Final Report Summary - NEUROSEMANTICS (Neurosemantics: the human brain as a meaning processor)
Neurosemantics aimed to further understand the implementation of meaning by the human brain: How does our brain construct meaningful representations of the world around us? How early in life do we start building them? Do these representations differ in speakers of one and two languages? Is language better than images or sounds in creating such meaning? Does language affect the perception and categorisation of things around us? Is there such thing as unconscious meaning processing? Deriving meaning form the world essentially makes us who we are. If we understand how we do this, we can hope to become better at it, that is, better at being human, not a small endeavour!
At the end of this five-year adventure, the human brain reveals itself in a new light (or a new shade, rather). We have shown that highly complex operations usually considered to be under voluntary and conscious control are implemented outside awareness: Babies spontaneously associate language sounds with visual shapes before they know their first words; they recognise words before they speak; they switch between languages before they are conscious that different languages exist. But it is not only babies that manifest unconscious high-level cognition: Adult bilinguals translate second language words into their native equivalents spontaneously and unconsciously; they sound native translations in their heads as they read or listen to words in their second language, but somehow they unknowingly stop when these words are unpleasant. Even more surprising, bilinguals speak two languages at once, although we only hear one, that is, they mentally access the sound of words in their native language while speaking in their second, without knowing. When adult bilinguals are faced with language switches, they cannot help processing the meaning of words in both their languages, even if they are asked to ignore one language. Yet more surprising, these effects extend to the domain of syntax: Welsh-English bilinguals apply a rule of Welsh grammar when reading English, even when no such rule exists in English!
Our research reveals the human brain as a voracious and automatic meaning processor mostly unaware of its inner workings, even in the case of faculties that we commonly consider under voluntary control such as language. In light of our findings, conceptualisations of meaning formation and decision-making need revision. A fully interactive, non-selective account of the human brain is largely inconsistent with modular views positing some functions (such as language) as encapsulated and relatively independent vis-à-vis other specialised brain systems such as face recognition or motor control. If language interacts with other systems in the brain, for instance, having additional words in a given language to discriminate between colours or objects should lead to enhanced colour contrast perception or finer object categorisation. That is precisely what we found when we showed that Greek participants who in their native language have two basic colour terms for blue, ‘Ghalazio’ (light blue) and ‘Ble’ (dark blue), perceive the difference between these two blues more markedly than native speakers of English whose language only has one basic colour term for blue.
Taken together the findings of the Neurosemantics project form a constellation of clues that reveal unsuspected levels of automaticity in meaning extraction by the human brain. We only have consciousness to understand the nature of our mind, yet most of what defines us and our understanding of the world comes from spontaneous, unconscious information processing that is wholly impenetrable. The emerging picture calls for a reconsideration of the way in which we conceptualise cognitive operations classically regarded as volitional. Human conscious awareness becomes a fine translucent layer covering a –mostly unknown and probably gigantic– mass of cryptic processes: Our inner world.
At the end of this five-year adventure, the human brain reveals itself in a new light (or a new shade, rather). We have shown that highly complex operations usually considered to be under voluntary and conscious control are implemented outside awareness: Babies spontaneously associate language sounds with visual shapes before they know their first words; they recognise words before they speak; they switch between languages before they are conscious that different languages exist. But it is not only babies that manifest unconscious high-level cognition: Adult bilinguals translate second language words into their native equivalents spontaneously and unconsciously; they sound native translations in their heads as they read or listen to words in their second language, but somehow they unknowingly stop when these words are unpleasant. Even more surprising, bilinguals speak two languages at once, although we only hear one, that is, they mentally access the sound of words in their native language while speaking in their second, without knowing. When adult bilinguals are faced with language switches, they cannot help processing the meaning of words in both their languages, even if they are asked to ignore one language. Yet more surprising, these effects extend to the domain of syntax: Welsh-English bilinguals apply a rule of Welsh grammar when reading English, even when no such rule exists in English!
Our research reveals the human brain as a voracious and automatic meaning processor mostly unaware of its inner workings, even in the case of faculties that we commonly consider under voluntary control such as language. In light of our findings, conceptualisations of meaning formation and decision-making need revision. A fully interactive, non-selective account of the human brain is largely inconsistent with modular views positing some functions (such as language) as encapsulated and relatively independent vis-à-vis other specialised brain systems such as face recognition or motor control. If language interacts with other systems in the brain, for instance, having additional words in a given language to discriminate between colours or objects should lead to enhanced colour contrast perception or finer object categorisation. That is precisely what we found when we showed that Greek participants who in their native language have two basic colour terms for blue, ‘Ghalazio’ (light blue) and ‘Ble’ (dark blue), perceive the difference between these two blues more markedly than native speakers of English whose language only has one basic colour term for blue.
Taken together the findings of the Neurosemantics project form a constellation of clues that reveal unsuspected levels of automaticity in meaning extraction by the human brain. We only have consciousness to understand the nature of our mind, yet most of what defines us and our understanding of the world comes from spontaneous, unconscious information processing that is wholly impenetrable. The emerging picture calls for a reconsideration of the way in which we conceptualise cognitive operations classically regarded as volitional. Human conscious awareness becomes a fine translucent layer covering a –mostly unknown and probably gigantic– mass of cryptic processes: Our inner world.