Tool-Extended Perception
All sorts of animals have been documented using tools to expand their perceptual reach: chimps muck around in anthills with sticks and are able to feel how best to stir the pot to get their creepy, crawly treats to emerge, and spiders use vibrations in their webs—caused by struggling prey—to triangulate that prey's location.
We humans seem to be especially good at extending our perceptual aura beyond our nervous system, however, and some evidence suggests the emergence and evolution of complex language may be tied to our enthusiasm for tools and the extra-sensory powers they grant us.
This suggestion stems from the finding that language and tool-usage seem to share neurological processes and patterns: our basal ganglia (located at the base of the brain) are engaged in similar ways when we use language and tools, and now that we have fMRI (a type of brain scan) data to support this assumption, there've been experiments to see if the relationship between tool-linked sensing and language might be connected in other ways, as well.
Findings from one such experiment showed that "learning a novel task that involves the use of a tool also improves performance in a complex language task." This builds on prior research indicating that tool-usage expands our spacial perception, which in turn necessitates the invention and refinement of concepts and terms for concepts related to the world beyond our bodies.
Said another way: if you're suddenly paying attention to not just your arm, but everything you can touch by swinging a club or throwing a spear, you've massively increased the range of operation and scope of what’s relevant in your environment; all of which you must now explore and track and learn about.
If you're communicating things about this now far-larger environment to other people, you must also come up with terms for "over there" and "that" and "in this part of the cave," which opens up all kinds of linguistic complexities not found in utterances that assume certain things about the scope and span and subject-matter of a conversation—when discussions are oriented around one's body and what one can perceive with just the sensing apparatus with which we were born, such linguistic gymnastics aren’t as necessary.
There's some evidence, too, that tool-use expands our conception of "self" so we're no longer limited to just what's contained in our skin, but expand our “me-ness” to encompass our clothing, our weapons, our hammers and bows and arrows, and maybe even the spaces we occupy because they're filled with tools we can use to detect (and perhaps even process, to some degree) things we can't (at least not as capably) with just our fingers and tongues and skin.
We don't yet know how all these pieces fit together, in the sense of one thing driving another, one thing leading to another, and how these connections might vary from person to person, culture to culture, or even creature to creature.
Because of how the expansion of self and self-as-sensing-entity correlates with language development, though, and because of how entangled the portions of the brain we use for these two bundles of processes and activities tend to be (alongside our psychological representations of sensorimotor and linguistic systems), there's a decent chance we’ll continue to discover and reinforce our understanding of the relationships between these otherwise seemingly disconnected cognitive efforts.
Brain Lenses is an Understandary project.
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