|
Christine Kenneally |
|
Kenneally175 The Human Brain 187 Evidence of the ancient neurological connections between language and gesture were announced in Nature in 2001, When scientists found that a crucial part of the brain that has been linked with language in humans, Brodman’s area 44, which is part of Brocca’s area, exists in chimpanzees and gorillas as well. What was striking about this discovery was not merely the existence of the area in other primates but the similarity of its structure to that of humans. Why should this be the case? Apes don't speak. And if spoken language is a purely human phenomenon, this finding makes no sense. It doesn't make sense, however, if we think of linguistic ability is having a heterogeneous structure. If this ability has developed piecemeal over time, then ape brains should share some of the same structures we use the language. But still, apes don't speak. What purpose does a larger left area 44 serve for them? (Scientists) suggest that apes are controlling gestures with this part of the brain in a language like way. Humans evolved the ability to point intentionally with their body parts and then with words. Captive apes are known to point to objects with intention, and in the apes observed a preference was exhibited were doing so with the right-hand. Another extremely striking finding about these shared brain bases come from Michael Arbib and Giacomo Rizzolatti, who discussed mirror neurons (cf. also index mirror neurons) as the first real evidence of the neurological underpinnings of imitation in 1997. Mirror neurons are specialised brain cells that fire if you, say, grasp a pen; they also fire when you see someone else grasp a pen. In some sense, the brain interprets these actions as the same thing by mapping them in the same way, meaning that what the monkey can do, the monkey can see. Arbib and Rizzolatti argued that the evolution of mirror neurons allowed humans to be skilled imitators: what the human can see, the human can, within reason, do. They help explain why speech is rooted in gestural communication. In his comparative work on mirror neurons, Arbib said his challenge is to ask, „What is the minimal set of requirements for brain which would make it possible for us to acquire language?“ He uses the slogan „the language ready brain“ to suggest that a brain „might not have language, but might be ready to learn it.“ 193 Human mutations 200: The different research projects reviewed in this book do not line up perfectly with one another; still, much of this work inhabits the same intellectual space, and together it promises to explain at least some of the larger language evolution story. When examined as a whole, the studies presented here signal a profound change of mood in the scientific community. In most disciplines the focus used to be on the separateness of animals and humans, that gulf being marked most strikingly by language. But over the last few decades, the emphasis has switched to investigating the continuity of life in addition to clarifying the boundaries that lie between species. We no longer have a sense that we are standing apart from all animal life and that language is a discrete, singular ability that isolates us. Despite the initial controversy connected with examining the mental life of nonhuman animals, once this research began, it didn't take scholars long to discover that thinking is a widely spread characteristic of many forms of life. In addition, in many animals there is some lexical ability, the capacity of the simple, meaningful structure, elements of culture, and the ability to imitate and learn. In animals closely related to us, the rudimentary beginnings of vocal control are evident. Although a language evolution is a relatively new field, it has brought together this research from many disciplines in a completely new way. Part of the field‘s struggle is that the very language used to get that these ideas does not serve it well. Language evolution research has illuminated a complicated geometry of species, traits, and relationships, and in the face of this newly defined space words like „uniqueness“, „innateness“, and „instinct“ have come to mean everything and nothing. Those terms are still bandied about to explain the disagreements between people working on language evolution, but in fact everyone agrees that there is linguistic innateness, and everyone agrees that there is something unique about language. Language has to be partly innate, simply because human babies are born with the ability to learn the language of their parents. While this can justifiably be called the language instinct, there is no one gene compelling us to produce language. Instead, a set of genetic settings gives rise to a set of behaviours and perceptual and cognitive biases, some of which may be more general and others of which are more language specific. Language is unique in that there are no other animals with which we converse, no matter what language we are speaking. And yet the miracle of this research has been the realisation that is unique from one perspective may be constructed of mostly old parts from another. All the work in genetics, neuroscience, ethology, biology, and linguistics has emphasised both the undeniable separateness and the powerful continuity of language. We are not the only animals that live within a world of meaning. |
|
|