes hard to follow (especially if you're listening to fragments while riding between classes). The youtube lecture he gives at Google is probably the most accessible summary of his points available, the most entertaining of which is his section on swearing. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to discuss language innateness so much in this book, considering he already wrote The Language Instinct to cover that topic, but one might say he's making huge strides in further definition and expansion of concepts of universal grammar, or something similar. This something similar might be further from the system of limited innate systems across humanity that Chomsky's "universal grammar" would imply, and closer to the topic of our class, which is how language shapes thought. Pinker would probably turn that around and use his discussions to make the case that thought shapes language, that thought is the broader category and that language is just one window into the far vaster complexities of thought.
One small category I wanted to comment on comes from this short, nonacademic blog entry: Language and violence. In it the author claims that violent crime has increased because of a lack of verbal outlet for frustration. He says that because words like "fuck" are so overused, they've lost their power so people resort to violence to express their anger. Beyond being unsubstantiated, short, and without citation, this article errs in that language is so plastic that it would fill any linguistic gap that appeared. If people wanted or needed words for their anger, they would (and sometimes do) invent them.
Finally, I was very interested by these two sites: Livemocha: A Social Language Learning Experience
and Learn a language without shelling out for a class
I wasn't formerly aware of sites like these. The first aims to connect people who speak different languages for quasi-tutoring sessions online, and the second links to a BBC website that offers free language lessons in a variety of different languages. These free language-learning-based websites are yet more great online resources and places I could spend hours of time if only I had them. But more than that, they offer the benefits of learning a language to those who might not otherwise get it. If a migrant worker wants to learn English and can spend half an hour at the library in the internet on his way home, these sorts of websites could open a lot of doors to him.
One small category I wanted to comment on comes from this short, nonacademic blog entry: Language and violence. In it the author claims that violent crime has increased because of a lack of verbal outlet for frustration. He says that because words like "fuck" are so overused, they've lost their power so people resort to violence to express their anger. Beyond being unsubstantiated, short, and without citation, this article errs in that language is so plastic that it would fill any linguistic gap that appeared. If people wanted or needed words for their anger, they would (and sometimes do) invent them.
Finally, I was very interested by these two sites: Livemocha: A Social Language Learning Experience
and Learn a language without shelling out for a class
I wasn't formerly aware of sites like these. The first aims to connect people who speak different languages for quasi-tutoring sessions online, and the second links to a BBC website that offers free language lessons in a variety of different languages. These free language-learning-based websites are yet more great online resources and places I could spend hours of time if only I had them. But more than that, they offer the benefits of learning a language to those who might not otherwise get it. If a migrant worker wants to learn English and can spend half an hour at the library in the internet on his way home, these sorts of websites could open a lot of doors to him.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Fooling the Brain
How Ventriloquists Trick The Brain: Sight, Sound Processed Together And Earlier Than Previously Thought
Does Your Brain Play Tricks On You? Note, this one doesn't look very scholarly, but it is relevant.
I always find it interesting when things "fool"our brains, like this link that Steve posted a few days ago with a myriad of optical illusions. The first article here talks about a recent discovery in sensory processing. The article from Science Daily relates a discovery by the Duke University Medical Center which apparently did much of its work on chimpanzees, but is extrapolating their findings to humans as well. They discovered that there is sensory integration much earlier than previously thought. Before, scientists believed that sensory information coming in through the eyes or ears was sent virtually separately to the cortex where the information was integrated and we made sense of it.
However, their new discovery suggests otherwise. Their work focused on a very small brain region in a very primitive part of the brain (primitive in the sense that it is thought to have evolved a very very long time ago relative to the evolution of our cortex and other higher processing centers) called the inferior colliculus. The article claims that this early combination of sensory information is what causes us to perceive ventriloquism as realistically as we do. This can also be applied to movies: even though the speakers producing the sound are at the sides of the screen or behind the receiver, the receiver perceives the voice as coming from the mouth of the actor or actress on the screen. It also seems to be a process that magicians take advantage of.
What the larger psycholinguistic ramifications of this are, I'm not entirely sure, but it does lead me to some questions. Firstly, what evolutionary significance does this have? Does processing and integration that happens earlier in the cognitive process save the higher regions of the brain from having to bother with it, making us more efficient? That is, is it better the we automatically perceive the growl of a predatory animal and the sight of a predatory animal as originating from the same beast rather than thinking about them separately? Is it just brain economics? Or does this earlier processing an evolutionary structure that benefitted earlier, more primitive brains which didn't have much of a cortex at all, and the inferior colliculus did the integration for whatever higher system sensed it?
Whatever the causes or reasons (or lack thereof), I find it fascinating when we humans devise ways of fooling each other, of tricking our brains. How it is done and for what reasons we are evolutionarily inclined to be susceptible are very interesting questions to me, and have larger ramifications for society such as using eyewitness testimony as rock hard evidence in court when the senses can be fooled fairly easily.
Does Your Brain Play Tricks On You? Note, this one doesn't look very scholarly, but it is relevant.
I always find it interesting when things "fool"our brains, like this link that Steve posted a few days ago with a myriad of optical illusions. The first article here talks about a recent discovery in sensory processing. The article from Science Daily relates a discovery by the Duke University Medical Center which apparently did much of its work on chimpanzees, but is extrapolating their findings to humans as well. They discovered that there is sensory integration much earlier than previously thought. Before, scientists believed that sensory information coming in through the eyes or ears was sent virtually separately to the cortex where the information was integrated and we made sense of it.
However, their new discovery suggests otherwise. Their work focused on a very small brain region in a very primitive part of the brain (primitive in the sense that it is thought to have evolved a very very long time ago relative to the evolution of our cortex and other higher processing centers) called the inferior colliculus. The article claims that this early combination of sensory information is what causes us to perceive ventriloquism as realistically as we do. This can also be applied to movies: even though the speakers producing the sound are at the sides of the screen or behind the receiver, the receiver perceives the voice as coming from the mouth of the actor or actress on the screen. It also seems to be a process that magicians take advantage of.
What the larger psycholinguistic ramifications of this are, I'm not entirely sure, but it does lead me to some questions. Firstly, what evolutionary significance does this have? Does processing and integration that happens earlier in the cognitive process save the higher regions of the brain from having to bother with it, making us more efficient? That is, is it better the we automatically perceive the growl of a predatory animal and the sight of a predatory animal as originating from the same beast rather than thinking about them separately? Is it just brain economics? Or does this earlier processing an evolutionary structure that benefitted earlier, more primitive brains which didn't have much of a cortex at all, and the inferior colliculus did the integration for whatever higher system sensed it?
Whatever the causes or reasons (or lack thereof), I find it fascinating when we humans devise ways of fooling each other, of tricking our brains. How it is done and for what reasons we are evolutionarily inclined to be susceptible are very interesting questions to me, and have larger ramifications for society such as using eyewitness testimony as rock hard evidence in court when the senses can be fooled fairly easily.
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