Why Language Is All Thumbs

[zonsb]

Very interesting excerpt that has some scientific research and analysis supporting what the title suggests. Click the source link to read the rest. The attribute described/explained likely predates the bicameral mind by about a million years.

Source: Why Language Is All Thumbs

Quote:Why Language Is All Thumbs
March 14, 2008 by Chip Walter

Toolmaking not only resulted in tools, but also the reconfiguration of our brains so they comprehended the world on the same terms as our toolmaking hands interacted with it. With mirror neurons, something entirely new entered the world: memes–a far more effective and speedy method for pooling knowledge and passing it around than the old genetic way.

Excerpted from Thumbs, Toes, and Tears, Walker & Co. 2006. Published on KurzweilAI.net March 4, 2008. Reprinted with permission.

Bold and underline emphasis mine.

Excerpt is in the footnotes and is the Forward, written by Ray Kurzweil, for the book, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears.

Quote:And of course we have that all-important opposable appendage (the thumb) that enabled us to take the “what if ” experiments in our minds and actually try them out. We were able to imagine tying a stone to a stick and then actually build the tool. One might point out that a chimpanzee’s hand looks similar to ours. But the devil is in the details, and a chimp’s hand is just not designed well enough to fashion tools. Some people maintain that chimpanzees are also a tool-making species, and, yes, a chimp can grab a stick and poke it into the ground, but its ability to do this is too clumsy to enable a sustainable process of technology improvement. The pivot points in a chimp’s hands are not in the right place for a power grip or for fine motor coordination. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, were capable of carefully winding the twine around the stone and the stick to create a useful tool, and then using that tool to create the next generation of tools.

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[eye2i2hear]

(11-17-2011 02:36 PM)zonsb Wrote:  

Quote:And of course we have that all-important opposable appendage (the thumb) that enabled us to take the “what if ” experiments in our minds and actually try them out. We were able to imagine tying a stone to a stick and then actually build the tool. One might point out that a chimpanzee’s hand looks similar to ours. But the devil is in the details, and a chimp’s hand is just not designed well enough to fashion tools.

[thinking out loud while typing]

There's something about this that seems a bit cart before the horse, or maybe cart beside the horse --at least from the context as an excerpt. First, what of the plethora of products that are way beyond the capability of thumbed-hands? Weren't those "'what if' experiments in our minds" as well? And as folks got around to them, perhaps they'd have gotten to such equally overcoming having non-opposing appendages? Which quickly winds back to my second and last bit: it seems less significant that it's thumbed hands capability and more significantly intelligence+appendages. I'm recalling here the amazing videos made of folks with handicaps (the equivalents of "thumb-less-ness"?) and the amazing feats they achieve.
e.g.




[not to even get into the use of the term "design" (rather than, say, evolved) and the likes of hands...]

[/thinking while typing]

[zonsb]

(11-17-2011 03:39 PM)eye2i2hear Wrote:  There's something about this that seems a bit cart before the horse, or maybe cart beside the horse --at least from the context as an excerpt.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-language-is-all-thumbs Wrote:It was while they were performing this routine experiment that they noticed something odd. When a macaque watched a researcher’s hand pick up an object and bring it close to his mouth, the sensors connected to the monkey’s brain indicated that neurons in its F5 region were firing. They didn’t activate when the monkeys simply saw the objects sitting there, only—and this was what was so unusual—when the monkey watched researchers pick them up, or when the monkeys themselves picked them up.

The implications of this are enormous. If the same neurons were firing in the monkeys’ brains when they watched the action, it meant they were playing out what they were seeing before them inside their own brain— their mind’s eye—just as if they were doing it themselves. They were mentally “mirroring” the physical action. You could also say that in a rudimentary way they were imagining they were doing the action; reliving, neuron by firing neuron, the experiences of others—in effect, putting themselves in the shoes of the researchers they were watching. They were experiencing a form of empathy that itself required a kind of imagination.

The ignition of F5 neurons made these seemingly simple gestures and maneuvers a form of communication far more powerful than any hoot, grunt, or howl. After all, if the monkey was mentally picturing the actions of the researcher, it was also quite possibly remembering and learning it. Monkey see, monkey do.

If you look hard, you can catch glimpses of early conscious communication on all sides of this. Imagine two habiline creatures—a parent and a child—sitting in their small, lakeside camp two million years ago, smoke billowing from the enormous volcanoes at their backs. They have roughly twice the neuronal wetware of the average chimp today (and certainly more than a macaque monkey), so their intelligence is far from trivial. On the other hand, they still can’t speak, so their ability to share what is on their minds is limited, even though they undoubtedly have far more to communicate than any of the other animals around them.

Now imagine the parent is making a simple tool, like those that Nicholas Toth and his colleagues experimented with. The child watches intently. Simply by observing, the same neurons—her mirror neurons—are firing in her head that are firing in her parent’s. And so when she attempts to repeat the action she has been watching, she can call upon those fired neurons to guide her hands to do something she has never actually done before but has imagined doing.

For his part, when the parent strikes flint against the rock, he is silently talking to the watching child. He is saying, with his hands, “This is how you make this thing. You hold this large rock like this and strike it with this small rock just so.” You can see him holding up the sharp sliver of flint that the blow has created. “See, now you have a knife.” And then next, he may carve the skin off a carcass, taking the “conversation” in a new direction.

The entire time the child is “listening.” Neither parent nor daughter have any language; not a single word they can exchange, not even a concept of words, only the looks on their faces, the expressions in their eyes, the gestures they make with their hands as they manipulate and exchange the rocks and flint. But a lot of information is traveling back and forth between their two minds. In a very real sense they are conversing.

This apparent connection between conversation and manipulation is more than metaphorical. More recent research, built on Gallese’s and Rizzolatti’s original discovery, has revealed that the F5 region in macaque monkeys is an analog for areas in our own brain essential for generating human language and speech (not necessarily the same thing, as we shall see)....

Bold emphasis mine.

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