5 - Human Communication: Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Summary
In the preceding chapters I outlined the idea that various three-component perceptual processes underlie some of the most interesting behaviors undertaken by human beings. Music and visual art are quintessentially human activities, and the triadic nature of the perception of harmony and pictorial depth is relatively straightforward. Although “skilled motor activity” is not a human uniqueness, several aspects of tool use demonstrate the importance of, to begin with, triadic visual perception, as reviewed in Chapter 4. Moreover, the subsequent emergence of handedness, cerebral laterality and toolmaking is intimately connected to the evolution of trimodal sensory neocortex, where the coordinated use of visual, tactile and auditory information underlies the skills of toolmaking.
In comparison with the unimodality of auditory music and the unimodality of visual art, the trimodal nature of the perception necessary for toolmaking makes the entire triadic argument more complex, but it is important to keep in mind that, once sensory phenomena have been converted into nerve impulses, there truly are no more sights, sounds and touches! Whatever the nature of the “higher-level” coordination of such sensations, they end up being digitized into the language of neurons … and the essential question concerns only the number of independent streams of information. So, although language is essentially an auditory skill, it is at the rather abstract level of “independent streams of information” that we must address questions concerning the cognition underlying language capabilities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Harmony, Perspective, and Triadic Cognition , pp. 216 - 254Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011