Thinking Beyond Science

We all sometimes – or often – struggle with attention. For example, when we are talking to someone and there is another interesting conversation going on nearby.* Out of courtesy, we want to remain focused on our interlocutor, but our hearing, gaze and thoughts generally direct themselves the other way. Here we recognize two ingredients that lead and orient attention: one endogenous, which happens from inside, through our own desire to concentrate on something, and the other exogenous, which happens due to an external stimulus.

The system that allows us to orient our attention towards a new element matures much earlier than the system that allows us to disengage our attention. Therefore, voluntarily shifting our attention away from something is much more difficult than we imagine.

When dealing with a child, a trick that some parents hit upon spontaneously, and emerges naturally when one understands attention development, is not asking their offspring to just cut it out, but rather to offer another option that attracts their attention. Then, almost by magic, the inconsolable crying stops ipso facto. In most cases, the baby wasn’t sad or in pain, but the crying was, actually, pure inertia. That this happens the same way for all children around the world is not magic or a coincidence. It reflects how we are – how we were – in that developmental period: able to draw our attention towards something when faced with an exogenous stimulus, and unable to voluntarily disengage.

Our brains are prepared and predisposed for language from the day we are born. But this predisposition does not seem to materialize without social experience, without using it with other people.

The ability to speak a language, to a large extent, is learned in a community. If a child grows up in complete isolation from others, his or her ability to learn a language is largely impaired.

The brain’s predisposition for a universal language becomes fine-tuned by contact with others, acquiring new knowledge (grammatical rules, words, phonemes) or unlearning differences that are irrelevant to one’s mother tongue.

In effect, a baby has a universal brain that is able to distinguish phonological contrasts in every language. Over time, each brain develops its own phonological categories and barriers that depend on the specific use of its language.

In order to understand that an a pronounced by different people, in varying contexts, at different distances, with head colds and without, corresponds to the same ‘a, one has to establish a category of sounds. Doing this means, unfailingly, losing resolution. Those borders for identifying phonemes in the space of sounds are established between six and nine months of life. And they depend, of course, on the language we hear during development. That is the age when our brain stops being universal.

How can babies know which are the words in a language? The problem is not only how to learn the meaning of the thousands of words that make it up. When someone hears a phrase in German for the first time, not only do they not know what each word means but they can’t even distinguish them in the sound continuum of the phrase. That is due to the fact that in spoken language there are no pauses that are equal to the space between written words. One solution is talking to babies – as we do when speaking Moth-erese – slowly and with exaggerated enunciation. In Motherese there are pauses between words, which facilitates the baby’s heroic task of dividing a sentence into the words that make it up.

Eight-month-olds already begin to form a vast repertoire of words, many of which they don’t even know how to define. In order to do this, the brain uses a principle similar to the one many sophisticated computers employ to detect patterns, known as statistical learning. The recipe is simple and identifies the frequency of transitions between syllables and function. Since the word hello is used frequently, every time the syllable ‘hel’ is heard, there is a high probability that it will be followed by the syllable ‘lo’ Of course, these are just probabilities, since sometimes the word will be helmet or hellraiser, but a child discovers, through an intense calculation of these transitions, that the syllable ‘hel’ has a relatively small number of frequent successors.

As humans, we assign intentions not only to other people but also to plants (sunflowers seek out the sun’), abstract social constructions (history will absolve me’ or ‘the market punishes investors’), theological entities (‘God willing) and machines (damn washing machine’). This ability to theorize, to turn data into stories, is the seed of all fiction. That is why we can cry in front of a television set – it is strange to cry because something happens to some tiny pixels on a screen – or destroy blocks on an iPad as if we were in a trench on the Western Front during the First World War.

We adults are not unbiased when we judge others. Not only do we keep in mind their previous history and the context of their actions (which we should), but we also have very different opinions of the person committing the actions, or being the victim of them, if they look like us or not (which we shouldn’t).

Throughout all cultures, we tend to form more friendships and have more empathy with those who look like us. On the other hand, we usually judge more harshly and show more indifference to the suffering of those who are different. History is filled with instances in which human groups have massively supported or, in the best-case scenario, rejected violence directed at individuals who were not like them.

Source : The Secret Life of the Mind: How Your Brain Thinks, Feels, and Decides by Mariano Sigman

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32498119-the-secret-life-of-the-mind

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