Ensuite 1

Lakefield, Qué, August 24, 2020

Continuing, it just dawned on me that when we begin to talk, the mind had already decided, some 600 milliseconds earlier, what we are about to hear. Too late then, we are left bothered and think of what we should have said instead. The experimental evidence for our mind having been made up before we are aware of it made people wonder whether we truly have a free will. 3

From thought to speech occurs in distinct steps. I read about an experiment in which subjects were shown some words; they were recognized 200 milliseconds later, then it appeared that at 320 milliseconds grammatical processing occurred, and at 450 milliseconds it appeared that the brain was getting ready to talk. It took 500 milliseconds in all, from start to finish, with all three steps occurring in a small region of the brain's Broca's area.* 4

Compare a 600-millisecond period to the times it takes for people to take their turn in a conversation. Measurements showed a typical gap of 200 milliseconds, but also that it depends on the language used, rising to 470 for Danish and falling to only 7 for Japanese. In other words, participants in a conversation are already preparing their responses to one who is still talking.* This finding, it seems to me, affects the conduct of social intercourse, including education, business affairs and politics. 5

Awakening 6

I am guessing that most grown ups feel they have a good idea of how children learn. I also have come to believe that parents in their, probably unwitting, role as educators, however well-meaning, ought to have a better grasp of how their children learn than some inflexible notion. 7

Over the last two decades, an understanding has gelled among evolutionary psychologists that children learn about the world in much the same way scientists do: by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories in the realms of physics, biology and psychology. "Obviously children are not doing experiments or analyzing statistics in the selfconscious way that adult scientists do." I am quoting Alison Gupnik, who specializes in cognitive development.*

"The children’s brains, however, must be unconsciously processing information in a way that parallels the methods of scientific discovery. The central idea of cognitive science is that the brain is a kind of computer designed by evolution and programmed by experience."

"One of the greatest mysteries of psychology and philosophy is how human beings learn about the world from a confusing mess of sensory data." 8

Quoting Pascal Boyer, who we met in my previous essay,*:

"From birth (and indeed some time before that) infants spontaneously pay special attention to speech, as opposed to other sounds, and can recognize the typical rhythm and prosody of their mother's language, perceived in a rather muffled form during the last months of gestation. In the first months of life, this leads them to pay attention only to recurrent sounds that are pertinent in their language and to ignore everything else as noise. That selective attention is reflected in babbling, which starts as a wonderfully catholic mixture of all possible sounds one can make with vocal cords, a mouth, and a tongue, and gradually restricts itself to the sounds of the local language. Paying attention only to specific sounds in turn allows infants to identify the boundaries between words, a pretty difficult thing to do, as the stream of speech is generally continuous. So learning takes place in steps, ... Each step, obviously, requires some previous expectations.... At each point these expectations allow the organism to orient to a special aspect of the sonic environment, and at each step these expectations are in turn modified by the kind of information that was picked up. These expectations make children orient to some properties of speech as carrying meaning but not others—they expect that the recurrent difference between ship and sheep, or between chip and cheap, may carry some diference in meaning, but they ignore the difference in te word 'ship' pronounced by a man and a woman—even though the accoustic contrast is just as great. Children can acquire their native language, from interaction with other speakers, because some very specific mental systems are prepared to attend to specific properties of sound." 9

These steps are made by a range of mental mechanisms referred to as "intuitive inference systems" or "modules" or "domain-specific systems." They are perceived as properties evolved from our genetic makeup. 10

Returning to Prof. Gupnik,

      "Baby brains are more flexible than adult brains. They have far more connections between neurons, none of them particularly efficient, but over time they prune out unused connections and strengthen useful ones.

      "The adult capacities for focus, planning and efficient action that are governed by this brain area depend on the long learning that occurs in childhood. This area’s wiring may not be complete until the mid-20s.

      "Babies and young children are exquisitely designed by evolution to change and create, to learn and explore. Those capacities, so intrinsic to what it means to be human, appear in their purest forms in the earliest years of our lives. Our most valuable human accomplishments are possible because we were once helpless dependent children and not in spite of it." 11

Genes, we learn, are the wellspring of brains and of mind, both. And mind itself, we saw before, is part of the environment from which it draws information.* It seems to me therefore that we have here a feedback mechanism reminiscent of the Fisher paradigm: "What we think, we do. What we do, we become."* 12