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PART ONE
TRENDS IN MODERN BRAIN EVOLUTION
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OUR WINDOW TO THE WORLD
The oculomotor system produces eye fixations on an object displayed in a visual scene. The process of fixation spends some time on each evaluation because the fixation must describe to the brain the characteristics of the subject of fixation.
The eye jumps from one fixation to the next because the subject seems to move from one position to another; hence, there is not a continuum to be followed, but we deal with separated points which are the subject of each fixation. The space interval between each fixation is called “gap” or “latency” because the brain does not know what exists or happens between each fixation when the eye jumps from one location to another. The brain must cover this gap by making a prediction and the prediction filling up that space assures a continuity between fixations.
The original gap/latency (estimated at 190ms) in the oculomotor system that deals with visual scenes and the motion of objects are filled up with a prediction about the missing part (190ms) of the motion from a scene. Such a prediction is a backward approach because it fills up a space that has been already traveled by the subject. It is a prediction that refers to the past.
In the case of humans, an additional gap is produced by the speaking language that occupies a dynamic virtual space in mind (that varies from 150ms to 500ms). It is filled up with information that is a prediction about virtual motions and dynamic interactions involved in the conversation or in thinking itself that now becomes associated and is structured by the language itself.
Our brain is set up to show the “continuity” of actions and events. Hence, every occurring gap/latency (that is a discontinuity) must be filled up to restore the continuity.
The language-exclusive-contribution (when verbs are involved) amounts for a gap up to 300ms but on average, this figure was determined to be in the range of 200ms during the perceptual and linguistic work in tandem.
The language changed our understanding about time because the grammar introduced the linearity of language while the verbs became used to signal the case of a time when an action or event occurs.
The oculomotor system is built in all mammals by many millions of years of evolution and generates a gap between present and the past, where the present appears as the first (that is the last) to occur action, while the past appears as the secondly occurring action (that is the previously occurred action). Here, the arrow of time runs from the present to the past.
Now, the verbs are the vehicles of that action that takes place in the virtual space of the mind. The verbs are capable of creating meaning for an “intention” that defines a “future” action. Intention implies a general desire or “plan” to accomplish something, while intent is described as an indication about a firm resolve to get it done. The verbs have allowed the brain to deal with future actions by adding that tense that describes the future.
The verbs carrying the intention or the intent have produced intentional programming, changing the language into a programming tool. All this programming is about inserting “control” over the surrounding reality.
Before the creation and introduction of a vehicle for human intention, the time was running from present to the past.
The verbs change all that, making it possible to indicate an intentional but forward action that is what defines the future. The rest of linguistic linearity contributed to generating that “asymmetry” that is the “arrow of time.”
A study (2015) by Hamidreza Ghader and Christof Monz, both from Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam titled “What Does Attention in Neural Machine Translation Pay Attention To?” analyzes the role of nouns and verbs in the mechanism of attention that is implied in translation techniques. This study tried to clarify what kind of phenomenon is captured by attention. It considered that “attention can be seen as a reordering model as well as an alignment model.
There were several questions: Is the attention model only capable of modeling alignment? How similar is attention to alignment in different syntactic phenomena?
The result found that attention can model the alignment in some cases, which are the cases of nouns, and in other cases, the attention goes beyond alignment referring to verbs. It concluded that attention follows different patterns depending on the type of word being used. Here is a split opinion about attention having or having not an influence on learning syntactic information.
“The concentrated pattern of attention and the relatively high correlation for nouns show that training the attention with an explicit alignment is useful for generation of nouns.”
However, the above is not the case for verbs where it must be captured other relevant information inserted in the context.
This study, even indirectly, points out to the role of various relevant information of the contexts which stimulated the production of verbs.
I have to mention that “attention is defined as the activity of a set of brain networks of alerting, orienting, and executive output. The coordination of the attentional networks implements cognitive control in a context-sensitive fashion. It is the mechanism of so-called selective attention to deal with the limited capacity of information processing via selectivity” (Desmone and Duncan, 1995).
I tried to suggest that changes in human attention behavior have influenced first the use of nouns, and later, a need for higher mobility in expression led to the introduction and use of verbs.
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HUMANS AND THEIR LANGUAGE ARE THE PRODUCT OF NEOTENY
S. J. Gould in Ontogeny and Phylogeny (1977) explained: “neoteny is retention of formerly juvenile characters by adult descendants produced by somatic development.” He argues that “humans are essentially neotenous.” Gould claims that in the animal kingdom “neoteny is an escape from specialization.”
Marco Mazzeo of University of Calabria (in his paper Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure-published in Geneve, Switzerland, 2014), analyzing Gould’s work shows that:
the success of Homo sapiens is due to his scarce morphological, cognitive and linguistic specialization. Advocates of hypermorphosis, by contrast, insist on the idea of Homo sapiens as “super ape” (Mc Namara, 1977), as super specialized primate. They are both convenient evolutive strategies, but their difference lies in the modality and rates: hypermorphosis has “strong immediate advantages,” while neoteny has “great macro-evolutionary potential whose price is an initial evolutive disadvantage.”
Stating that Homo sapiens is a neote...
