Posted: Mar 09, 2010 7:21 pm
katja z wrote:@Mr. Samsa: I've been chewing on those studies on AGL in pigeons Let me see if I've got the implications right: our capacity to use grammar would be just a case of a more general pattern-recognition ability that is not confined to humans and that seems to have even evolved independently (at least) in birds and in primates, so it really isn't something extremely special or necessarily connected to human language. We just seem to have invented a new use for it and to have become really good at it.
Yeah that's basically the gist of it..
katja z wrote:I wonder if this ability to recognize and apply complex sequential regularities is also responsible for our love of narrative - for the fact that we seem to "intuitively" organise our observations and experiences into narrative sequences, and even invent hosts of stories just for the joy of narrating/listening to them.
It could be. There's a similar idea that tries to explain why we like music - apparently the human brain loves it when it can predict what's coming next in a song (through basic chord progressions), but it also seems to have occasional discordance or surprise as long as it "fits" into the song. I'd have to read up on it again though as I can't remember the full details of that, but it would make sense if we like hearing the words we've created, as well as the meaning behind them, and that we love structuring them in such a way that it produces a general familiarity with the odd surprise in there.