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Not… writing… anything…

I’m trying an experiment this morning. I don’t feel like writing anything, but my friend and colleague Steve said he’s bored with re-reading my previous post and wants something new.

Okay… here we go… not writing anything… la, la, la… it’s… not… working…

It’s hard to write nothing. Harder than writing something, in fact. Why would that be? Probably for the same reason it’s hard to think nothing, I’d guess.

I’ve been reading The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon. Deacon is both a neurologist and anthropologist, and he has an interesting take on the nature of symbol use in humans and how it might have developed. His core thesis is that our apparently innate faculties for language spring from an earlier, nascent capability for symbolic learning, and that this “learning style” and language encouraged each other’s development, co-evolving from small beginnings rather than suddenly springing forth full-blown in Homo sapiens. He deconstructs the nature of symbolic learning, showing how different it is from “indexical” and “iconic” learning in which obvious similarities and perceptual correlations rule the roost. Deacon believes that once communication of learned symbolic knowledge — such as tool use or location of food — began to improve people’s chances of survival, tremendous evolutionary pressure was brought to bear on the improvement of both symbolic learning and symbolic communication. On this view, thought, speech production, hearing and linguistic analysis evolved together seamlessly, resulting in what today appears as a near-miraculous “language instinct”, but what is in fact a pieced-together collection of incremental improvements just like what is found (non-miraculously) in any other successfully adapted organism.

The internal, bodily change that drove all this, according to Deacon, was the “prefrontalization” of the brain: the increasing volume and area devoted to a bunch of neural circuits in the front of our heads that, in effect, perceive and influence our own perceptions and intentions. If the quality we think of as “red” is a natural phenomenon of consciousness that emerges from our having a visual sense, then one might say that the innate sense of “symbolism” or “meaning” emerges naturally from our having this other, special meta-sense: the perception of our own mental activity as a phenomenon in its own right, fed back into consciousness.

No wonder it’s hard to write or think nothing. Left to its own devices, meditating or sitting in front of a keyboard, a brain is going to perceive some random activity within itself… and that’s a perception in its own right, fed back into consiousness… and that’s going to generate more activity… and… la, la, la…

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