A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence. Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task."We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."The team of brain and cognitive scientists - comprised of Newman (now at Dalhousie University after beginning the work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester), Elissa Newport (University of Rochester), Ted Supalla (University of Rochester), Daphne Bavelier (University of Rochester), and Peter Hauser (Rochester Institute of Technology) - published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.To determine whether different brain regions were used to decipher sentences with different types of grammar, the scientists turned to American Sign Language for a rare quality it has.Some languages (English, for example) rely on the order of words in a sentence to convey the relationships between the sentence elements. When an English speaker hears the sentence "Sally greets Bob," it's clear from the word order that Sally is the subject doing the greeting and Bob is the object being greeted, not vice versa.Other languages (Spanish, for example) rely on inflections, such as suffixes tacked on to the ends of words, to convey subject-object relationships, and the word order can be interchangeable. Brain mysteries sekhar --- On Sun, 9/5/10, kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: [Wittrs] popping in re mathematics foundations To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: Sunday, 9 May, 2010, 7:26 AM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM) is one of LW's lesser known works, coming after the TLP and PI in notoriety. I've poked my head in here a number of times to relate foundational work in a particular set of geometric language games (a domain) with RFM, because of the illumination I get in both directions (LW helps me understand, plus I find his work more understandable, because of this bridge). The domain in question evaluates triangles and tetrahedra as models of 2nd and 3rd powering respectively, in a way that's logically consistent i.e. appears not to break any rules.[0] This is precisely the kind of gestalt-switching therapy we find applied in RFM (in in the PI for that matter), so I'm finding this example quite apropos. Once you make this switch, to a unit volume tetrahedron, you've got a lot of discoveries close at hand, many still being disseminated. In brief, you get a concentric hierarchy of roughly spherical polyhedra with rational whole number volumes, mixed with the expected incommensurables. The volumes are such as 1 for the tetrahedron (as mentioned), 3 for the cube, 4 for the octahedron, 6 for the rhombic dodecahedron, and 20 of 2.5 for cuboctahedra of obvious edge lengths. A rhombic triacontahedron weighs in with volume 5, also 7.5... and I could go on for more para- graphs. What's interesting about this geometry is that it's author dedicated his write-up to one H.S.M. Coxeter, who was a student of Wittgenstein's, at least for awhile, and committed his suites such that the Blue and Brown Books might be written. This was a time when LW wanted a smallish set of listeners, and so made up a game where they'd take notes for those not selected to be in attendance. Many of us here are familiar with the bio and so know some details about this chapter. Coxeter wrote a book entitled 'Regular Polytopes' among others and I've charted pages 71 and 119 as especially important. In Wittgenstein, I keep going to Part 2 of the PI and the duck/rabbit, as I'm thinking gestalt switches are at the heart of this philosophy, what he meant by "leaving every- thing as it is" (i.e. what flips is ineffable, or has the capability of so being). Earlier in this archives, I go into much closer detail regarding the specifics of the mathematics, especially its logical foundations. I was revisiting a lot of that this morning in another archive, will provide this link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/synergeo/message/58683 For those not familiar at all with this thread: in some dimension we go back to Karl Menger, a dimension theorist I stumbled upon. Turns out he was pretty famous in some circles and his "geometry of lumps" essay continues to be well received. He provides another way of being "non-Euclidean" (other than by jiggering with the 5th postulate), thereby challenging some of our cherished notions of "dimensionality" and how that concept must work. He shows us a different set of language games, alien yet grokkable. He calls it a "geometry of lumps". Merge that with the "4D" of a tetrahedrally based logic, and you've got plenty of grist for a small army of mathematicians and/or philosophers.[1] I also recruit among computer scientists. Most recently I had the good fortune to lead a three day workshop in Baltimore at the Johns Hopkins campus, working for AURA and Holden Web.[2] For some idea of what "tetrahedral mensuration" might look like in Python, a computer language, I'll close with a link to this logic (a demo /exercise in one of the workshop segments): http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/holdenweb/ch.py I'm not sure there's much that's questionable here, as no theses are being advanced. However there might be some need for clarification. Standing by if so. Kirby PS: for those of you tracking brain <-> consciousness literature, I recommend 'Tomorrow's Children' by Dr. Susan Greenfield. I was just at her lecture on Thursday evening and found her mind/brain discourse to be useful philosophy. She's more in the "moving target" school, i.e. consciousness may be qualitatively changing thanks to technologies, though not necessarily for the better (she's hoping to spark debate, brings a sense of urgency to the equations, though also some humor). Here's a write-up of her talk, with a picture of the book cover: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2010/05/tomorrows-people.html ENDNOTES: [0] http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/synergetics/s09/figs/f9001.html [1] http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2009/03/res-extensa.html [2] http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2010/04/python-gig.html ========================================== Need Something? Check here: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/