Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Thought Experiment - Language of Thoughts


I was once on an unplanned expedition in a forest-cum-park with my sister and we chose the off-road trails to walk upon. Contrary to my expectations, it was much more wildlife populated than I thought it would be. Among other animals, we came across a path where some 10-15 Langurs were sitting. We were terrified (Ok fine, I was terrified, my sis wanted to take a pic and I wanted a stick) but there was amazing stillness and calmness amongst them. They looked at us and hardly had any reaction. One of them had its long tail resting on the path and it gracefully curled it back for us to pass. Their stillness amazed me. They had something very core to nature, which I certainly didn’t. To me, they seemed more like a group of monks sitting and meditating, which as I later pondered, might not be actually so different.

I think animals have the extraordinary ability to sit for hours at peace doing nothing, just occasionally responding to the external stimuli of the environment, that too in proportionate intensity. What makes this ability extraordinary is perhaps its absence/scarcity in humans. We have the special ‘gift’ of creating our own internal stimuli, effectively creating a pseudo-internal environment in additional to the actual external physical environment. We are always thinking. It like a voice in our mind. Eckhart Tolle has crisply defined the same in his book ‘The Power of Now’:

“..virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologs or dialogues. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes and so on.”

And paradoxically, it’s the effortless/involuntary thinking that is the problem contrary to the thinking that required effort (doing math or coding). Daniel Kahneman is a researcher & psychologist whose work is considered as a major pillar in understanding the psychology of human mind. In his work ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, he also has segregated the thinking process of humans into broad but distinct two categories. One part ‘fast thinking’, which is effortless, involuntary and extremely quick (flight/fight/freeze response). Another part is ‘slow thinking’, which requires a lot of effort and deliberation and is exhaustive (solving math).

The question for the thought experiment is – Is knowledge of language a root-cause for involuntary thinking or ‘voice in head’?

I am pretty sure that all of us think in sentences/words in some particular languages, perhaps mostly in our mother tongue and a few more languages. I wonder at what age babies/children start having the internal chatter or voice. If we knew no language, how would our thinking get impacted? Would we still have the voice in the head or the chatter? Perhaps some research on babies and nomadic tribes who have not developed language as a mode of communication might help to answer some of these questions.

One argument against it can be in terms of emotions. Even if there is no language, emotions will exist, they are kind of universal and innate. Happiness, sadness, jealousy, regret, fear etc., all would still exist. But mind’s thoughts/commentary is quite discreet from emotions. For example, take this very moment. There is a lot going on in mind, much more than just any emotion of feeling of happiness or sadness, rather in all probability it might be more close to a neutral emotion. Emotions come in peaks and subside, the rest of the time we have the commentary. So how would a nomad’s or infant’s mind activity differ from us, considering they can’t have the internal commentary?

We can try to compare an infant’s mind with an adult’s mind using MRI/c-MRI/some-other scans to show which areas of the brain are active/more active. But there might be a lot of factors which might make this comparison incorrect. It’s a newborn child after all, with the physical parts of body and mind still growing, so the comparison seems incorrect. The scanning is normally done in response to some external stimulus. Some images are shown, questions are asked etc. But we are interested in brain activity which is caused by the internally generated stimulus. First, it might require a non-intrusive apparatus of measuring as the mere presence in a specialized room/equipment will act as an external stimulus. Second, assuming we do are successfully able to measure the brain activities in non-intrusive ways, the end result will be in form of active and non-active areas of the brain shown on a computer screen. In all probability, the study might conclude that the brain of the infant is less active compared to an adult. How does this help in answering our original question?

Another extremely popular way of measuring is via questionnaires. Give a set of carefully designed questions (kind of like psychometrics) to a person and then evaluate his thinking based on the answers provided. In addition to the uselessness of this approach in our experiment (subject doesn’t know the language), I have never been a big believer in this approach. And there is a growing set of researchers who also think the same. This approach is fundamentally flawed according to me, and as indeed it led to increased type-1 error in US school healthcare programs and wrongly tagging more and younger children with ADTs and Depression, starting the use of Prozac and allied products in disproportionately high ratios. Measuring something which is fundamentally unmeasurable is OK, we need that. But putting too much faith in those measurements and devising interventions based on those numbers has butterfly effects. And since that happens in long terms, it gets ignored by the immediate gains it is able to showcase. To understand that the results from actual physical research can be so wrong, consider the peanut allergy study fiasco in the US. And this is just one of the early intervention which is being recalled/modified. Now consider the implications of research based on no physical data but just some questions answered by the patients. How can we say, the data which gets collected is an observation or an opinion?

Perhaps I diverted from the main question too much. But it was able to demonstrate the potential of the question. ADD, PTSD, Depression – these are problems of the mind. Most of our medical research is focused on suppression the regions of the brains which cause these problems in the patients. Tell me if you see it as a positive approach at all.

Coming back to the forest and Langurs, I don’t think they have the privilege of thinking in a language like we do. But they also perhaps don’t have the compulsive internal chattering like we do. And we can’t unlearn language. Neither should we. Once we have started identifying the ink marks as alphabets and words, we can’t see them as inky spots anymore. We cannot and must not go backward. But the artificial stress and mind-chatter which comes along with it should be acknowledged and understood in its unnatural nature for living beings. I read somewhere that no other living creature on planet earth feels negativity except humans (I don’t have data to back it, can be researched).

All forms of meditation basically attack this mind-chatter, trying to reduce it having the ultimate aim for one being able to be still in mind. Perhaps the animal kingdom is already there. Sun is a definitive source of physical life on earth and will be a definitive source of its destruction as well. So can be a language for mental life.

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