The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Shimon Edelman Page B
Authors: Shimon Edelman
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American.
In contrast to inept foreigners and their queer phonemes, both the native speakers and the language memes they bandy about benefit greatly from the categorical limits on phonemic variation. For the speakers, a digital medium affords error-free communication; for the memes, it promotes faithful replication. It was by going digital that the language memes adapted to their human hosts’ predisposition for perceptual categorization, while offering them a handsome kickback in the form of a reliable medium for communication. This co-evolutionary development set both sides in the language game on a path to their unprecedented collective success. 10
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
The digital revolution in cognition would have not gone far were it not for another key structural trait that is common to all languages: arranging and rearranging the same digital building blocks to construct a potentially unlimited variety of complex messages, by the way of constrained combinatorial composition. By themselves, digital memes are useful (and fecund) because they are easy to trade. Assigning a distinct symbol to each thought, however, would quickly exhaust the cognitive resources of even the brainiest species. Much worse, it would rule out any possibility of communicating a thought for which the originator and the intended recipient do not already share a symbol.
Both these problems can be averted by the same means: reuse of partial structures in different contexts, which includes constructing larger novel structures out of smaller existing ones. Under such a recycling scheme, a part’s contribution to the meaning of the whole (that is, to the effect that it has on the listener) depends on its context. Because different combinations of familiar parts can mean different things, novel meanings can be expressed in a form that would not leave the listener too bewildered. The tale of Queen Mab that Mercutio spins for Romeo just before they crash the Capulets’ party no doubt transcends the prior linguistic experience of that self-confessed “lusty gentleman”—
MERCUTIO
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.
[thirty-seven more lines of wild fantasy omitted]
And yet, Romeo finds Mercutio’s ravings not so much incomprehensible as perhaps just slightly boring.
ROMEO
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.
Whatever Shakespeare’s characters have to say about their author’s wordplay, his audiences delight in it. (I still remember being electrified by the Queen Mab rant, delivered by John McEnery in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet , which I first saw in the early 1970s.) Why is it so?
In his 1765 Preface to Shakespeare , Samuel Johnson remarked that “the dialogue of this author . . . is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences.” The delight that we take in Shakespeare’s words (or in those of Homer) is a close relative of our pleasure in language in general, whose roots go to the core of what it is to be human. 11 Our happy symbiosis with language ensures that we use it often, and with relish; the skill of a master of dialogue or narrative serves merely to amplify the features that are present to some extent in any spirited conversation or good story.
As in the rest of cognition, the pleasure in language is derived from a properly maintained mix of familiarity and novelty—something old and something new. On the one hand, familiarity with at least some parts or aspects of the stimulus ensures that the perceiver’s brain circuits will not remain indifferent to it. Novelty, on the other hand, promotes an effort on the part of the brain to make sense of the stimulus. This
In contrast to inept foreigners and their queer phonemes, both the native speakers and the language memes they bandy about benefit greatly from the categorical limits on phonemic variation. For the speakers, a digital medium affords error-free communication; for the memes, it promotes faithful replication. It was by going digital that the language memes adapted to their human hosts’ predisposition for perceptual categorization, while offering them a handsome kickback in the form of a reliable medium for communication. This co-evolutionary development set both sides in the language game on a path to their unprecedented collective success. 10
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
The digital revolution in cognition would have not gone far were it not for another key structural trait that is common to all languages: arranging and rearranging the same digital building blocks to construct a potentially unlimited variety of complex messages, by the way of constrained combinatorial composition. By themselves, digital memes are useful (and fecund) because they are easy to trade. Assigning a distinct symbol to each thought, however, would quickly exhaust the cognitive resources of even the brainiest species. Much worse, it would rule out any possibility of communicating a thought for which the originator and the intended recipient do not already share a symbol.
Both these problems can be averted by the same means: reuse of partial structures in different contexts, which includes constructing larger novel structures out of smaller existing ones. Under such a recycling scheme, a part’s contribution to the meaning of the whole (that is, to the effect that it has on the listener) depends on its context. Because different combinations of familiar parts can mean different things, novel meanings can be expressed in a form that would not leave the listener too bewildered. The tale of Queen Mab that Mercutio spins for Romeo just before they crash the Capulets’ party no doubt transcends the prior linguistic experience of that self-confessed “lusty gentleman”—
MERCUTIO
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep.
[thirty-seven more lines of wild fantasy omitted]
And yet, Romeo finds Mercutio’s ravings not so much incomprehensible as perhaps just slightly boring.
ROMEO
Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.
Whatever Shakespeare’s characters have to say about their author’s wordplay, his audiences delight in it. (I still remember being electrified by the Queen Mab rant, delivered by John McEnery in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet , which I first saw in the early 1970s.) Why is it so?
In his 1765 Preface to Shakespeare , Samuel Johnson remarked that “the dialogue of this author . . . is pursued with so much ease and simplicity, that it seems scarcely to claim the merit of fiction, but to have been gleaned by diligent selection out of common conversation, and common occurrences.” The delight that we take in Shakespeare’s words (or in those of Homer) is a close relative of our pleasure in language in general, whose roots go to the core of what it is to be human. 11 Our happy symbiosis with language ensures that we use it often, and with relish; the skill of a master of dialogue or narrative serves merely to amplify the features that are present to some extent in any spirited conversation or good story.
As in the rest of cognition, the pleasure in language is derived from a properly maintained mix of familiarity and novelty—something old and something new. On the one hand, familiarity with at least some parts or aspects of the stimulus ensures that the perceiver’s brain circuits will not remain indifferent to it. Novelty, on the other hand, promotes an effort on the part of the brain to make sense of the stimulus. This
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