Mark Changizi

speaker

236 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Nov 2024

Mark Changizi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 502. Angry and Red: Color as Emotion | Mark Changizi · 28 Nov 2024 podcast

I mean, neuroscientists know that we didn't evolve, but they've named some of the areas of our brains even, you know, basically reading areas. And we know that they're not actually reading areas. So how did that happen? In fact, we read so well, it really is like an instinct. We read often more than we listen to all day long. Reading is, and we're so amazingly good at it.

Even children are great at it by four years old, and they're barely being read to. They're not having much practice compared to being spoken to. So it's almost as if it's an instinct. So how is that possible? And so what I argued 20 years ago is that over time, cultural evolution itself shaped the look of writing to look like nature.

So we already have visual systems that are incredibly good at processing natural scenes, object recognition. And so all that culture had to do was invent writing systems that looked like nature. In our case, so for example, you've got L junctions. Just whenever there's some kind of contour in the world, meaning the tip of another contour.

You've got T-junctions whenever something goes behind something. There's my contour here, goes up against this contour. Those are the two main ones. There's X-junctions, but X-junctions don't happen in a world of opaque objects. It's very rare, in fact. And then you can look at all the different kinds of junctions that have three contours. Let's say Y junctions and K junctions.

And it turns out there's 32 of these different kinds of topologically distinct junctions with three contours. And then you can ask, well, how commonly do these things happen in natural scenes of just opaque objects? Either you can look at like different kinds of varieties of scenes as well. It just turns out it doesn't really matter where you look.

It's all the same as just a world with opaque objects strewn about. It's basically that drives the same relative probability of which of these junction types happen. And then you can just ask, well, if this idea is right, then you should find that across human writing systems, writing tends to have the junction types that are found in nature. In those proportions? In those proportions.

And that's the case.

Right. This is a 2006 paper by an American naturalist. So the idea is that we read, we can only read, which is part of what we take to be central to our human nature, even as the ability to be literate, right? I mean, of course, it's not part of our human nature. This is culture which is harnessed. Especially silent reading. Not to mention science.

This is a cultural evolutionary process which has harnessed a visual object recognition brain for reading by tricking it, not because we've evolved for it, but instead evolving writing to fit us. Now, the same idea I argued in the next book in Harnessed That spoken language is like this as well.

So spoken language, instead of writing evolving to look like nature, it's spoken language evolved to sound like nature, in particular sound like solid object physical events. When there's solid objects... That's a consonant? That's a consonant. Well, a plosive in particular. There's a plosive like puh, duh, kuh. And then you've got fricatives... Well, this doesn't make any sound at all.

You got sliding sounds. And then you have, when either of those things happen, the things vibrate, they ring. And those are like the sonorants. Sonorants are things that ring, vowels and any kind of like ya and wa and also just A-E-I-O-U. The basic notion of a syllable is a hit in a ring. It's either, you know, sa is a slide and those objects are vibrating or a ba is there's a collision.

Like a bell. Yeah, it's like a bell. Something hits and they're ringing thereafter. And then this is just – what you can then start working out when I do the book is like, look, there's all these grammars of what solid object events do.

So you can actually work out – they typically are going to start with a consonant or a plosive or a fricative because those are just the – more often with a plosive because that's what starts the event. And it will typically end in certain kinds of ways because that's what physical events – amongst solid objects do.

And you can start working out all of these many dozens of kinds of regularities and then ask whether across human languages you find the same morphemic regularities at that level.

In that case, because the rolling maybe you can't hear, but if you're imagining sliding bricks, it could be buh, buh, sh.

Say bosh.

Like bash.

And there'd be a consonant at the end. Oh, yeah. But you can work out many kind of mathematical regularities that happen in exactly those systems and are peculiar. And then across humankind, you can show that, oh my gosh, over and over again, these same regularities of solid object physical events are found as universals across human life.

So the story in both these cases, and then music, let me, before I make that kind of summary thing, music... also sound like speech, but of course it's fundamentally different. It's utterly evocative. We could listen to music all day long in the car, in our houses. My music is on literally all day long. We just enjoy it so much.

Why would I enjoy listening to these weird sounds that some people have thought, well, they're like mathematical things from Plato's realm. This is always bull crap. This doesn't make any sense. We didn't evolve to like mathematically beautiful things. We evolved to like things that are human. Those are the things that we want to touch and be with.

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