Thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Thoughts’

I always try to catch a few science sessions at MWF. I didn’t study science beyond Year 10 (somewhat regrettably) besides a bit of psych at Uni, so it’s a special, pleasurable challenge to wrap my head around the concepts and questions raised in sessions such as this afternoon’s Thoughts on Thoughts.

Chris Krishna-Pillay was our engaging and funny host, chatting to cognitive neuroscientist and raconteur Michael Corballis. It was a free session in the Yarra Room and the audience was crowded in, standing and sitting on the floor all the way up to the back. Corballis explained that he came to write ‘popular science’ because in his many years of lecturing he often encountered students who, simply, didn’t understand many of the concepts in the (academic) language they encountered. With the pop science, you have to ‘let loose a little bit’, he said. His latest book Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain features short, sharp chapters that began as magazine articles.

Corballis spoke a lot about language, about what we don’t know (and about what he’s trying to find out) as much as what we do. He believes that language capacities in human beings have evolved incrementally (not with a ‘big bang’, as Noam Chomsky has suggested). He supports the theory that language is related to, and has evolved from, gestures as opposed to sounds and calls, eg. an intentional gesture of an ape grooming another, as opposed to their more emotive and involuntary calls. The gesture theory is supported by the fact that sign language, in MRI scans, lights up the same area of the brain, in the hippocampus, as does speech language. Corballis’ research takes him many places—from the now sequenced Neanderthal genome, to fossil evidence, to studying chimps and bonobos.

Other animals do communicate, but language is separate from the communication of simple concepts. For example, we can’t know, and it’s improbable, that a dolphin or a dog or other intelligent mammal can express ideas of what happened yesterday, or what is going to happen tomorrow. This is part of what makes a language, the discussion of what’s happening, what has happened and what will.

Memory is therefore intertwined with language: ‘the ability to communicate about the non-present’, as Corballis put it, the ‘means of describing things that are not in front of you’. Humans have what he called ‘episodic memory’. Whether animals actually remember an ‘episode’, or whether they are simply ‘conditioned’ to act a certain way is not something that can currently be proved. For example, if a dog buries a bone, and he goes to retrieve it, is he specifically recalling the ‘episode’ of burying it, or is it more instinct, sense, and smell that come in? It is an absolutely fascinating question. And I like that sessions like this place those kinds of (possibly unanswerable) questions in your mind.

To go a step further, Corballis discussed the fact that human beings are capable of having ‘thoughts about thoughts’, and about other people’s thoughts, but we cannot know if other intelligent species have this level of awareness. It is probable that we are unique in this aspect, and that it is tied in with our capacities for language and episodic memory.

We are limited with what we can know about memory, too, because animals and young children (before language) cannot tell us what they remember. Language is inadequate, in many respects, Corballis explained, because there’s more to memory than we’re able to get from language, such as the specificities of sense memory (though of course some of the greatest writers do try, and manage to spark our recognition).

At one point, a question was raised about dreaming. We still do not know the exact purpose of (human) dreaming, though there are many theories. Corballis said that animal dreaming is pretty much to do with the consolidation of memory (ie. a rat coding the maze). He says that human dreams are undeniably strange! Our own dreaming and mental time travels ‘help us frame futures and even our sense of self’, he said, but there will always be a ‘random component’. Dreams can be like Rorschach tests, Corballis said, we can read into them what we will.

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Michael Corballis will also be appearing on The Story of Science panel, tomorrow (Saturday 1 September) with  Margaret Wertheim, Peter Doherty, Elizabeth Finkel and Leah Kaminsky. His most recent books are Pieces of Mind: 21 Short Walks Around the Human Brain and The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilisation.

See some of my previous vaguely sciencey MWF posts:
Lab coats, lit journals & marrying frogs (2011)
Birds of a feather (2011)
Complex life (and our plastic brains), a beautiful fluke (2010)