Talking may be our most complicated neuromuscular process.
At birth, humans have the capacity to recognize maybe 800 distinct human speech sounds. Linguists call these sounds phonemes. For some reason, each language uses only a small selection of the sounds available to the human brain to both distinguish and make. English uses a mere 52 out of the 800. Hawaiian uses 13. The !Xóõ language of Botwana and Nambia has 161. Each language uses a small sample of the 800 sounds available to us, and uses a different sample. Most languages use sounds that overlap with the sounds used in other languages and include sounds that don't overlap with a comparative language.
Infants appear to be able to recognize and respond to all 800. That's amazing by itself, and then within 6 months, we start to focus in on the ones associated with the human languages presented to us by the humans who speak to us. We are also able to distinguish human speech sounds from other meaningful sounds like door bells ringing and the sound of rain drops.
Now comes the most important lesson about our cognitive functioning. As formidable as our ability is to use language, in the last post, Pierre Bayard spoke of all the reading we forget. That's not all we forget. As also noted in previous posts, we little human curious specks in the universe take in as little awareness as possible. Our brains are designed to ignore all but the most obvious risks and the most obvious opportunities. What's more, we think negative thoughts and use negative words for heightened awareness of risk and opportunity. We say fear and greed. "Yond Cassius has that lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous." quoth Shakespeare.
Our brains, after taking in as little as possible, work to then forget as much as possible of what we took in. And over time, it can extinguish the capacity to learn new things and even to remember how to learn or relearn certain new things.
All that beautiful and broad awareness of the 800 sounds? We forget all of them but the ones we use to communicate with those closest around us at six months. For a child learning English, Hawaiian, Putonghua, the sounds needed just to pronounce the name of the !Xóõ language disappear from our cognitive access, much less nearly all of the other 161 !Xóõ sounds. And quod erat demonstrandum, my Latin alphabet has no meaningful sound/symbol coordination with these sounds.
Why?
Because we are highly inefficient information processors. The awareness we have is processed through our meat-based neuromuscular system. We are ruthlessly biased toward what we perceive as useful and ruthlessly biased against what isn't. Our brains cut loose even the possibility of accurately recognizing and processing those sounds. It's why, even when we learn a language after the critical period for retaining the phonemic awareness of the sounds of that language, we speak in accents. Phonemes that weren't available to us in that period come to us as approximations. Trained actors, working with linguists, can sometimes make native-sounding approximations, but those sounds will come from a different brain activity from their developmental speech.
If I were to read this aloud to you, or go off the script and just talk, I would do all this with the complex neuromuscular operation we call Talker. Talker is the third neuromuscular activity for which we can measure the strength of the neurostimulus supporting it.
In the Kairos Assessment, Talker measures the neurostimulus generated by the activity we use to speak. In order to do something as simple as saying, “Hello,” we throw into complex and well-timed orientation, muscles from the base of our diaphragm through our chest, throat, larynx, tongue, lips and nasal passages. When we put this muscle system into complex and well-timed orientation, we self-generate a neurostimulus that allows us to think more clearly, store in memory more durably, and retrieve more reliably, experience some calm and focus;.
All of this happens when we use the same neuromuscular system to sing, hum, whistle, and breath. All of these also generate the neurostimulus that clears our thinking, supports our memories, and delivers calm and focus.
The most complicated thing we do -- even after our brains have squeezed out even the capacity to do any but its most necessary thing -- paradoxically clears our thinking, supports our memories, and delivers calm and focus.
Perhaps the highest level of our humanity is to offer a kind word to another human.
Thank you for example.
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Warm regards,
Francis Sopper