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

Mechanisms of Originality Comparing Language Systems to Neural SystemsWhen I was a boy I felt that the role of rhyme in numbers was to compel whiz 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 deoxyribonucleic acid based on their function as information systems. In this paper, I would desire to consider some of these issues further, as well as add the comparison to the anxious system. The conversation was structured around the five ingrained characteristics of DNA these ar stability variation reproducibility the ability to pedigree information and the ability for that information to be read. For this paper, Id like to focus upright on the criteria of stability by looking at what some researchers atomic number 18 saying now more or less 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 ghastly 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 developing of the brain. I mention this only because I think that while the gamble of chasing ones own tail is very real, the observations which arise from a consideration of th e places where the deuce 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 address following words are series of words (which in westward languages are usually sentences). Interestingly, meaning is not acquired until letters have do the leap to words.