Cool. Did you efficiently become a more focused person (in terms of attention and memory) after these years spent working with those subjects?
I wish! Actually, procrastination is my biggest bugbear.
Now I'm curious about that one! How? Exercising regularly I guess?
You're kinda right, actually. See, we're all familiar with the idea the saying "our brains are computers", when actually this couldn't be further from the truth. Anecdotally, the best evidence to show this simply isn’t the case comes from the case argument. This is the idea that if you have a computer, regardless of the shell it’s in – be it a desktop, a phone or a laptop – it will function the same. The hardware is not different, and works similarly regardless of what form it comes in. Now, when we turn our attention to humanity, this isn’t as straight forwards. We know that if you are lacking a limb, for example, your thoughts, your cognitions will be totally different to someone that is not missing a limb.
One of my favourite arguments in this debate comes from perception. Colour doesn’t exist. What we see as colour is just lightwave reflectance that are picked up by cells in our eyes. The actual process is relatively straight forwards: we have colour cone detectors that feed information into our occipital lobes. Most of us have three different kinds of colour cones, if you’re colour blind then you have less, and some incredibly lucky women have four. This means that there’s no green in grass or blue in the sky, but instead that you create beautiful scenes on a daily basis. It also means that if you’ve ever had an argument with someone about whether or not something is red or pink, you may have both been correct. Incredible in its own right, this suggests that colour is an interaction. An interaction between the contents of our environment and the physical, perceptual capabilities we have.
But we still apply these labels, red, green, blue, to things. So language doesn’t fit the world directly: you don’t know if my green is your green. These linguistic labels are not the real thing. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Language, a thing we feel can describe everything, can’t. And you know this already. If you’ve ever experienced something amazing and tried to explain it to someone, maybe it was a funny moment, maybe you were really upset by something, or maybe you realised you were in love… You’ve probably found the explanation really difficult. You’ve probably used the phrase you just had to be there.
And this tells us something nice about language. We can even have issues with single words, like ambiguities. Take the word bat, you don’t know if I’m referring to a flying mammal or the act of striking something. But as soon as I put this language into a context, the ambiguities disappear. Do you think a bat could bat a mosquito while flying? You know the former is the mammal, the latter is the act of hitting. Gregory Bateson, a linguist said it best when he mentioned that without context, or words and actions have no meaning at all.
Let’s talk a little more about meaning. Does
this road run or meander through the forest? Teenie Matlock asked exactly this of her participants and found those primed with action words like running responded significantly faster than those primed with more passive words like meander or stroll. Interestingly, this was the case even in individuals blind from birth because of image schema.
Schemas are the hierarchical ordering categories of language. Things like chair and car, where if I ask you to think of one you probably think of something similar to what you’re sitting on now, or you think of a Ferrari. You can’t quite think of a general one. These schemas structure our world, how we see it, and how we interact with it. They’re related to another concept we call the conceptual metaphor.
These are best understood, I think, with the example "time is money". Now, time’s abstract. We can’t see it. But, we can spend, steal, save and – if you’re anything like me – waste money. And I waste a lot of it. We systematically abstract our understanding of money to time. Metaphors shape our perceptions and restrict our thoughts.
Considered together, we have the basis of embodied cognition. The idea that our image schemas, our frames and metaphors are all actually interlinked neural circuitry. The idea that, radically, not just our mind is responsible for the ways we think, but also the body and the environment too. And this explains how we learn abstract concepts, things like happiness, anger, and love.
We play videogames because it is rewarding and reinforces behaviour. We like the escapism that comes from playing videogames, and we like getting told we're doing well at things. It's nice.
