It can be easy to take for granted all that our brains do when understanding the world, particularly in the realm of language. While many early philosophers recognized some of this complexity, the computer age brought about attempts to get computers to understand our communication tool – language – and these attempts brought home just how amazing it is that we can do what we do. There’s so much to analyze with regards to language (and our hierarchical cognitive abilities in general): how did it come about; how do we learn it as children; what changes as adults to make learning more difficult; how are learnings at the concept level encoded (i.e. how do we learn and remember facts); etc. I hope to dive into all those areas in future posts (update: Defining our Terms), but for now wanted to share a visualization related to that last topic. Before diving in, take a moment to think about what might have been going on in your brain when you read the title of this post – try to get beyond “your” mental experience, and think about what must be happening “under the hood”!
This rendition is obviously extremely simplistic compared to what actually happens in our brains, and is shown at the level of concepts, not neural connections or firings (although the lines can be interpreted loosely as connections between groups of neurons), but hopefully provides a bit of a foundation for further thought. This image may provide some context for how we manage to understand a sentence like “Basketball hoops were invented by James Naismith”, but it says nothing at all about how we actually remember that fact and retrieve it later (which requires physical changes of some sort in our brains) – see if you’ve got any ideas!
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