The sound of thought

Andrea Moro has an article in The MIT Press Reader dated 9/6/22 entitled “What Is the Sound of Thought.” He makes very interesting comments which I will share in the next few blog posts. He addresses the “reading [of] linguistic thought directly from the brain.” He asks, “Why do we include the sounds of words in our thoughts when we think without speaking?”

Moro asks what language is made of. “When it lives outside our brain, it consists of mechanical, acoustic waves of compressed and rarefied molecules of air (i.e., sound); when it exists inside our brain, it consists of [encoded] electric waves that are the channel of communication for neurons. Waves: In either case, this is the concrete stuff of which language is physically made.” . . . This complex system translates the acoustic signal’s mechanical vibrations into electric impulses in a very sophisticated way, decomposing the complex sound waves into the basic [encoded] frequencies that characterize them. The different frequencies are then mapped onto dedicated slots in the primary auditory cortex, at which point the sound waves are replaced by [encoded] electric waves [transmitted via the process of quantum tunneling that has been explained in previous blog posts and in my books and ultimately interpreted by the immaterial cognitive mind].”

My next blog post will continue to include excerpts from this interesting article.

Stan Lennard