Reply to post: Re: Playing with words in the English Language

Re: Playing with words in the English Language

I am doing brain mapping right now at the local university. Our neural structure can be amazing. For vision the entire retina is one to one mapped on the front of the occipital lobes with inversion taking place there. For language there are two main areas. Nouns including names are mapped into Brocca's area close behind the frontal lobes on the sinister (left) side of the brain. It is incredibly precise. It is like very thin layers of neural tissue and those layers are mapped according to age when language(s) are learned.

One of the mistakes most of us make is to use too much "baby language". Instead we should use the actual language with simple and very clearly spoken words. We all have the most neurons in the brain at about 3 months after birth, if not premature. From that point forward it is a matter of use it or lose it. That is called Synaptic pruning. The more new and interesting things we are exposed to from just after birth the more of those neurons we retain. It is why we will often put up a spinning toy with bright colours and similar items. Three dimensional toys are by far the best (no stupidity phones with flat interfaces).

Language is stored in the layers as time passes. The other areas are Wernicke's speech area and the posterior sinister fusiform gyrus. Wernicke's is used primarily for verbs, adverbs and similar as well as conjunctions etc. The posterior fusiform gyrus is for reading. Even tiny amounts of damage there can make it nearly impossible to read or at the best just a single character at a time.

In Brocca's area the words one learns later in life are more easily affected by even very tiny amounts of damage. The damage is often not direct but is called a disconnection syndrome. That is where the white matter (axons, the "wiring") are cut somehow. The memory is intact but access is limited.

The main thing is that brain structure is a huge number of very small entities that each have very specific functions. Also, it is analogue, not digital in nature.

When it comes to language what you learn very early is what you will know the rest of your life. Brain pruning is finished at late puberty. Learning any other language is then more difficult. I learned English and Danish at the same time. English has about 34 or so phonemes but Danish has 52. That is the largest number for Western European languages. It makes it much easier for me to learn other languages anywhere. I am multi lingual as is my mother.

There is far more I could say about all of this but it would be much better if you could somehow attend one of my courses I am planning, even one for children.... ☺