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home • MAY 30, 2020

Language and Learning

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
Marvin Minsky

You get sensory inputs from your five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. They make impressions in your memory. Let’s call this impression web.

The mind is capable of clustering these impressions and identifying these clusters distinctly. Then we give each of these distinct clusters a name such as hot, cold, happy or sad.

These clusters get connected to other clusters when new sensory impressions happen and the mind connects them to what it already remembers. It also happens when the mind identifies links and patterns of similarity and difference between clusters while navigating memory — otherwise known as thinking.

Thoughts are triggered by new sensory impressions as well as the process of thinking. Language lets us share symbolic representations of impressions and not the impressions themselves. So, when we read someone else’s writing, the linguistic web we create in our mind is not the same as that of the author.

Language is the technology of communication.