The student decided to give him some advice: don’t tell anyone except perhaps Professor Poser, the director of the school’s psychopathology program. When a fellow student entered the lab, Pinker explained his strange experience and conveyed his excitement. Like this: (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) HUMPTY – DUMPTY – HUMPTY – DUMPTY.” He double-checked the audio file and confirmed that he really was listening to the same two tones, meaning the effect had to be perceptual. One morning while he was listening to one such set of overlapping tones, the sounds he was hearing suddenly turned into “a chorus of screaming munchkins. His job was to synthesize trains of overlapping tones and categorize them as either one rich tone or two distinct tones. When Pinker was a student, he worked in a laboratory at McGill University that studied auditory perception. Pinker explains this idea with an enlightening and somewhat amusing story, which I will retell here. The first is the idea that language is nothing more than a series of noises, meaning that our brain can sometimes find language in places we wouldn’t expect it to. Today I’d like to highlight one of the book’s chapters, “The Sounds of Silence,” in which Pinker discusses an interesting phenomenon that we all experience quite frequently but have likely never thought about. It contains an absolutely fascinating explanation of what language really is and how humans interpret it.
I recently picked up another one of Steven Pinker’s books, The Language Instinct.
0 kommentar(er)
