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

Mechanisms of Originality Comparing Language Systems to queasy SystemsWhen I was a boy I felt that the role of hoar in poetry was to compel one to find the unobvious because of the requisite of finding a word which rhymes. This forces novel assocations and al well-nigh guarantees deviations from routine durance 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 amid nomenclature and DNA based on their function as tuition systems. In this paper, I would ilk to consider some of these issues further, as healthy as extend the comparison to the nervous system. The conversation was structured slightly 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, Id like to focus just on the criteria of stability by lo oking 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 every loving of discussion like this is that the parallel lines one tries to pursue are unless parallel in places eventually they do overlap, and often they are indistinguishably tangled. The almost obvious and forbidding example is that language is itself a product of nervous function thus, when one gets to the root of how sentences are understood and generated, the comparison to aflutter activity becomes moot, because in fact it IS neural activity (highly specialized and belike 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 specify 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 s tructures parallel one another (in an extremely base 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 earn or phonemes (9) the next train of organization is address 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.