Mechanisms of Originality: Comparing Language Systems to Neural Systems :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Mechanisms of Originality: Comparing Language Systems to Neural Systems "When I was a boy I felt that the role of rhyme in poetry was to compel one to find the unobvious because of the necessity of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel assocations and almost guarantees deviations from routine chains or trains of thought. It becomes paradoxically a sort of automatic mechanism of orginality ..." ---- Stan Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician In a previous paper, I began exploring a comparison between language and DNA based on their function as information systems. In this paper, I would like to consider some of these issues further, as well as extend the comparison to the nervous system. The conversation was structured around the five "essential characteristics" of DNA; these are stability; variation; reproducibility; the ability to store information; and the ability for that information to be read. For this paper, I'd like to focus just on the criteria of stability by looking at what some researchers are saying now about the structure of language and the structure of the nervous system. One complication which is intrinsic to any kind of discussion like this is that the parallel lines one tries to pursue are only parallel in places; eventually they do overlap, and often they are indistinguishably tangled. The most obvious and forbidding example is that language is itself a product of neural function; thus, when one gets to the root of how sentences are understood and generated, the comparison to neural activity becomes moot, because in fact it IS neural activity (highly specialized and probably not easily generalized neural activity at that). Similarly, any discussion about the origins of language is also by definition a discussion of the evolution of the brain. I mention this only because I think that while the risk of chasing ones own tail is very real, the observations which arise from a consideration of the places where the two structures parallel one another (in an extremely basic way) are sufficiently interesting to warrant the attention. The simplest way to think about structure is in terms of building blocks or discrete units. With language, the most basic units are either letters or phonemes (9); the next level of organization is words; following words are series of words (which in Western languages are usually sentences). Interestingly, meaning is not acquired until letters have made the leap to words.