My main interest as a mathematician, armchair psychologist, and sometime quasi-therapist is not in meaning for its own sake, but in the role language plays in the functioning of the human mind. It's been discouraging to me how few scientific psychologists seem to be interested in the structure of the mind. Of course in the old days of behavioralism the attitude was that the mind and all those psychological things that are of greatest interest to ordinary people -- thoughts, emotions and the like -- are inaccessible to scientific study. But even now, all these cognitive psychologists are saying in sci.psychology that their interest is in abstract cognition rather than in the human mind as such. And in any case, I don't see how one can understand the structure of the mind if cognition, emotion, and behavior are regarded as things to be studied separately.
In article <1992Feb21.131123.15890@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu>>
kbradfor@vdoe386.vak12ed.edu (Kenneth Bradford) writes:
> I'm no expert on left/right brain-ness, but in relation to the
> second part of your message, ...
> ....
> ... This seems interesting: we use the left-brain
> language function to create something (metaphor) that sort of
> extends language beyond the linear mode toward the right brain
> functions -- to the point of, e. g., poetry, the basis of which
> is rhythm (left). It's worth thinking about.
I do believe that "left-brained" and "right-brained" are useful designations of two different modes the mind works in, whether or not they have any relation to the actual structure of the brain. One of the enlightening things about going through NLP training was being around people who are much more right-brained than me (and, I believe, most academics, especially in the sciences) and hearing them describe the way they perceive their own mental processes.
In the Changing Beliefs videotape put out by NLP Comprehensive, the subject has a belief to the effect that it's not okay to have very much money, and he wants to change that belief. Steve and Connirae start by asking him "Do you have an image of what that belief looks like?"
Now the amazing thing to me as a very left-brained person is that when most people are asked this sort of question they immediately answer "Yes." For a lot of people, visual imagery is an important part of the way things like beliefs, ideas, and concepts are "coded" in the mind. And the NLP "submodality" techniques (as illustrated in the videotape) seem to show that by changing the sensory qualities of the imagery -- such things as brightness, distance, size, and location -- one can change the role that a belief, say, plays in the overall structure of the subject's mind. By playing with these sensory qualities, one can replace the undesired belief with another belief.
Frankly, as a clinical technique I believe the Changing Beliefs technique would be difficult to use with a typical client. But the scientific implications for understanding how the mind actually works are, in my opinion, fascinating.
To me, it just doesn't make sense that evolution has created portions of the brain especially adapted to understanding abstract concepts. It just has to be a kludge. My guess is that the brain (or the unconscious mind, if you prefer) doesn't make distinctions between abstract nouns and concrete nouns. For an abstract noun it creates a cluster of images, feelings, sounds, and words (but only a few words) that are just like what it would use to store the concept representing a concrete noun, and this cluster is what I recognize internally as the "meaning" of the word "freedom," "justice," or "science."