amudu: Language can also be present in the absence of sound, What happens to the electric waves in our brain

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Language can also be present in the absence of sound, What happens to the electric waves in our brain

What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound?

Language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read or when we use words while thinking.

"The very fact that the majority of human communication takes place via waves may not be a casual fact; after all, waves constitute the purest system of communication since they transfer information from one entity to the other without changing the structure or the composition of the two entities. They travel through us and leave us intact, but they allow us to interpret the message borne by their momentary vibrations, provided that we have the key to decode it. It is not at all accidental that the term information is derived from the Latin root forma (shape): To inform is to share a shape.

In his “Philosophical Investigations,” Ludwig Wittgenstein asked: “Is it conceivable that people should never speak an audible language, but should nevertheless talk to themselves inwardly, in the imagination?” "

Electrodes on the brain have been used to translate brainwaves into words spoken by a computer – which could be useful in the future to help people who have lost the ability to speak.

When you speak, your brain sends signals from the motor cortex to the muscles in your jaw, lips and larynx to coordinate their movement and produce a sound.

“The brain translates the thoughts of what you want to say into movements of the vocal tract, and that’s what we’re trying to decode,” says Edward Chang at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). He and his colleagues created a two-step process to decode those thoughts using an array of electrodes surgically placed onto the part of the brain that controls movement, and a computer simulation of a vocal tract to reproduce the sounds of speech.