Chapter 22 scrambler in the brain

Linguists have had a lot of debate on theoretical issues.They should also argue.It is conceivable that scholars who spend their lives trying to understand the mysteries of language, that is, to understand human beings as a whole, will often disagree with each other, and even become irritable and impatient with each other.More worryingly, they argue more than their counterparts in other disciplines. For linguists, especially those who act as philosophers, there is a difficult technical problem: the only tool with which they have to do their research is the very system they wish to study.This made them especially vulnerable to the kind of danger that physicists have remembered since Heisenberg.The closer the linguist gets to the heart of the problem, the more he has to look at that mechanism in terms of the mechanism at hand; no wonder it suddenly twitches, trembles, and flees in a cloud of smoke just when the answer seems within reach.

You can see this phenomenon in some books about languages.This is especially the case with books written by men who are not themselves trained linguists and therefore cautious.These writers come in from the outside to explain something to the public, and they always reach a point at which the article itself suddenly becomes utterly incomprehensible, disintegrates into meaningless nonsense.Such things usually occur after the points of linguistic logic have been clarified, the basic idea of ​​switching grammars has been explained, the question of whether some languages ​​are more "complex" than others has been addressed, and the mathematical techniques for deep analysis of sentences have been sufficiently developed. Happened after the description.Equipped with so much powerful and useful information, the non-expert then marches forward, unaware that he is now crossing a frontier into an unknown, perhaps unknowable land, before disappearing from view.

I'm not quite sure what happened at this stage of the communication.I like to believe that something is wrong with the transmission mechanism of the information, and once transmitted, it is nonsense to the reader.But I could be wrong on this point.Maybe it was flat, clear prose after all, and the problem was on my end, in my head.Maybe I don't have the receptors for this kind of speech. Or, I changed the message as it came in without realizing I was doing it. On other occasions, on matters that do not involve linguistics, I have doubts that it may not be useful to ask.A patient and gentle mathematician once explained Gödel's theorem to me.Just as I was about to accept it whole, nodding my head, admiring the beauty of the whole thought, I heard a switch snap in the quicksilver wall, and the thought suddenly became nonsense in my head.I've had similar experiences listening to electronic music, and worse ones reading poetics.It wasn't like erasing data or losing interest or distracted, it wasn't.At that time, if my brain was abnormal, it was more vigilant, eagerly grasping every sentence, but then, the switch was turned off all of a sudden, and what came in turned into an unfathomable code.

This gives me a way of saying something about the brain, at least mine.I believe that somewhere in the brain, probably in the right hemisphere, there is some kind of center that has a sort of scrambling effect, similar to those electronic devices that are installed on the phones of political dignitaries, that instantly converts all classified sentences into nonsense noise. Perhaps, where language is involved, secrecy is required.It is conceivable that if we had some kind of comprehensive, conscious understanding of what we were doing, our language would all be reduced to an endless babble, or even a dead silence.To get rid of the most austere sentences, the lovely Wallace S Evens kind of sentences, like, "The man replied, that's how it was, changed on the blue guitar," is mentally inappropriate. possible.To do this, monitor all the muscles, keep an eye on the syntax, watch out for the semantic catastrophe caused by the slightest change in word order, pay attention to the tone of voice, the expression on the corners of the eyes and mouth, and most of all worry about saying something meaningless. It's much harder to do that than to be in charge of your own breathing, being told to use your conscious mind to take care of that function, throbbing endlessly.

The scrambler in the brain would be a protective device, keeping the delicate center of the language machinery free from tinkering and tinkering, shielding the mind from information it doesn't want to be involved with. You might think that if there is a neuron scrambler in one part of the brain, then there should be some sort of systematically installed anti-scrambling center.Somewhere in the other frontal lobe, the disintegrated information can be restored to an almost original order.I doubt it.I admit that it is unlikely that the brain would risk flooding itself with completely meaningless noise, but I think it is more likely that really deep and dangerously scrambled ideas like the true nature of speech are consolidated into unrecognizable pleasurable experiences, such as small talk or music or sleep.There are people who, with great agility, can catch fleeting thoughts and catch them before they disappear into the scrambler.Poets like Stevens have these qualities.But for most of us, things are done automatically, out of sight, and I guess there's nothing wrong with that.