The Human Mind as Linguistic Structures

[Michaelangelica]

You have a point. I did not mean to imply that ALL brain activity was linguistic.

 

Strong emotions and fight-or-flight reactions are mediated by the so-called "lizard brain", which I think is the hippocampus and amygdyla. These emotions and reactions are FAST and are not built out of linguistic structures, though we USE linguistic structures for thinking about them, talking them about, analyzing them.

 

And we still have our mammalian brain .

Yes I agree, the cerebral cortex is a much later evolutionary structure and may be much more involved in language, but even here there a specific areas for speech.and words. Even specific regions for nouns, adjectives etc.

Not only that but some responses (removing a hand from a burning fire) do not even involve the brain but just a reflex loop from the spinal cord to the hand and back.

Some neuroscientists say they are not sure even where the brain begins and ends. The body might just be a part of the wonderful 'abacus' of the brain.

 

A friend's son is teaching Japanese babies English in Japan by flashing English words at them with flash-cards. They are picking up the language very quickly.

 

The Japanese and Chinese language both seem very visual (pictorial ) to me.

 

Interesting that there are two schools of thought on teaching reading one involves "sounding out" the word phonetically. the other just visual recognition.

 

My English teacher wife does a bit of editing books, student essays, PhDs etc. She is amazing! She can pick one mistake out of a 100 pages very quickly. (Always complaining about the lousy editing in the detective stories we read) When I asked her how she did that she just said the wrong words 'jump out' at her.

 

The other day I saw her having great difficulty decoding the "Are you human? " letters and squiggles for security on abanking website. She has a lot of trouble with reading these where as I have little (Sometimes they are very hard to read). So she is very "literal" in her language.

 

My daughter is a journalist and Magazine editor. She taught herself to read when she was three years old. My wife was appalled . "What will she do at school?" she bemoaned. As it turned out, my wife was right and her first school experiences were not good. She had a raeding ("sic.reading"- my dyslexia?) age of 8+ when she started. As it was we could not stop her raeding (sic again!)if we had wanted to. We read to her every night.

 

The same daughter found Japanese very easy to pick up. She used to think in pictures and words and make logical (?) 'jumps' like me. Consequently we can/could talk in a sort of 'shorthand" ( she also learnt real shorthand -something I would be unable to do) Lately however I notice she is starting to think more in words, and loosing the ability to think in pictures, as that is her life.

 

Yesterday on ABC 702 radio was a report from ACER (Aust. Council Ed. Resarch) saying that 50% of Australians could not properly undrestand (sic dyslexia again -low blood sugar)or comprehend a newspaper or magazine article.

The announcer Richard Glover found this hard to believe and was appalled by this figure.(He has written a number of books.) But it seems Australians are up there with the 'advanced countries' of the world like Canada and USA. So Why is this?

I will try to google a link for you.

Can't find it, but you might enjoy looking at their site:-

ACER - Australian Council for Educational Research

 

Also I read some research a long long time ago which said 90% of those in jail had major reading difficulties. (The other 10% accountants, lawyers, politicians had very superior skills !!)