The Crap I Think Of!! Fixation # 1,967: Human Communication Is Mind-Boggling
psychcentral.com Human communication astounds me. I’d go so far as to say that human communication is the thing that most strains my brain circuits to think about (well, after the universe and higher mathematics, of course). The fact that we can do it, the means by which we do it, and the effects or potentialities of our doing it, are all marvels quite awesome to contemplate.
Just think about it. In our most elemental form, we are large organisms that can move in order to hunt, gather and reproduce. And because we can move very far distances, we need an especially sophisticated way to convey essential information to our fellow organisms. (I’m no professor, of course, so please take my theorizing as the non-scholarly, largely self-stimulating riffing that it is). We cannot rely simply on giving off gases the way trees signal each other about crowding or the state of available resources, or exchange dance moves or glandular liquids to inform each other where the food is, the way members of an insect colony do. Our experiential worlds are too vast, so at some point we started gesturing and beeping at each other. It was more like grunting than beeping of course, but if you imagine it as beeping, the stunning reality of it all grows clear.
E. Marmer | Free to Navel Gaze For if, in a lab, we were examining stationary beings, little more than polyps on a mossy rock (which some would say is actually what we are) and we discovered that they were beep, beep, beeping at each other, and furthermore reacting in a way that indicated a mutual understanding of what all that beeping was about, we’d be quite amazed. Maybe even gobsmacked.
Let’s take a step back. Before all the beeping started, there were of course all the non-verbal cues that we also see in other mammals and birds. Excitable hopping about, threatening stances, cautious peering, they’re all there with us still. Moreover, like other pack mammals, say wolves, dogs, apes or lions, we also luckily have far more advanced facial muscles, enabling us to contract them this way and that to show fear, anger, pleasure, sorrow and indifference. Studies have confirmed what we already somehow intuitively know, that humans around the globe understand these facial contractions all in the same way.
And don’t forget the more basic electro-magnetic or chemical signals, which personally I’m convinced we still pick up on, even if we can’t explain how we do it. How else would we sense fear in a person standing next to us, or feel someone else’s attraction to us? So even before we get to the verbal stuff, the non-verbal communication is all pretty amazing. Imagine those polyps with little appendages flailing about in certain recognizable patterns and each having the means to perceive and comprehend its neighbor’s movements. Astonishing!
But here we come to verbal communication. Ah, language! If there is anything which displays our stunningly superior brain power it is that! Language not only enables us to convey needs and emotions, it gives us the means to explore and use numerical systems, biology, physics, philosophy and societal norms. How could we have developed and shared knowledge about architecture, history, or justice without language? How could we have built civilizations? Human language covers everything from the simple and concrete to the most abstract concepts imaginable, and the fact that we can use it to identify and share those concepts is extraordinary. Even the concrete in language is far more complex and abstracted than immediately obvious. For if I say to you “Throw me the ball,” I am already participating in a shared system where we have isolated and identified an action as “throwing” and an object as a “ball.” If I ask you what you’d like for dinner tonight, and you tell me, we have not only drawn upon the concepts of food preparation, but also invoked the ideas of planning for the future and altruistic consideration of another’s preferences. And I haven’t even touched on our ability to explore thoughts relating to cynicism, generosity, bridging differences, futility, consciousness, wastefulness, cultivation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Our brains and vocal chords evolved to a point where we were able to create this incredible tool. What a gift! We then created alphabets and means to record our language for conveyance to larger and larger audiences. And with our language we can effect change to our environment, for good or bad, by obtaining cooperation or fomenting conflict. We can understand each other at levels never before possible, and this has led to accelerated leaps in our development. It’s all so far-reaching, so full of potential, so noble, even. We have, through language, the capacity to share information that can help us understand and preserve our existence and our planet, and on a more personal level, our relationships. Too bad our more primitive emotions of fear, distrust and selfishness and our impulses for dominance and greed continually get in our way. It seems that some aspects of humanity have evolved faster than others.
Well, I for one remain hopeful. Everything on this planet seems to be part of a natural network that interacts harmoniously, and when there are deviations from that model, nature eventually generates a correction. Maybe advanced language is such a correction. Violence and destruction need no words, and the ability of humans to manipulate their environment creates the danger of violence and destruction on scales that no other organisms on our planet can achieve.
rosalilium.com So, maybe what first evolved as a means to share information to our fellow organisms, grew into the complex system that it is now to temper fear, rage and chaos and give us forward looking sensibilities. It is, after all, through language that we have been able to learn and understand more about each other, in ways no other species can. For us humans, communication is way beyond hunting, gathering and reproducing. It’s the ultimate tool for mutually assured survival in an intelligent world.
See what I did? I used a rumination on communication to express hopefulness for humanity! Isn’t language just fantastic?
