Languages and brains 🧠

s Gary Marcus in The Birth of the Mind. “The reason animals can learn is that they can alter their nervous systems based on external experience. And the reason they can do that is that experience itself can modify the expression of genes. ”

language and thought are, in fact, distinct entities that the brain processes separately

Emergentism is actually a concept that extends way beyond linguistics. Very generally speaking, it’s the idea that simple interactions can give rise to complex systems. And those complex systems are much more than just a sum of their parts. Which I know sounds really abstract, but this kind of thing, emergent phenomena, are actually really common... See more

So it’s basically like a shortcut for telepathy. We can’t read each other’s mind. But we can use this tool called language, which is a flexible way to communicate our inner states, to transmit information to each other.