COGNITIVE ABILITIES, ABSTRACT THINKING AND HUMAN LANGUAGE. Some general consideration

Arrival is a 2016 movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and one of my favourite sci-fi dramas ever (sorry not sorry, Solaris by Tarkovsky). I had read the short story upon which it's based, "Story Of Your Life" by Ted Chiang – just a week after seeing the film at the cinema.

It is the story of a linguist and a physicist recruited by the US government to crack a cryptic written language used by aliens who have landed on Earth: a collection of circular jagged logogram-like symbols whose interesting idea would hint at the debated theory of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (also known as Whorfianism), which is generally refuted by most linguists and postulates that languages influence our world perception, cognition and our thinking, so individuals belonging to different language communities should experience reality in a different way.

The circularity of logogram-like symbols would reflect the aliens' worldview and how they categorise the time.

?In the short story by Ted Chiang, the features in the aliens' language would allude to the embodied cognition. It means that the physical body and the representation of it have a deep role in cognitive processing and there is a dynamic interaction amongst the body itself, our mind, our experience, our culture and, of course, our language.

In considering the role memory plays in language acquisition over the lifespan, here is my point of view, as far as I am concerned as a psycholinguist.

Firstly, I would like to start by saying that all the curious, weird, creepy or cute creatures we come across in films and novels always constitute a psychological projection of environmental elements, that is, a cognitive representation of them and the instincts/impulses/feelings human beings take inspiration from (without being conscious of this most of the time). When described by humans, aliens, with their look and their languages, are no exception at all.

Biological approaches often underline a phylogenetic continuity of cognitive abilities between us and other terrestrial species, in particular primates with whom we share many traits. Evolution is yet a very slow process and there would be no chance for survival on Earth if organisms were not able to learn strategies to escape from danger, defend territory, increase the opportunity to find food resources and reproduce.

Secondly, according to an evolutionary psychological view, specific characteristics of human memory and related cognitive abilities like language come out along with the appearance of symbolic thought, thus we would say language, seen as a complex cognitive phenomenon, usually develops later on. It would be unique to our species, but actually we should take into account that certain members of the class Mammalia such as elephants, dolphins and apes seem to exhibit a wide variety of behaviours and, on many occasions, even death-related rituals. This would suggest they might possess a sort of basic abstract thinking and are likely to understand the concept of life when their conspecifics pass away.

Last but not least, we cannot rule out that for thousands or even billions of years ahead, environmental conditions might lead other species' brain architecture to become as developed or even more so than our own, with primary neurological regions capable of comprehending and processing an enormous flow of information and therefore elaborate speech, and maybe also a written language of logogram-like scripts.

Having said this, such a topic may sound more fascinating if we bear in mind that similar evolutionary paths might occur on other planets too. Still, aliens' cerebral anatomy may distantly differ from ours due to characteristics of their endocranial asymmetry.

Moreover, a different memory-based cognitive framework might even correspond to aneural types of biochemical cognitive-related structures and habituation mechanisms underlying learning processes. In the sense that non-terrestrial organisms' language-related areas could be associated with peculiar physiological functions (e.g. telepathy), as well as to a kind of language that we, as 21st century citizens, shall never be able to comprehend by using neither our sense organs nor our current technology.

Written by Marco Mazzanti

Linguist. Macroareas of interest: Russian language, linguistics and psycholinguistics

FURTHER READING

Jaak Panksepp & Lucy Biven, The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions, New York ; London : W.W. Norton & Company, cop. 2012

John P.J. Pinel & Steven J. Barnes, Biopsychology, Harlow : Pearson, 2018

ELECTRONIC RESOURCES

The Royal Society Publishing:

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0158

Stanford Encyclopedia of Phylosophy:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/#:~:text=Cognition%20is%20embodied%20when%20it,constitutive%20role%20in%20cognitive%20processing.