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A lady never multitasks
So I was reading about primateology and language development (Next of Kin by Roger Fouts, which I would recommend to the thinking reader) until nearly 1 am last night, partly because the book was quite interesting, and partly (I suspect) because I've been busy writing and making and spending time with the boy, and haven't actually read anything for probably months now. Which is not only sad, but leads to the kind of conditions that resulted in me having a headache all day today. But all this is beside the point I was trying to make.
The book as a whole is structured as the story of the author's career in both human and chimpanzee language studies, with little bits of the neurology and developmental psychology and everything behind why it all works this way thrown in on an "as needed" basis. And so it is that my question from last week didn't get answered until page 350. But what we find is this: There are two kinds of brain matter, the gray and the white. Gray, which humans have in much larger proportion, is used for "sequential thinking," ie logic and sorting and linguistic sorts of powers. White, which chimpanzees have more of, is used for "simultaneous processing," which is to say, learning to walk and chew gum at the same time. Or pay very close attention to your environment while you're still working on something else (field sense), or co-ordinate a vast number of small motions to work together as you want them to (fencing... well, any sport, really), or observe a semi-infinite number of gesture and social cues, and process and react to them without having to spin them all through a conscious train of thought.
Or in other words, the reason I'm often slightly out of it socially is the same reason that I had my driver's license for five or six years (ok, admittedly the first 4 of those I was in college, so not driving more than 3 months a year) before I learned to tune the radio without driving off the road. I can learn things that require non-gray-matter thought; eventually I can learn to do some of them quite well. I've been training my body & brain to fence off and on for the past twelve years or so? I forget... and people keep saying I'm on the edge of being really good at it if I just applied myself a bit more, although I often have to be told and shown a great many times when I'm assimilating new things, which I find somewhat frustrating, given that in other areas-- those things my gray matter has mastered-- I only have to be told once, if at all. But I am the sort of person who scores 98th or 99th percentile on standardized tests, and will manage to offend people who don't know me very well by having social reactions-- tone of voice, body language, phrasing-- that's not quite what they expect to hear. And in the absence of a translator, who can follow me around and point out what I'm doing wrong, or what other people are hearing when I try to relate to them, it's fairly certain I'm not about to sort out all the finer points of how to socialize on other people's terms. To a large extent, I don't particularly care; it's also fairly clear that my brain developed itself quite at right angles to the norm in a lot of cases, anyway. It's just that sometimes I wish I didn't end up doing things like giving up talking to strangers in shopping lines because they always look at me blankly when I try to join their conversations.
And no human will be as good at social interactions, in our own sphere, as the chimpanzees are in theirs. The wild chimp has a rudimentary gestural language that covers most of what they want to talk about anyway, and a comprehensive grasp of the white matter sort of communication. Or rather (ok, I'm extrapolating here) they take in and process vastly more detail evidence of what's going on around them and what their peers are thinking and feeling, instead of needing to be able to express it in words to make sure their audience picks up the fine details. The basic communicationally dysfunctional human won't talk about what he's thinking, and so no one knows what's going on in his head. The similarly dysfunctional chimp doesn't pick up on the nuances of his peers, and doesn't know what anybody else is thinking. But for most of us, either system works just fine as a social model. A social model skewed towards simultaneous-processing won't necessarily build you systems of higher mathematics or a shingle roof to keep the rain out, but it may well be that creatures who think that way have a better understanding of each other, not to mention the athletic grace that humans tend to take for granted in other creatures and often have to train strenuously in themselves.
And the funny thing, for those of us who study or read about it, is that there's absolutely no way to know how all this actually works. Except to observe the resulting abilities and speculate about what it might be like. Any more than you can match neurological pathways with another human being, only more so. (and true, two people can learn to think alike. Sometimes they can even come to think alike due to outside influences without intentional effort. But so far as I understand it, there is an almost complete certainty that this is two people mapping a maze of neurons in their own ways to approximate the same results. In the diverse pathways of your brain, you may store things more or less in the same places most other people do, unless of course there's a good reason not to, at which point you adapt, but your coding is all done in your own personal language.)
The book as a whole is structured as the story of the author's career in both human and chimpanzee language studies, with little bits of the neurology and developmental psychology and everything behind why it all works this way thrown in on an "as needed" basis. And so it is that my question from last week didn't get answered until page 350. But what we find is this: There are two kinds of brain matter, the gray and the white. Gray, which humans have in much larger proportion, is used for "sequential thinking," ie logic and sorting and linguistic sorts of powers. White, which chimpanzees have more of, is used for "simultaneous processing," which is to say, learning to walk and chew gum at the same time. Or pay very close attention to your environment while you're still working on something else (field sense), or co-ordinate a vast number of small motions to work together as you want them to (fencing... well, any sport, really), or observe a semi-infinite number of gesture and social cues, and process and react to them without having to spin them all through a conscious train of thought.
Or in other words, the reason I'm often slightly out of it socially is the same reason that I had my driver's license for five or six years (ok, admittedly the first 4 of those I was in college, so not driving more than 3 months a year) before I learned to tune the radio without driving off the road. I can learn things that require non-gray-matter thought; eventually I can learn to do some of them quite well. I've been training my body & brain to fence off and on for the past twelve years or so? I forget... and people keep saying I'm on the edge of being really good at it if I just applied myself a bit more, although I often have to be told and shown a great many times when I'm assimilating new things, which I find somewhat frustrating, given that in other areas-- those things my gray matter has mastered-- I only have to be told once, if at all. But I am the sort of person who scores 98th or 99th percentile on standardized tests, and will manage to offend people who don't know me very well by having social reactions-- tone of voice, body language, phrasing-- that's not quite what they expect to hear. And in the absence of a translator, who can follow me around and point out what I'm doing wrong, or what other people are hearing when I try to relate to them, it's fairly certain I'm not about to sort out all the finer points of how to socialize on other people's terms. To a large extent, I don't particularly care; it's also fairly clear that my brain developed itself quite at right angles to the norm in a lot of cases, anyway. It's just that sometimes I wish I didn't end up doing things like giving up talking to strangers in shopping lines because they always look at me blankly when I try to join their conversations.
And no human will be as good at social interactions, in our own sphere, as the chimpanzees are in theirs. The wild chimp has a rudimentary gestural language that covers most of what they want to talk about anyway, and a comprehensive grasp of the white matter sort of communication. Or rather (ok, I'm extrapolating here) they take in and process vastly more detail evidence of what's going on around them and what their peers are thinking and feeling, instead of needing to be able to express it in words to make sure their audience picks up the fine details. The basic communicationally dysfunctional human won't talk about what he's thinking, and so no one knows what's going on in his head. The similarly dysfunctional chimp doesn't pick up on the nuances of his peers, and doesn't know what anybody else is thinking. But for most of us, either system works just fine as a social model. A social model skewed towards simultaneous-processing won't necessarily build you systems of higher mathematics or a shingle roof to keep the rain out, but it may well be that creatures who think that way have a better understanding of each other, not to mention the athletic grace that humans tend to take for granted in other creatures and often have to train strenuously in themselves.
And the funny thing, for those of us who study or read about it, is that there's absolutely no way to know how all this actually works. Except to observe the resulting abilities and speculate about what it might be like. Any more than you can match neurological pathways with another human being, only more so. (and true, two people can learn to think alike. Sometimes they can even come to think alike due to outside influences without intentional effort. But so far as I understand it, there is an almost complete certainty that this is two people mapping a maze of neurons in their own ways to approximate the same results. In the diverse pathways of your brain, you may store things more or less in the same places most other people do, unless of course there's a good reason not to, at which point you adapt, but your coding is all done in your own personal language.)
sounds fascinating...
Re: sounds fascinating...
Meanwhile, you people should read The Descent of Woman, which I already loaned you. :P