On Understanding Without Doing
An idea that I have commonly heard from teachers is, "Oh, just do it, and then you will understand." (I have written about how this rarely works with me; I tend to learn best by reading about something, not by doing it.[1]....))
This idea is sometimes taken further -- "You can't understand what I mean, because you have not practiced such and such for yourself."
Or sometimes, people seeking empathy will say, "You cannot understand how I feel, because you have not experienced this."
Apparently, this has been a question among philosophers for a while, and it was more recently raised by neuroscientists as well. The commonly held theory among both became, "You cannot understand something that you cannot do yourself." That is, a blind person cannot understand color; a deaf person cannot understand sound.
Support for this philosophical theory was found by neuroscientists when they discovered mirror neurons, brain cells that seem to turn on both when someone observes an action and when someone does an action. For example, if I see someone walking, there are supposedly neurons that fire. When I am also walking, those same neurons fire. This seems to indicate that ones processing of an observation involves the same areas of the brain one uses to do the same actions.
While this may all be true for some things, as usual, people have made the concept into too much of a dogma.
For one, I have already shared how it was discovered that people born blind still dream in images.[2]
A more recent finding was not in humans but in monkeys, but it is likely the finding would hold true for humans as well.
A neuroscientist named Justin Wood performed experiments where he would find groups of monkeys he had not seen before. He would then set up a camera and being an odd experiment. He would pretend to throw rocks at the monkeys. That is, he would wind up for a throw, but he would never release the rocks. He had twelve variations of mimed throws. Some of them would have amounted to the rock flying backwards behind him or way to the side or a few feet in front of him had he let go of the rock; others -- had he let go -- would have flown straight for the monkeys' foreheads.
Now it needs to be understood first that this species of monkey (macaques) is incapable of targeting a throw. They can hold something in their hands, wave there arms, and let go, but for some physical reason (beyond my anatomical knowledge), they are incapable of aiming a throw.
However, these monkeys would only jump away on the throws that would have worked had the stone been released. That is to say, these throwing-deprived monkeys could still understand very well the physics and results of a physical task they were incapable of doing.
Not only does this experiment lend support to the idea that voice-trained animals really can comprehend language as language without being able to speak or tools without being to create them, but it seems to indicate that brains are capable of processing more things than the body is able to do or has done.
This idea is sometimes taken further -- "You can't understand what I mean, because you have not practiced such and such for yourself."
Or sometimes, people seeking empathy will say, "You cannot understand how I feel, because you have not experienced this."
Apparently, this has been a question among philosophers for a while, and it was more recently raised by neuroscientists as well. The commonly held theory among both became, "You cannot understand something that you cannot do yourself." That is, a blind person cannot understand color; a deaf person cannot understand sound.
Support for this philosophical theory was found by neuroscientists when they discovered mirror neurons, brain cells that seem to turn on both when someone observes an action and when someone does an action. For example, if I see someone walking, there are supposedly neurons that fire. When I am also walking, those same neurons fire. This seems to indicate that ones processing of an observation involves the same areas of the brain one uses to do the same actions.
While this may all be true for some things, as usual, people have made the concept into too much of a dogma.
For one, I have already shared how it was discovered that people born blind still dream in images.[2]
A more recent finding was not in humans but in monkeys, but it is likely the finding would hold true for humans as well.
A neuroscientist named Justin Wood performed experiments where he would find groups of monkeys he had not seen before. He would then set up a camera and being an odd experiment. He would pretend to throw rocks at the monkeys. That is, he would wind up for a throw, but he would never release the rocks. He had twelve variations of mimed throws. Some of them would have amounted to the rock flying backwards behind him or way to the side or a few feet in front of him had he let go of the rock; others -- had he let go -- would have flown straight for the monkeys' foreheads.
Now it needs to be understood first that this species of monkey (macaques) is incapable of targeting a throw. They can hold something in their hands, wave there arms, and let go, but for some physical reason (beyond my anatomical knowledge), they are incapable of aiming a throw.
However, these monkeys would only jump away on the throws that would have worked had the stone been released. That is to say, these throwing-deprived monkeys could still understand very well the physics and results of a physical task they were incapable of doing.
Not only does this experiment lend support to the idea that voice-trained animals really can comprehend language as language without being able to speak or tools without being to create them, but it seems to indicate that brains are capable of processing more things than the body is able to do or has done.