How the Limits of the Mind Shape Human Language (How I Went From Consonants to Rat Brains) - Fabricio

How the Mind Corresponds to Language
     We often see language as a creation of mankind that has seemed fixed overtime. One language is created, then another, and another, and another. People think that they were just created rapidly and easily. However this simply is not the case. Languages, like us, evolve. In the article How the Limits of the Mind Shape Human Language, the author brings up study made by psycholinguists that concluded that children can easily learn words that have fixed consonants and changing vowels, but they have a hard time learning words that have fixed vowels and changing consonants. Using this data that they collected, they found out that every language in the world works in the way of fixed consonants. This, frankly, blew my mind since it proved that languages evolve with humans. When our subconscious found out that it was easier for you to learn with fixed consonants, we just went along with it, and that is reflected in the languages that we have today. An example shown by the author was Hebrew, which is the language that uses this the most. In English, we use this in words such as ring in which the "i" is changed depending on the verb tense. The reason behind why we prefer fixed consonants over fixed vowels is something the author doesn't mention, but what from what I read I can deduct that it is probably because there are less vowel sounds than consonant sounds.

     One small quirk that I found a bit amusing in the article was that rats were able to learn both words of fixed consonants and fixed vowels, which comes to show that rats may be smarter than children. How they made the rat learn the words and how they proved it, I do not know. In all seriousness though, research has concluded that a rat's brain is quite similar to our brains. Deducting certain aspects such as neuron count, which differs from 600 million to 100 Billion (fun fact: a group of scientists were able to construct a slice of a rats brain into a computer, containing 31,000 neurons. If you want to know more about rat brains, visit this article: https://www.livescience.com/52453-rat-brain-reconstructed-in-computer.html), they proved that when our brain reacts to something, a rat's brain does it in the exact same way, by sending a signal a part in the center of the brain. 

Articles Visited
  1. https://theconversation.com/how-the-limits-of-the-mind-shape-human-language-122596
  2. https://news.psu.edu/story/270321/2013/03/26/research/rats-brains-are-more-ours-scientists-previously-thought
  3. https://www.livescience.com/52453-rat-brain-reconstructed-in-computer.html


     

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