I think it's useful to have a mental picture of how a mind works, and part of my mental picture relates to what I consider 'true' thoughts versus the 'translated' thoughts we hear in our head.
I think the relationship between a 'true' thought and a 'translated' thought is similar to that between a protein and its DNA sequence.
A protein is an active 3D structure that 'reacts' with other proteins around itself. These reactions sometimes form more complex proteins, and other times cause proteins to break down into smaller segments. A protein is neither "code" nor "data"; it's an active structure that has both qualities.
A DNA sequence on the other hand is a passive 2D encoding of a protein that is suitable for storage within the nucleus and may be easily written down.
I visualize our mind as containing hundreds of thousands of 'true' thoughts that are active 3D structures that react with one another, sometimes creating more complex thoughts and sometimes breaking thoughts down into smaller pieces. Now and again, our language system translates an active 3D thought into a passive 2D representation that is suitable for communication. It's this 'translated' thought which we hear in our head. Similarly, when we hear a sentence we can translate its passive 2D representation into an active 3D representation that can then react with the other active 3D thoughts in our mind.
I don't want to carry the metaphor too far because it oversimplifies what I think is really going on, but hopefully I've got across the idea that there are 'true' thoughts are active structures that react with each other and 'translated' thoughts are passive structures that don't react with anything.
Interestingly enough, the initial translation from an active form of a thought to a passive form is probably very fast - less than a second. The initial passive form would represent the complete sentence structure.
Then either the speech center can translate the sentence into a sequence of phonemes, or the writing center can translate the sentence into a sequence of pen movements.
Note that there's a parallel pipeline of translation occurring: active thought => passive translation of thought as grammatical structure => rendering of grammatical structure as speech or written word.
The inverse occurs when listening to someone speaking or reading a book. Each step can continue in parallel so that a partial representation of a sentence will have a corresponding partial active representation; otherwise you'd have to wait until the end of a sentence before processing it.
Comments