Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

90 I HOW THE MIND WORKSto a much bigger information structure in long-term memory, such as thecontent of a phrase or sentence.) A third format is the grammatical representation:nouns and verbs, phrases and clauses, stems~an^" roots,phonemes and syllables, all arranged into hierarchical trees. In The LanguageInstinct I explained how these representations determine whatgoes into a sentence and how people communicate and play with language.^\Ah ( u\A *Wf ,*H-?/\ .->«A«^.sc*»fThe fourth format is mentalese, the language of thought in which ourconceptual knowledge is couched. When you put down a book, you forgetalmost everything about the wording and typeface of the sentencesand where they sat on the page. What you take away is their content orgist. (In memory tests, people confidently "recognize" sentences theynever saw if they are paraphrases of the sentences they did see.) Mentaleseis the medium in which content or gist is captured; I used bitsof it in the bulletin board of the production system that identifieduncles, and in the "knowledge" and "concept" levels of the semanticnetwork shown in the last diagram. Mentalese is also the mind's linguafranca, the traffic of information among mental modules that allows usto describe what we see, imagine what is described to us, carry outinstructions, and so on. This traffic can actually be seen in the anatomyof the brain. The hippocampus and connected structures, which put ourmemories into long-term storage, and the frontal lobes, which house thecircuitry for decision making, are not directly connected to the brainareas that process raw sensory input (the mosaic of edges and colors andthe ribbon of changing pitches). Instead, most of their input fibers carrywhat neuroscientists call "highly processed" input coming from regionsone or more stops downstream from the first sensory areas. The inputconsists of codes for objects, words, and other complex concepts./Why so many kinds of representations? Wouldn't it be simpler to have\ an Esperanto of the mind? In fact, it would be hellishly complicated.The modular organization of mental software, with its packaging ofknowledge into separate formats,- is a nice example of how evolution andengineering converge on similar solutions. Brian Kernighan, a wizard inthe software world, wrote a book with P. J. Plauger called The Elementsof Programming Style (a play on Strunk and White's famous writing man-