Language, consciousness

• Evolution of language

  • communication, cooperation, coordination, cultural = adaptive benefits
  • physiological requirements
  • requires wide range of sounds
  • adaptions to larynx
  • also requires social adaptions
  • language depends on conversation
  • language needs to be learned
• Language in brain

  • language skills are in left hemisphere
  • unless ur left-handed
  • unless ur bilingual from young age
  • consists of 2 skills:
  • production (speaking)
  • relies on motor skills
  • broca's area
  • comprehension (listening)
  • relies on auditory skills
  • wernicke's area

  
• Broca's area

  • damage causes (non-fluent) aphasia
  • inability to speak, incorrect stress patterns, lack of grammar
  • not correlated to motoric problems
  • can be severe
  • also some deficits in comprehension
  • speech actually activates most of the cortex, not jus broca's area
• Wernicke's area

  • damage causes (fluent) aphasia
  • inability to comprehend language, whether heard/read/seen
  • trouble remembering or recognizing names of objects
  • can speak with normal grammar but does not make sense
• Consciousness

  • "Cogito ergo sum"
  • Descartes sugguested that only internal subjective experience is direct; everything else is inferred
  • we know that we r conscious
  • we infer that other r also conscious
  • also proposed dualism; mental states r not physical
• Flavours of consciousness

  • there may be several types of consciousness:
  • perceptual consciousness
  • detecting things in the world and constructing a model of the world from them
  • most ppl don't consider this enough
  • phenomenal consciousness (sentience)
  • what it feels like to be conscious
  • having valence internal states
  • access consciousness
  • availability of info for use in cognition
• What is consciousness?

  • we recognize the subjective experience of phenomenal consciousness
  • being conscious involves feeling like something. this experience is called qualia (singular; quale)
• What does consciousness do?

  • we can do a lot of things without consciousness
  • sleepwalking
  • anything robots can do
  • parietal cortex activates before we are aware of having decided on an action
  • is consciousness an epiphenomenon?
  • a side effect of varying complex systems
• Who is conscious?

  • we assume that beings that behave as we do when conscious are also conscious
  • we can also ask if ppl are conscious of something
  • binocular rivalry
  • requires language
  • ppl often give wrong answers
• Neural correlates of consciousness 


  -Global workspace theory

  • phenomenally conscious info is spread across cortex
  • integrates perceptual, affective, memory
  • broadcast by the prefrontal cortex

  -gamma waves

  • synchronize firing across large regions of cortex like theta in the hippocampi
  • possibly involved in the binding problem
  • ensuring all stimuli are perceived as one scene
  • maybe help to broadcast some representations

  -P300

  • EEG signal correlated with decision-making
  • exists in some non-conscious patients