[Peter Barus]

Thank you Whit, for inspiring thoughts…

“language, and the left hemisphere’s tendency to too often lead us away from truth by it”

Reading this, it occurs to me that this “leading” is structural, not in any way intentional; inherent to language, not some nefarious scheme. The LH is in a way confined to language and the world it encapsulates, like a mosaic that only shows the tiles, and nothing of the between-ness that gives the image meaning, or like the saccades between visual impressions that leave invisible blind-spots. Seeing a mosaic we get the meaning without ever seeing those connections, which may be the function of language, structure, and the LH as well. That is, a feature, not a bug.

And structure itself is only a part of something much greater, a visible armature, which may support much visible refinement enhancing the appearance of wholeness and completeness… but like a statue, only conveys movement with, at best, a hint, like the implication of wind in flowing garments, or (somehow) angelic weightlessness.

I think it was Drew Kopp who said, at a workshop in London I was lucky to attend, “Did you ever care about speaking in such a way that what you didn’t say was present? Probably not. But that’s where making a difference lies.”

“Out here” in the space of a conversation, where my internal state is negligible, is where live is really lived.

[Shannon McCarthy]

Hi again Whit,

Jackendoff is new to me, thanks for the heads up. It looks like he has two great books out. Is it A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning that you recommend, or his 2002 Foundations book?

[Shannon McCarthy]

“The Parallel Architecture on Language and Elsewhere”, 2023- just gave it a read- thanks for letting us know.

“We do not understand conceptual structures very well yet.” -Jackendoff

It all seemed pretty straight forward until he gets to the Spatial Structure part. I can see why you’d want to talk about his ideas on parallel architecture and maybe his thoughts on tonal music theory and its implications or overlap with the hemispheres! Nice little bit here:

“Further consideration suggests that Spatial Structure cannot be just a <i style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;”>visual representation. The size and shape of objects and their spatial layout can be determined haptically, that is, through the sense of touch. In addition, information about the spatial configuration of one’s body comes from proprioception (Lackner, 1988; Lackner & Dizio, 2000). All three of these—vision, hapsis, and proprioception—have to be correlated with each other in order to understand what is going on in physical space. This job belongs to Spatial Structure. Moreover, Spatial Structure is not just for perceiving: it also has to be used to plan action in the world.”

What part are you thinking about? I’m curious!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Just a moment...

Just a moment...

[Whit Blauvelt]

Hi Shannon,

Appreciate your engagement here! I’ve been bouncing around through a stack of Jackendoff’s books. His recognition of the spatial interests me as I’ve long been focused on the relation of path with opinion. There’s a binary in pop psychology (and in formal psychology until quite recently, for instance in Baddeley’s writing on “working memory”) between verbal and visuo-spatial thought, with verbal of course seen as LH and visuo-spatial as RH. But it turns out, as Laura Otis goes into in some depth in her book, Rethinking Thought, that the visual and spatial are as much separate capacities as the verbal is from either. And Broca’s Area in the LH is as crucial for spatial intelligence as it is for aspects of language. Jackendoff had worked out from linguistic evidence that spatial thought is a separate capacity, even ahead of neuroscience’s discovery of this.

A mention by Jackendoff led me to finally read sociologist Erving Goffman’s book, Frame Analysis. Goffman doesn’t write of spatial paths in so many words (indeed the book is from 1973), but brilliantly examines the structure and the stagings of our verbal presentations, emphasizing that they are far less about “information” than about, if I may roughly paraphrase him, relating the paths we have taken, and present ourselves as taking, and especially the quite-varied “I” as teller and subject of our stories.

A crude reading of McGilchrist suggests there are two “I”s, one quite verbal but blind, one more perceptive but mute, rather along the lines of a true self masked by a false persona. This is seductive (certainly to me), but may be an example of, as it’s said, there being a solution to every complex problem which is simple … and wrong. Nor should I suggest McGilchrist intends to promote that reductive conclusion. Rather, we might ask from McGilchrist’s marshaled evidence how to bring language back into the subtle service of “the master.”

In that, looking to experts in aspects of language, Jackendoff and Goffman among them (along with the cognitive linguists in Lakoff’s circle) may take us farther on the trail which McGilchrist has blazed. While we note how deeply Iain despises the Anglo-American analytic philosophers’ emphasis on language; neither Jackendoff nor Goffman (nor Lakoff) are in that tradition.

So do we want to stop with McGilchrist, just accepting him as if a guru who has attained a full enlightenment, or do we want to go farther, taking him as a scientist and philosopher who has opened a broad horizon for further — and somewhat urgent — exploration?

For my own focus, it’s largely on implications and methods for bringing the spatial more into the mix, which is not quite the same as “visual thinking” in (art historian) Rudolph Arnheim’s framing; but then he didn’t separate the visual from the spatial, as it now appears a fuller analysis requires.

Whit

[Shannon McCarthy]

Hi again Whit,

I’m glad we both are interested in the space. What does Laura Otis say about the different capacities with the visual and the spatial? (Are you an art historian?) I’d like to hear your ideas about bringing the spatial into the mix. What are you imagining?

I’m just coming off some focal seizures on the left side that affect language- I know the words are there, but they are difficult to retrieve in speech. I’d believe it too that LH is needed in proprioception. However, whatever the confusion that happens with language from compromised LH temporal area, I think spatial understanding from a distance is not affected. Like, I may have trouble with the written grocery list, but if I make a map of the kitchen in my mind and remember a star over the areas which need something, I can get it. Pictures and their relatives can be separate from words. Also, I think my painting is still fine, technically, which requires depth/ relation/ space perception even with a slow language center. Anyway sorry to talk about my own self here, just where my mind is currently.

Isn’t the meaning of guru the one who dispels darkness? In that respect I think he’s already done it. And I hear you- we ought to keep asking questions, and I do agree that looking to advance his work and question what else could be is a way of respecting its importance.

[Whit Blauvelt]

Hi Shannon, Apologies for late reply. I’m not an art historian, but for some years lived with one, who gave me a copy of Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Alpers presents a fascinating thesis which holds up well, that most European art follows the Italian model, where the art illustrates the narratives, and is secondary to the language of those stories. Golden Age Dutch art, by contrast, regards language as secondary to the visual. In our context here, we might ask whether Dutch culture (at least in the 17th century) had a different hemispheric balance than the Italian.

Of course, the Dutch of that time, as the premier navigators of the oceans, also had an intense spatial awareness. Witness the maps on the walls in Vermeer’s paintings — windows with light streaming in from the spaces outside — and the production of globes of both the Earth and the heavens.

Your account of spatial understanding of grocery needs is fascinating. Teasing out just what spatial intelligence is, especially in light of the recent realization from neuroscience that it’s not identical to visual … well it’s an active puzzle for me, especially as my own conceptions are more spatial than visual, or at least more abstractions than photo-like imagery.

Jackendoff places the spatial closer to the lived body than the verbal-conceptual, helping guide our actions in this spatial world. I’m currently working through an unfortunately poorly-written book by a trio of undistinguished professors, Spatial Intelligence: Why it Matters from Birth through the Lifespan, which despite the poor writing (and being printed in an impossibly tiny font by Routledge) has the virtue of exploring how spatial intelligence is generally neglected in both theory and education. Jackendoff suggests we’re generally less conscious of the spatial than the conceptual, yet it’s of equivalent importance in our mental architecture.

I’m currently trying to tease out the different affordances of spatial self-understanding as compared to verbal-conceptual self-understanding. I’m suspecting that what’s variously known as “the ego problem,” as well as McGilchrist’s “hemispheric problem,” stem from failure to bring the verbo-conceptual into full spatial contextualization, in a culture which follows Descartes’ faulty intuition that res cogitans is best conceptualized as without (spatial) extension.