Welcome (back) to Brain Blast, your newsletter connection to the worlds of brain science, cognition, neuroscience, and psychology. In this issue we’ll focus on the role that language plays in abstract representation, both in how it frees the brain to think in creative and complex ways and in how it quietly constrains our brains and dictates our actions.
Thinking in the Abstract
Abstract representation, in a sense, is what makes us human (unless, I guess, you are reading this as an elephant). It allows us to encapsulate ideas, the essence of “things”, into nuggets of conceptual thought and then operate on them in our minds, free of physical limitations and constraints. Fundamentally, the entirety of brain’s physical and functional structure is built on the concept of abstraction – the building increasingly complex representations that are progressively less reliant on tangible features. An easy, if somewhat reversed, way to think about abstraction is to think about how a visual scene can be broken down into component parts. As I look around my living room (don’t judge me, it’s hot in my office upstairs), I can break the scene down into different areas, like the reading corner versus the sitting area. Within those areas, there are distinct objects, like an individual couch or a coffee table. Each object, in turn, is made of individual lines and angles and colors. Abstraction in this way allows us to group individual aspects of our world into meaningful units that we can then think of as a whole.
Language allows for a particularly powerful type of abstraction. Words are an arbitrary set of line markings that we link to semantic meaning, and can then linked to each other through grammar and syntax. This system has two critically unique features. First, words allow us to represent concepts in our lives that are not currently present or even may have no physical construct in the world around us. On Tuesday, when I wrote about elephants, you didn’t need a picture to conjure up an image in your head, and when I brought up “PTSD” you, if nothing else, knew it was some sort of clinical disorder that needs treating. That’s pretty remarkable if you think about it; the letters E, L, P, H, A, N, T, S, and D and their lowercase counterparts are, at their core, just lines on your screen, yet in the order, combination, and context I have presented them, I can evoke the content of an entire newsletter (you HAVE read the last newsletter, right?).
The second unique feature language gives to abstraction is the ability to relate these word concepts to one another in different ways through grammar and syntax. As in the title, “I speak, therefore I am” (no relation to the book, I have not read it so don’t ask my opinion) relates multiple concepts – myself, speaking, being – to imply a causality between the act of speaking and one’s own existence. Grammar structures can be used to relate and explore concepts that have no basis in reality, so I can say something nonsensical like “the elephant swam through the purple, hazy sky” and you can know that’s not a thing that would happen in real life while still being able to imagine some visualization of an elephant somehow swimming through a very strange-looking atmosphere. Together with an essentially unbounded vocabulary, this gives us an incredibly flexible and powerful system of creativity, reasoning, feeling, and decision-making.
There is No Spoon
Baba Is You, near and dear to my heart and the subject of a recent post that made its way into my feed, is puzzle game whose mechanic features a fascinating use of both language and abstract representation. At face value, the game gives you a character, the titular “Baba”, that you move around to push blocks of text into combinations in order to get a flag to a goal. The text blocks form rulesets through grammar connectors; for example, as the game title suggests, the ruleset “[Baba][is][You]” consists of two objects, Baba and you (the controller), and gives you control over Baba’s character – but only as long as the ruleset stays intact. To successfully complete each level, you must manipulate the rules by pushing the text blocks around and completing the win condition, typically some form of reaching a flag.
In level 1 of Baba is You, the player finds themselves controlling Baba, able to move around a walled garden, a ruleset of [Wall][is][Stop] next to them, and the flag and the text blocks [Flag], [is], and [Win] on the other side of the wall. It’s a simple enough job to move the [Stop] block away from the ruleset, allowing Baba to cross the wall and create the "[Flag][is][Win]” condition to win the level. You know something funky is going on in level 2, which has the exact same setup and solution, but the wall has been replaced with flags (and now [Flag][is][Stop]), Baba has been replaced with a single piece of wall (and [Wall][is][You]), and the word [Baba] has replaced the word [Flag] with no actual Baba to be found. But the first time you really break your brain is on level 6, where you (as Baba) are stuck in a walled garden and the winning flag is behind a line of skulls with the rule [Skull][is][Defeat]. You can break the [Wall][is][Stop] rule, but the [Skull][is][Defeat] rule is irrevocably locked behind a line of rocks, and Baba touching a skull ends the level immediately. To win, you must turn yourself into the wall, then run yourself into the flag as pieces of your wall self are consumed into oblivion as they collide with skulls on each movement step. (Alternatively, there is also the solution of turning the wall into blocks of Babas, which is equally valid and hilariously adorable.)
The thing that makes Baba is You’s puzzles so mindbending is the exact same reason we can find solutions to them in the first place. Every object has an associated text block, and the flexible rulesetting allows you to combine different elements in almost limitless fashion. Even the text blocks themselves are also pushable objects – in one solution, I had to use random bits of text to fill holes in the ground so I could walk through a hallway to the flag. The game designers use these features in incredibly clever ways, which require you to overcome preexisting notions of how objects work and relate to each other and to think outside the (sometimes physical) box. I will admit that writing this post has taken me longer than expected in no small part because I picked the game back up, and I had forgotten just how insanely complex it gets (as of time of writing, I’ve completed just 60 of the game’s 231 levels, and am thoroughly stuck). The wildest part is that Baba is You’s grammar and vocabulary are infinitesimal in comparison with full human languages, hinting at just how powerful the language system really can be.
Human Nature
Our language system is, by all known metrics, unique to humans, and is critical to the human experience. This latter truth is no more keenly felt than when we hear the tragic stories of “feral children” – children who, through whatever unfortunate circumstance, are deprived of human interaction for their early formative years. There is what’s called the “critical period hypothesis” of language development (first hypothesized by none other than Dr. Wilder Penfield), which theorizes that language acquisition is dependent on language exposure in the first few years of life. Feral children are unfortunate case studies in the potential outcomes of missing this exposure. The Wikipedia page on feral children, particularly the “Raised in Confinement” segment, lists several illustrative examples, including the famous case of Genie, who was isolated until the age of 13 in a locked room. Genie never developed language, though she did make progress on nonverbal communication, and furthermore failed to develop social skills and was never able to care for herself. Indeed, failure to develop language is a hallmark of these cases, and seems to be a critical marker for if and the extent to which these children may recover and live a normal life. In a quote from her memoir, The Story of My Life, Helen Keller gives us a poetic glimpse into her experience of the moment she first comprehended the relationship between signed words and semantic meaning after her own period of linguistic isolation:
Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!
As language unlocks tools for creativity and imagination and, perhaps, gives us access to our humanity, it also shapes and constrains our behavior, down to our fundamental perceptions of the world. Imagine the numbers 1 through 10 placed on a line. What orientation is the line in, and what direction do the numbers go in? If your first language was English (or any language written from left to right), I’d bet money you imagined the line horizontal with 1 on the left and 10 on the right. If you grew up speaking Mandarin, though, your imaginary line was probably vertical. Interestingly, the strength of these associations is not equal, as discussed in this review article; in bilingual Mandarin/English speakers, proficiency in Mandarin is correlated with an increased tendency to “perceive” time vertically, but the opposite is not true for English proficiency and horizontal perception. This may be due to the prevalence of metaphors and idioms in Mandarin that specifically link time and verticality, where such phrases are not as commonly found in English. How we conceive of the relationship between space and time is such a fundamental part of cognitive processing, and it’s wild how much the human experience can vary based purely on which language(s) you were taught as a child.
The languages we learn not only have impacts on our perceptions of the world, but also dictates the ways we can express ourselves and interpret events around us through the vocabulary, grammar, and idioms they make available to us. You can translate “Bless their heart” into any language you want, it will never mean what it means when someone says it with a southern drawl and a raised eyebrow. Even words themselves may have no good translation in other languages; the word “hygge” has had pages of English dedicated to defining it, and yet any Dane will tell you that no one has ever really captured what it means to them. This concept is harnessed in the wonderful 2022 novel Babel by R. F. Kuang (required reading for all academics with any inkling of interest in fantasy fiction). The events of Babel revolve around a unique magic system in which silver is imbued with various powers by inscribing a phrase or concept on it in two languages; the power produced is the idea of the phrase that is “lost” in translation. For one example, the main character at one point holds a bar marked with the English word “invisible” and the Cantonese “wúxíng”, which he notes means “formless, shapeless, or incorporeal”. When the Cantonese is spoken, the lost portion, the idea of simply having no form or becoming nonphysical, allows him to hide a group of people in distress. Differences in language may even affect our actual perceptions; it is thought that ancient cultures that didn’t have a word for the color blue may not even have perceived it the way we do today.
Final Thoughts
Human language is a uniquely powerful system of symbolic representation and operation that really does make us who we are. From birth, we are finely tuned to acquire and use language in service of not just communication with others, but also complex reasoning, processing feelings and emotions, and imagining and thought-experimenting. Once we have language, we are fundamentally shaped by it, and it drives our behavior even when we might not realize it. I’ve only scratched the surface of the role language plays in our lives here, but I hope you have found it as intriguing as I do, and I look forward to exploring more with you in the future!