The Brain-Body Circuit at Work [The Brain-Body Circuit 1-3]

1-3 The Brain-Body Circuit at Work

We have seen how a brain-body circuit works when we walk: the automatic relaying system accomplishes its task without the intervention from the conscious control. You would say that to walk is a mere physical task and our mental activity is too complicated for a brain-body circuit that works on the simplest of the simple principles: ‘stimulated or not’. If I say that a computer does an intelligent task on the similar principle: ‘0 or 1’, you would resent that our intelligence is far beyond the reach of a machine. And I am still saying that it works. I would like to take the example in how we process a word: a single word, not a whole sentence. It is simple enough to start analysing how brain-body circuits handle intelligent tasks. Still it is complicated enough for you to realise a possibility that it works.

When we hear a word, we know without a delay what it refers to. When we read a word, we know immediately what it stands for. When we think of something, we know the word to describe it almost always without a delay. We consciously use words most always, still when we recognise a word or to choose one, we do so without giving it a thought. We sometimes seek a word and feel it clinging to the tip of our tongue. That is a rare occasion, but I will explain the phenomenon later in this section. It reveals another important point with the brain-body circuit, but let it rest for now.

We hear a word and know it immediately, so the sound of the word comes as the first stimulant to the brain-body circuit. We read a word and know it immediately, so the optical information comes as the first stimulant to the brain-body circuit. We think of something and the word for it comes to us immediately, so our mental image or feeling also stimulates the circuit. What we have here is that a certain piece of information triggers a system to retrieve another piece of information from the storage. As a former system’s engineer, I cannot help but comparing this mechanism to a database system in a computer.

A database is basically an electronic version of the books you keep, such as a balance sheet, an address book, and so forth. Electric or physical, they all store information in quite an orderly way. On the books you have a line or few for each entry; on a database system each entry is called a record. A record contains several kinds of information such as a name, an address, a date, an amount, etc. and each kind is classified as a field. What distinguishes a database is the mechanism of index, which facilitates an immediate retrieval of the specific data we require. Please imagine that you are looking for someone in a crowded square. It would be quite easy if that someone responds to your call. Otherwise you have to go round and round the square looking into each one’s face. When we look up certain information in a conventional book, the printed one that is, we have to read through it until we find the information. The table of contents and the index help but still you have to see for yourself in which page it is written and read the page through until you get the specific information. In the database system, an index empowers the record with the ability to answer the call. When a record is called by its index, it answers with all the information you have requested. With an index a record is no more inert but functional. This functionality facilitates a computer to summarise or analyse a certain group of data. A computer is indeed very good at computing but it needs to gather relevant data before starting computation.

For a farther inspection on the index mechanism, I would like to invite you for a shopping. At a shelf in a shop, you find something you want and wonder how much it costs. Is the price printed on the item? Nowadays less and less items have the price printed on them, and the price is most always shown on the shelf. You see the price on the shelf, find it adequate and bring the item without a price tag to the register. The clerk there has a gadget called a barcode reader and uses it on the item you have brought. When a barcode reader reads a barcode, it reads for the database and not for itself. A barcode reader interprets the row of bars, each with different width, into electric information that a computer can understand. The register machine relays the information from the reader to the database, which tells the necessary information in return. So a receipt is printed out with the name and the price of your item. Why is this relay necessary? Why can’t the barcode reader read all the necessary information from the barcode? Because a barcode does not record the whole information: it only records a unique number to identify the item. With this number the database retrieves the necessary information and sends it back to the register machine in an electric form. The display and the tiny printer on the register machine interpret the electric information into the physical form or the letters that the human eye can catch. On a day of a bargain sale, the prices in the database are changed. In this way, a register clerk does not need to know the prices at all. The unique number serves as a very important index to get information about the item from the database.

The database stores other information such as the stock and the sales. The information about the sales occurs every working day, so the database often stores a day’s sales of an item as one record. Such records consists of the fields such as the item number, the sales date, and the number and amount of the item sold. Only the item number and the sales dates are designated as indices among all the fields in most cases. As indexing is to add functionality, it sure is taxing and it is wise to limit the indexed fields to those you usually use for searching so that you can reduce the burden.

When you ask the sales information for a specific date, you will have as many records as the number of items sold on the day. When you ask one for a specific item, you will have many records, too. When you ask one for a specific item on a specific day, you will have only one record. In this case the date and the item number combined serves as the unique number to identify a record. Of all the indices the one that defines the record without ambiguity is called the main index and the others secondary indices. With the information about the item itself, which have its name, price, manufacturer and such, the item number alone serves as the main index. The sales records have the item number and the date combined for the main index.

Please remember two important features about the database system: indices and interpreters. Indices make a record functional. Interpreters are the peripheral equipment such as a barcode reader, a display and a printer. A barcode reader interprets a row of bars with differing width into the language of computer. A display and a printer interpret the language of computer into the language that we humans can see. The interpreters connect the database to the world around.

Words in our brain are functional, too. They respond to audio and visual stimuli and to your thought. In other words, what you hear, what you read and what you feel or think stimulate indices that attach to a word. This doesn’t mean that the word circuit is directly connected to our eyes or ears. Other circuits are connected directly to our eyes and ears. They work like a barcode reader, which does not transfer the image of a barcode to the computer like a fax machine but interprets the code into an electric signal that a database understands. The brain-body circuits to handle the incoming sound or image interpret the incoming information into signals or stimuli that other circuits can recognise. But how exactly do they interpret? It seems they classify the information into patterns already stored in the brain. Take a sound ‘r’, for example. The sound differs from person to person and language to language, but when we recognise the sound we are not much disturbed by the differences. When we hear an ‘r’ sound, the circuit verifies it with the stored pattern ‘r’ and relays this pattern ‘r’ to the next circuit. This is when we are trying to recognise each sound: when we are to determine who is speaking, we need more sensitive analysis. When we are to recognise a word, which is the collection of sounds, we cannot afford to recognise each sound precisely.

Let us do a little experiment to determine if it is practical to recognise each sound when we are to recognise a word. I describe a word by the sounds: phoneme by phoneme, or each bit of sound in order, and you reconstruct the word. Something like ‘Charlie, alpha, tango’ for ‘cat’, but this time not with letters but with sounds. Now, the first phoneme is ‘l’ in ‘lion’. The second: ‘u’ in ‘butter’. The third: ‘n’, then ‘d’, and the first ‘o’ in ‘conductor’. The last one is ‘n’. Do you have the answer or a headache? The strict analysis on the sounds of a word seems troublesome to say the least. In reality we hear the sound of a word not as the sequence of phonemes but as the collection of familiar chunks of sounds. The hearing circuit compares incoming sounds chunk by chunk with patterns stored in our brain. The chunk-by-chunk recognition works against us when we hear foreign words. Foreign languages have so many unfamiliar chunks that the mother tongue lacks, we are almost unable to recognise them.

To speed up the recognition, we seem to store patterns in two different forms for each word: one is the equivalent form that treats each phoneme precisely, and the other catches the essence as ‘LUNdn’ for ‘London’ or ‘aNAPle’ for ‘an apple’. The essence form works as the index to call a corresponding word. A written word, too, has two forms in our brain: the equivalent and the essence. When we proofread, we must be very much careful otherwise we cannot detect a misspelling. We store a visual index after we reduce the queue of letters into some kind of pattern that is easier to catch in an instant. We have some words we hear and know without problem but we cannot say. For those words we have the sound index in the essence form but not the equivalent form. It is easier to remember the essence form than the equivalent form. As we already have necessary patterns for the essence, we only have to remember the combination. With the equivalent form, we have to remember the exact sequence of phonemes and that is hard. With foreign words, the situation is reversed. Until we store in our brain all the sound patterns unique to that language, we have to keep toiling to know and store all of them. This explains why we have harder time learning to hear the language than to speak.

Between the word circuit and the voicing circuit, a word exists as the instructions for the motion. The instructions form deals the sequence of phonemes as one chunk. When we speak, the instructions form is relayed from the word circuit to the voicing circuit. We do not aware how our vocal organ is toiling to make sound after sound. We speak without consciously controlling our voicing circuit; we get awkward once we try to speak under the conscious control. This is observed in a simple word game between two players with three-syllable word. Take ‘potato’ for instance and the game goes like this: one player says the first syllable ‘po’, then the opponent says the next ‘ta’, again the first player the last ‘to’, and the opponent gets back to ‘po’; so they continue to pronounce each syllable in turn. This simple exchange can serve as a game because we more than often err during the exchange. We err because the instructions form is always ready to blurt out the whole word.

So, the instructions form is for the automatic function. In other word, it does not tell our consciousness how to make each phoneme. As a result, we have hard time pronouncing an alien word even when it has no alien sound. One of such words for Japanese people is ‘yeast’. Although the Japanese language has the sound of ‘y’, it is always followed by the vowels ‘a’, ‘u’ or ‘o’ and not ‘i’. A native Japanese speaker pronounces ‘ya’, ‘yu’ or ‘yo’ without knowing exactly how to make the ‘y’ sound. Without the exact knowledge at the conscious level, the new combination ‘yi’ cannot be reconstructed. In the second language acquisition, alien pronunciations should be presented with the exact instructions for the motion. It is futile to attempt mimicking the sound without knowing exactly how to make it.

The brain-body circuit deals three forms for the sound of word: the equivalent form, the essence form and the instructions form. The same threefold forms work with written words. There are some words we can read without difficulty but we cannot write. When we misspell a word, it is more than often recognisable as the intended word. This is because the relation between the pronunciation and the spell has some regularity as we see in the group of ‘all’, ‘call’, ‘tall’ and ‘fall’ or in the contrast between ‘bat’ and ‘bate’, ‘fat’ and ‘fate’, between ‘cut’ and ‘cute’, ‘us’ and ‘use’, or ‘bit’ and ‘bite’, ‘sit’ and ‘site’ and the like. We can reconstruct a passable fake with such patterns. When the stored visual form is not precisely equivalent, we still can write a readable word if only we know how to pronounce it. For some words the stored visual form can be not the equivalent form but the plan to reconstruct from the stored patterns. The more you learn to write English, the more easily you learn to write a new word. This is because you get more of the reliable patterns on the way.

We have seen that the several circuits are involved in dealing with a single word, and they relay several forms of the word to accomplish tasks such as to hear and know, to read and know, to pronounce or to write. When we see the whole as one, we have a word circuit as a workgroup. In this workgroup several interpreter circuits work around a functional record that stores relevant information about the word.

When I read, I pronounce each word in my brain. I do not have a visual index directly connected to the word circuit. My reader circuit translates visual signs into sound index and take a detour through the sound-to-word circuit. As a result the speed of sound in my brain stands as the barrier to read fast. Similar detours occur when we learn foreign languages. At first, a foreign word is translated into the mother tongue to be recognised. This hinders not only the simultaneous recognition but also the exact understanding of the word, as many words lose something in translation. When we get familiar enough with a foreign word, we do not need the translation detour. This is when the circuit for this specific foreign word gets ready to serve. We know the process as our own experience. But how can it be explained in terms of the brain-body circuit? So far I have described the circuits that handle different appearance of a word itself: audio and visual forms and a motion form. Now I have to deal with the circuit that connects between a word circuit and the object or our thought.

A word represents a certain object. A word ‘shadow’ is useless unless it is connected to shadows around us. But how a word is connected to the object either in the world around or in our thought? When I see someone’s shadow, why does a word ‘shadow’ come to my mind? Why not ‘person’, ‘picture’, ‘grey’ or not even ‘shade’? And why do those other words come to us in other occasions? When I seek refuge from the scorching sun under a tree, why a word ‘shade’ comes to me, and not ‘shadow’? When I hear a word ‘shadow’, what do I know from the word?

Linguists say what I am asking is a matter of semantics. They may say and the others will definitely say that it is the meanings. I am sorry but I have come to avoid these two words for grave reasons. First of all, what they represent is too cumbersome. With them, we think of a dictionary entry, which is a very long list. I cannot imagine our brain consults with such a list within a split second after we hear a word. It may be my prejudice but the lengthy lists in a dictionary are possible only in a study where intelligent people spend as much time as they please. In a rush of conversation, we need something far simpler that can be relayed between brain-body circuits. What can it be?

When I feel a word clinging to the tip of my tongue, I am aware of what I want to say but I do not know any form to represent it. What I am aware then is definitely not that lengthy list of a dictionary entry. It is one concrete image and almost tangible. It is definitely some kind of existence, not that I advocate mysticism. I also see this existence when I read a dictionary. When we read through one voluminous entry for a single word very much carefully, we can feel that something common runs through the entry from the top to the bottom. That is the existence I am talking about, and I call it the focus of a word. It is, indeed, simple enough for the brain-body circuit, and it is rich enough to explain the wide range of usages some words have. Now, let us talk about the heart of a word.

I met a lady who had ‘shadow’ for her name. It was during my business stay in Singapore. I wondered what parents would name their daughter as such, and I believe you do, too. The answer lay in the actual word she had for her name. The lady was from India and her name was Anya, which comes from a verb that means ‘to follow’. Wherever you go, your shadow never leaves you. Therefor a shadow can be seen as a follower. I am sorry for the modern women, but I understand the wish of Anya’s parents: the wish for her to live happily ever after. If you have seen ‘Gandhi’ the 1982 movie by Lord Richard Attenborough, you will recall old Gandhi and his wife re-enacted their wedding ceremony in which the bride always followed the gloom and swore to do so for the rest of her life. A shadow as a follower is not quite negative. There is nothing dark in children playing to step on others’ shadow to tag them.

Then why do we get a certain negative feeling from words like ‘shadow’ or ‘shade’? As the Indian word ‘anya’ focuses on the shadow’s behaviour to follow the substance, the other words have their own focal point. ‘Shade’ focuses on the condition of light. ‘Shadow’ focuses on the shape. In olden days, the English language had only one word for ‘shade/shadow’: they did not distinguish between light and shape. Then the focus of the word was on a condition as a whole created when an object blocks light; it is darker than the world around, and its shape is similar to the object which blocks the light, similar but lacks the substance completely. As time went on, the focus was divided into two areas: ‘shadow’ came to focus on the shape, and ‘shade’ on the difference in brightness or colour. The focus of word works like the main index in a database system: it identifies a word without ambiguity. And when your focus shifts a little sideways, you get another word.

The Chinese language also distinguishes a shade from a shadow: ‘yin’ for ‘shade’ and ‘ying’ for ‘shadow’. They call a movie ‘dian-ying’: an electric shadow. ‘Yin-yang’, literally meaning ‘shade and the sun’, presents a philosophical notion of the harmony or conflict between negative and positive elements.

The Japanese language has only one word for ‘shade/shadow’. But as we borrow many letters from Chinese, we are expected to be careful in choosing which letter to write, ‘yin’ for ‘shade’ or ‘ying’ for ‘shadow’. When we dry clothes or foods avoiding the sun, we write ‘dry in shade’. We write a shadow theatre as ‘shadow picture(s)’. In our case, letters help to sharpen the focus.

I have a theory that a similar effect worked when the Chinese developed their letters, hieroglyphs as you may know. In their letters, they have simpler letters that represent elements and complex letters created by combining a few elemental letters. Those elements are classified into two categories: those represent the sound and those represent the meaning. In close observation I came to think that the element for the sound represents a larger field of focus and the ones for meaning shows categories to narrow the field.

The diagram above shows how a single sound element is combined to an additional element to sharpen the focus. In the olden time the sound element, or the basic form, meant that something stays at a same place. When it is combined with the element ‘tree’, it represents the part of a tree that keeps it stationary, namely the root. With an eye, it represents an anatomical eye that is rooted in our skull with nerve fibres. With the heart, it represents hatred which is a feeling that takes root deep in our heart.

The complex letters are created this way. I suppose all the letters with the same sound element had the same pronunciation in the beginning. Then there was only one word for all the letters that shares the same sound element, and this word covered a large field of focus. As the letters were assigned with reference to its genre, each letter was granted the opportunity to stand from others, or each letter started to develop as an individual word. In the end, the letters with the same sound element have come to hold different pronunciations.

The linguistics tells us that a word has a denotation and a connotation. A denotation refers to the actual object the word is assigned. A connotation adds a certain flavour to the denotation. If I am to interpret the work of brain-body circuits in accordance with this view, the process to choose a word becomes a little complicated. As ‘shadow’ and ‘shade’ refers to the same object, one circuit recognisees this object as ‘shade/shadow’. Then another circuit intervenes with the order to choose between ‘shade’ and ‘shadow’. And an evaluation follows to determine if the attention is on the shape or on the light. The process is too cumbersome to be done in a split second after you conceive the object.

With the focus of word as the main index, we can reconstruct a far easier process. When we conceive an object and will to name it, we are seeing a certain relevance the object has for us. The relevance can be our need, desire, curiosity or disgust. And such relevance is directed toward a specific facet of the object, which corresponds to the focus of word. When you are looking for someone, your attention is already directed toward shapes, so that you can easily have the word ‘shadow’ for ‘shade/shadow’. When you are under the scorching sun, you would very much like to avoid the sun, so that you are already seeking ‘shade’. When you are watching a curtain on which the light and the tree over there create some strange patterns, you are attracted to the shadow. When you are following a bug walking on the ground and suddenly you lose the clear sight as it proceeds to a dark place under a leaf, you will curse the shade.

I have just blurted out the process with the focus so hastily that I owe you a more detailed explanation. I was not clear about the timeline and the relations that a word has in our brain. In the examples with ‘shade/shadow’, the focus seems to be set even before the conception of the object. I have to explain how that can be possible. I also need to explain how our knowledge and words are connected in our brain, as our knowledge helps to set our focus: for example, to look for a shade under the scorching sun, we need to have known that a shade gives us a relief. To illustrate the process along the timeline, I have a pretty good example here. It is a word puzzle from the TV program ‘CSI’.

- Say ‘silk, silk, silk’.
- Silk, silk, silk.
- What does a cow drink?
- Milk.
- Wrong. A cow gives milk, and drinks water.

It seems the sound of ‘silk’ has excited the brain-body circuit for ‘milk’ even before the actual question was asked. Then the question excites it further with ‘a cow’ and ‘drink’, and the victim was tricked into the wrong answer quite easily. The first step here is to activate the ‘milk’ circuit with the sound of ‘silk’. I must remind you that billions of nerve fibres reside in our brain and one fibre can be connected to multiple fibres; therefore one stimulant can trigger multiple fibres or multiple brain-body circuits. The case with ‘silk’ and ‘milk’ is about a group of related words. ‘Silk’ and ‘milk’ have the same sound pattern. Such a group sometimes gives us fun with puns or joy with rhymes but often more troublesome than useful in choosing a word as we have just observed. We have other groups here which are quite useful. One is the group with a cow and milk, and another is the one with ‘what to drink’, or beverage, and milk. A cow and milk are linked through knowledge. Beverage and milk form a category. Such groups always help our conception of words. When we talk, when we read, when we hear, the words relevant to the topic are activated, not that all the relevant words spring up from the memory at once but they are set ready to serve so that we can follow the narrative with much ease. Most words in our brain are usually dormant and need to be activated when we use them. We have stored too many words to recall all of them at once. It is far less taxing to activate words in a group for the occasion and the activation saves us from the trouble to seek each word in turn. The same can be said with our knowledge and experiences.

It seems that a certain condition activates a set of vocabulary or knowledge before they are actually used. We know the trigger as ‘context’. The pre-activation through context helps to distinguish homophones, or to sharpen the focus of a word. When you are talking about regulating prices the word ‘ceiling’ will not make you look upward. When we hear a medieval tale, we can know if the night came or the knight did. When we are talking about old films, the name ‘Elizabeth’ will trigger our memory of the actress who played the queen of Egypt, not the actual Queen of England. When we are talking about recent ones, the same name will trigger either or both of the actual Queens of England. I must confess that I cannot distinguish ‘crowd’ from ‘cloud’ or ‘grass’ from ‘glass’ on the sound, as R and L sound the same to my Japanese ears. I seldom get confused because the context helps me to expect what will be said.

I would like to return to the ‘milk’ puzzle to make further observation about the connections among words and knowledge in our brain. The sound ‘milk’ and the object ‘milk’ are directly linked together, so that the sound triggers our conception of the object immediately. The sounds ‘milk’ and ‘silk’ are not directly connected; they are only connected through a sound pattern. Such a link is indirect but still works as an index to retrieve a word. Such indirect links can be seen between ‘milk’ and ‘a cow’, or between ‘milk’ and ‘beverage’. And as those links are formed through experiences and knowledge, each of us can have different links; in other words the links can be quite personal. For example those farmers who tend cows should have a link between ‘a cow drinks’ and ‘water’ so that they will not be fooled by the puzzle. We know as a general rule that animals drink water, but the knowledge does not crystallise into the link for each species except for those which we care very much. Generally, we have to follow an indirect route to see that a certain species drinks water: we need to remember that the species is one of animals, then we know it drinks water. On the other hand, when we are asked about a specific animal, we automatically assume that the answer must be unique to it. A unique answer can be quite important in our lives and we often have a special link between someone special and his or her favourite beverage; for example, a Star Trek fan may have a link between Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and ‘tea, Earl Grey, hot’.

We must not forget that links in our brain are so personal and so diverse. The condition we are in also varies from time to time and that affects our choice of a word. I started talking about choosing a word with ‘shade/shadow’. But in reality it is rather a rare case that we choose among the words with the same denotation. Here is a wise observation from ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’.

Counsellor Deanna Troi: We are stranded on a planet. We have no language in common, but I want to teach you mine. (holing a glass of tea) S'smarith. What did I just say?

Capt. Jean-Luc Picard: Cup... Glass.

Counsellor Deanna Troi: Are you sure? I may have meant ‘liquid’, ‘clear’, ‘brown’, ‘hot’.

We are not a gadget to tell the names, so that we do not analyse the world around us to have a word. We feel the world and find words to express our need or feeling. Our attention retrieves words, and not the intelligent analysis. When our attention is focused upon something or upon the condition it is in, we get the word. The focus is a very important index to retrieve a word. It is also unique: the focus can determine one word without ambiguity. A man of letters will completely agree with me. They toil to find one specific word which cannot be replaced by any other words. I insist that the focus is the main index of a word.

Back to the ‘milk’ puzzle once again. It is imperative to notice that it depends on asking without ambiguity what a cow drinks and not what beverage a cow gives. The question itself is indeed straightforward; quite different from the three-word message that troubled the crew of classic Star Trek: ‘NO KILL I’. How do we combine words to send an unmistakable message? Can I explain the process in terms of the brain-body circuit? In the next entry I will extend the observation from a single word to sentences, or what the linguists call syntax.