[IxDA Discuss] Affordances (was Re: iPhone Keynote)

[Alan Wexelblat]

On 1/16/07, pauric <radiorental at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mark Said "In short, the brain stores and reassembles images, not words."
>
> I'm not sure this is strictly true

It's almost certainly both true and false, at least insofar as we can
tell from communication errors people make.  The research I'm familiar
with is a couple decades old but should still be relevant.  In
observing so-called speech production errors (people say the wrong
word) you can find a class of people who produce words that are
lexically similar to the intended word.  Most often these are words
that start with the same phoneme as the intended word.  We can infer
from this that the intended word is sufficiently "close" (for some
arbitrary meaning of close) to the intended word that it got retrieved
instead, despite their imagistic dissimilarity.

So for example I might say "Jack" when I mean "Jason" even though the
two men look very little alike.

On the other hand, it's quite rare for speakers to say "Jane" instead
of "Jason" even though the words share some phonemic similarity -
actually more phonemic similarity than "Jack".. Again making wild
guesses at what this tells us about the brain we assume that there is
something about the very different concepts to which "Jason" and
"Jane" refer that cause us not to make that kind of error.

Once you move out of the category of basic nouns the story gets even
less intelligible.  Nobody has been able to provide a satisfactory
theory of how the brain stores an abstract concept like "honesty" or
"advanced" that would be very hard to render imagistically.

Best,
--Alan