Paleopoetics by Collins Christopher;

Author:Collins, Christopher;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI027000, Science/Life Sciences/Evolution, LAN009000, Language Arts And Disciplines/Linguistics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2013-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Hearing Voices

Before returning to our deep human past and exploring how and when voice became our preeminent means of mindsharing, I want to review some of what neuroscience now knows about the human voice—how it is produced and perceived and how vocal language is decoded by the brain. While we may never know exactly how and when we shifted from gesture-dependent communication to vocal speech, we can safely assume that we share most, though not all, of our own brain’s sensorimotor circuitry with those ancestors of ours who underwent this semiotic transition. With that in mind, I will begin with some simple observations.

When contrasting gesture and voice, we need to consider not only the different way each is produced but also the different way each seems to be received. A visual object seems very much “out there,” whereas a sound is a perturbation of the surrounding air that, when received, creates an effect that seems localized within our skull. The visual brain can usually locate a visible object with pinpoint accuracy, but the auditory brain can determine only the approximate source of a sound, and this by comparing the relative amplitude entering the right and left ears.

Other receptive differences demonstrate how these two independent perceptual systems complement one another. The fact that the eyes have lids that can shut off visual input allows us to sleep. While the visual system, turned inward, occupies the sleeping brain with soundless dream scenarios, the unshut ears and the ever-vigilant auditory system monitor the environing soundscape and, trained to discriminate danger cues from background noise, will wake the sleeping brain and its visual system only when particular sounds enter the ears. Urban apartment dwellers, for example, sleep peacefully through the wailing of police and ambulance sirens but wake up suddenly at a mere rustle at the door or on the fire escape outside their window.

The independence of hearing and vision also permits the waking brain to parallel-process bimodal information, e.g., to interpret a person’s vocal tone while watching the expressive movements of his face, hands, and lower body. As in every multitasking action, however, our attention is not equally distributed: we choose information channeled through only one of these sensory modalities for focal attention, while absorbing information provided by the other modality using subsidiary attention—another instance of dyadic patterning. If, for example, the person before us seems to be nervously concealing something in his clothing, we will focus our attention on his hands and posture while monitoring any vocal sounds he makes for supplementary information, or, if we are conversing with someone, we may focus on her words while peripherally processing her body language, both intentional and unintentional.

Though gesture and voice, in reception, are processed by separate sensory systems, in production they are both motor actions. As Ulric Neisser phrased it, “[T]o speak is to make finely controlled movements in parts of your body, with the result that information about these movements is broadcast to the environment. For this reason the movements of speech are sometimes called articulatory gestures.

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