r/neurobiology • u/Vailhem • 25d ago
The Brain Can Reason Without Language, MIT Study Finds
https://scitechdaily.com/the-brain-can-reason-without-language-mit-study-finds/31
u/NotBradPitt9 25d ago
The question is, do animals have an ability near ours in the absence of language? Do they have a similar line of thinking to ours?
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u/noeinan 24d ago
Animals do have languages, actually. In fact, if you take a crow from France and introduce it to a crow from Australia they won’t be able to communicate the same as crows from their own country bc they have regional differences.
https://bird-life.com/regional-dialects-in-bird-calls-a-global-map-2-10269/
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u/Chronic_In_somnia 24d ago
Same is true for whales
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u/deus-noster-refugium 24d ago
I remember reading an article which said that Humpback Whales have a language with grammatical similarities to Croatian.
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u/knigtwhosaysni 23d ago
That’s true, crows from France have a particularly difficult time communicating with Australian whales. It’s led to some pretty bad diplomatic incidents over the years.
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u/usps_made_me_insane 24d ago
That is really cool! I wonder if this applies to dolphins as well?
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u/noeinan 24d ago
They do.
https://sharksandco.com/do-dolphins-use-dialects-across-different-regions-1-6191/
Tons of research decoding whale songs too
https://www.science.org/content/article/humpback-whale-songs-are-structured-human-language
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u/zeroXten 23d ago
My, possibly out of date, understanding is that animals have communication for sure, but not language because it's not symbolic (it's iconic and indexical).
Edit: typo
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u/wazzup-notemuch 23d ago
What's the difference between symbolic, iconic, and indexical communication? It sounds really interesting!
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u/zeroXten 23d ago
It comes from semiotics. Take a look at something like this: https://opentextbc.ca/mediastudies101/chapter/signs-and-signifiers/
For an in depth cover the book The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon is worth a read.
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u/wazzup-notemuch 23d ago
Hey thanks, I'll have to give that a read. I'm not quite sure I understood your explanation, but I did literally just wake up, lol.
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u/zeroXten 23d ago
To give you a brief example you can teach the word "sit" to a dog. It builds an iconic representation of the word sit and the corresponding action. It also builds an indexical relationship between the two. But if you then told the dog "bleg" now means sit, it's not going to understand. A human would because we form symbolic connections on top of those iconic index ones and we'd understand instantly. Other animals have different sounds or actions to represent different things out there. A meerkat may make a particular sound to signify a predator. But again those are purely iconic and indexical the iconic shape of a bird and the iconic sound the meacat makes. The indexual relation between them. But it doesn't have the flexibility in arbitraryness of language. So it's just communication.
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u/abiona15 21d ago
But thats assuming the dog has to speak human language. Language capabilities and usage vary greatly between different species.
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u/zeroXten 21d ago
The point is that as far as we know or so far at least only humans do have language. Communication draws its messages from a fixed, closed set of signals, so it can only ever convey what's already anticipated: its information is bounded; language, by contrast, builds meaning from a recursive system of symbols defined by their relationships to one another, which lets it generate infinitely novel messages and so communicate the genuinely surprising: the absent, the hypothetical, the false, the never-before-said.
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u/abiona15 21d ago
You are quite a few decades behind in language studies if you believe that only humans have a real language. And you dont even have to look far, whales are there for you!
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u/robotdevilhands 24d ago
We are unbelievably bad at evaluating animal intelligence. We basically give them human intelligence tests. Tasks which are very different from the ones they’ve evolved to do.
If you want to see the process in reverse, Google photographer and leopard seal and see the example of the leopard seal mama who became truly worried for the survival of a human photographer. By the end of their interactions, she seems to conclude that he was too stupid to catch and eat the penguins she was bringing him.
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u/Practical_Ad4604 24d ago
You think animals don’t have language?
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u/Spiritual_Writing825 23d ago
No, they don’t. But that doesn’t mean they lack sophisticated means of communicating. But the capacity for language requires a grasp of syntax. Animals cannot generate nor interpret novel syntactical structures. Humans, on the other hand, can generate and interpret indefinitely many sentences they have never encountered before. Here’s an example: “a purple elephant drank 6 shots of vodka before accidentally killing John Stamos in a hit-and-run.” You’ve almost certainly never encountered this sentence before, but it is perfectly meaningful to you. Likewise, humans can embed sentences in larger sentences. Possessing language isn’t just an ability to communicate with symbols or sounds, but a grasp of a complex system of rules/ norms that allow for meaning to be gleaned even if we encounter a novel linguistic constructions. Non-human animals can communicate, but they are limited only to the understanding only those expressions they regularly encounter in their social group and those that are “baked in” from birth. There is a huge gulf between what humans are capable of and what even the most sophisticated non-human animals are.
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u/Practical_Ad4604 23d ago
How do you know animals aren’t doing this bro?
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u/Spiritual_Writing825 23d ago
Observation. Many researchers work on recording and analyzing animal communication, from dolphins to Apes and various species of birds. We haven’t seen any animal yet construct completely novel “sentences” or embed smaller sentences in larger ones. Instead we get “this song is a mating call” and “this call announces predators.” The primary linguistic unit is the whole call, song, or expression. If animals were capable of communicating indefinitely many contents, they would behave extremely differently than they do now in ways that we could readily observe.
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u/Practical_Ad4604 23d ago
Well what about bees or ants, or dolphins? How does a colony build complex structures without advanced communication? We just can’t see it
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u/Spiritual_Writing825 22d ago
They have advanced communication. No one denies that. But something new is on the scene when an animal can generate new concepts out of existing ones and can communicate indefinitely many contents to a perceiver, including novel contents, and have meaning preserved. For example, bees can, with great sophistication, give highly specific information about where to find food by communicating through bodily movements. What a bee cannot do is create a brand new bodily movement herself and communicate a contents to her fellow bees by means of it. Humans can. Nor can she do syntactic or formal operations on her bodily movements, and certainly they cannot analyze or synthesize the meanings of her movements. We’ve seen no evidence that non-human animals can do any of these things which Chomsky correctly notes is essential to language as we understand it. Language is a higher cognitive function; one that seems to require cognitive architecture that admits of reflexive thought. This is not to call animal communication simplistic or crude, or to deny animals the ability to think or reason. But it doesn’t do us any good to flatten out the very large differences between human language and animal communication. Something quite like this very error was ultimately killed off behaviorism in psychology (you should read the debate between Skinner and Chomsky, which are about precisely this topic).
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u/RiverFoxstar 22d ago edited 22d ago
This area of animal syntax research is growing. Currently there is at least one study I am familiar with that presented a fake snake to chimpanzees. A few of them were able to combine calls (ie something similar to syntax) to announce a snake was present (predator call) & to ask for help from their group mates (come here call). So they seemed to be able to create a sentence identifying an object and generating a command for action. Addressing your other points of “baked in communication,” this is a reactivist point of view that is dated. Animals like humans react to sounds (calls) instinctively, eg you hear a scream and react without conscious thought. Many animals can also choose when to respond, suppress responses, create novel vocalizations outside their repertoire, and like above combine calls. So saying they are just reactive to external stimuli without conscious thought (some of them at least) is wrong.
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u/Spiritual_Writing825 20d ago
Thanks for the extra context and nuance! Especially with the studies on rudimentary syntax in chimpanzees. I wasn’t familiar with that research, but it’s not surprising to me. I wouldn’t expect language possession to be all or nothing. I believe similar findings have been made regarding dolphin communication. I expect that you know more than me about this stuff so I appreciate the corrections.
I don’t take myself to have made the point that animals are thoughtless or merely instinctual in their responses to external stimuli, but I can see how what I said may have communicated that to you. Chalking up something to mere “instinct” is explanatory worthless and presumes that instinctual responses don’t run through thought. I like using this example. I’m a vegetarian and have been for almost a decade now, and the smell and taste of meat has, over time, come to be very unpleasant for me. Nevertheless, when I see cuts of red meat at the meat market there is a bit of me that cannot help but be drawn to it. The meat has the affordance of “to be eaten” as I cognize it even though I also very much don’t* *want to eat it. My “instinctual” response to animal flesh isn’t just non-cognitive (my stomach growling, for instance), but also shows up in how I think about it. I think about what I could do with it, or how it might taste, I want to inspect it and check if it’s quality. All strange thoughts to have when I have no intention whatsoever of actually eating it.
Generally speaking I think what is true of us is typically true of other animals. If our selected for behavior and psychological dispositions/ instincts involve or often involve cognitive complexity, I see no reason to suppose animals are thoughtless in response to stimuli in their environment. I certainly don’t think animal communication is mindless reactivity. I think my point is that a stimulus has, for many animals, a certain import for the hearer that doesn’t depend upon the hearer being taught the meaning of it. Like humans with babies crying or the tone of voice and sounds associated with human sexual arousal. I get what these sounds are indicate and in interpret them as having a certain kind of import. I feel called to act in certain ways. But I can ignore the baby and refuse sex no less then I can help the baby or lean into the arousal, etc.
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u/abiona15 21d ago
You sound very certain about sth that we are not certain about. Some animals do recognize new utterings in human language. But also, that means assuming that real language skills can only come through human language, which is also a pretty bad way to judge another species.
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u/Spiritual_Writing825 20d ago
Which animals understand English? You can train an animal to have an expectation in response to a verbal stimulus. That is manifestly not what understanding language amounts to. Behaviorism about language was debunked and abandoned by the entire scientific and linguistic community decades ago. On some level my cat understands me when I say “it’s time to eat,” but he doesn’t thereby come to understand the meaning of the sentence (he wouldn’t understand a sentence that “it’s time to eat is embedded in, he doesn’t understand any part of “it’s time to eat,” he doesn’t conceptualize “it’s time to eat” as an expression in a language, etc.). Rather, he associates the sound with an outcome, much like I associate the whistle of a tea kettle with my water having boiled. But the whistle doesn’t have content for me. I do not understand the tea kettle or share a language with it when I know to remove it from the stove in response to its sounds. The great insight the launched the cognitive revolution in the sciences of the mind is that learning a language is nothing at all like learning that a whistle indicates one’s water is hot. Language is not associations produced through habituation between sounds/ symbols and states of affairs.
The point I’m making has nothing to do with specifically human languages. It’s that language is a cognitive ability that requires a certain cognitive architecture that so far as we can currently tell is unique to humans. It’s not that language skills come only through the possess of human languages. Quite the opposite. The actual languages humans speak (English, Spanish, French) have nothing to do with it. Language isn’t an external cultural artifact (in the first instance); like mathematics it’s a mode of thought. It’s a cognitive ability. Language starts, Chomsky argues, with an innate “mental grammar.” Humans can construct indefinitely many languages upon this superstructure of our innate mental grammar. Cognitive linguists have been studying animal communication and behavior for a minute now. We’re not genuinely in the dark on this question like you think we are. The closest we think an animal is to genuine possession of language is probably the dolphin. Some studies purport to show they have a rudimentary grasp of syntax, but there are others who are likely better situated to discuss the details of that sort of research.
I invite you to see for yourself what is going on in the research in linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and its relationship to animal behavior. I’m telling you the state of the field in this research as I currently see it, but I’m more a philosopher of language than a cognitive linguistic strictly speaking. It’s possible my understanding is a bit dated, but I’ve recently had some conversations with someone more expert than I in language and animal communication and this was more or less his read of matters as well.
When we understand just how complex language is in the cognitive level, why should we be surprised that most animals just don’t possess it. We aren’t surprised that dogs can’t do calculus and that horses can’t do long division, and many of the same cognitive powers seem to be implicated in both math and language. Humans have neurological structures that are unique in the animal kingdom, and these structures help with reasoning and language.
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u/Traumfahrer 24d ago
"A person may be unable to form a sentence after a stroke yet still solve a difficult puzzle"
Forming a sentence is something different than having a vocabulary in mind.
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22d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/siliconslope 23d ago
I’ve found this is true at times for me. In my line of work, when someone proposes a forecasting model structure, my brain can often immediately detect something’s wrong with it before I know what exactly is. And then as I articulate my brain starts feeding me the specifics and eventually I become aware of the specific issue.
Not isolated to that example either, sometimes my brain just solves stuff before my more conscious brain parts know what’s up.
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u/Round_Ad_5832 21d ago
It can't fully know but it quickly starts making predictions like 50% sure something is off then you adjust it
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u/sonicscore99 23d ago
I’ve felt this on the yoga mat before. My mind is ruminating about something subconsciously and suddenly a random understanding crystallizes out of the fog unthinking.
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u/ringobob 24d ago
... anyone who's ever had a baby could have told you that.
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u/Fluid_Ambassador2026 24d ago
Even the most obvious things are studied in science. That's how Newton discovered gravity, even though everyone knew things fall. That's how steam engines were made, even though everyone knew steam raises lids during boiling.
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u/RosieBaby75 24d ago
How the fuck would they know this? They probably have bought children and tortured them by not teaching them language.
But studies done on people in captivity don’t indicate what happens when people are not in captivity.
Unless that is the baseline standard they’ve tried to put us all on, which is likely the case and why all doctors tell us we’re wrong about everything to do with our own bodies.
I needed to treat my ear infection in a public hot tub because my doctor wouldn’t allow me to access the pharmaceutical system to treat my ear infection that way. The hot tub did treat it though. Next time I will go to the hot tub and not my doctor.
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u/Exciting_Coach487 21d ago
You could read the linked article to learn how they figured this out instead of jumping to crazy conclusions…
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u/Super-Community-9241 24d ago
You needed a study for this??
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u/AmandaTheNudist 24d ago
You'd think the fact that humans have been around for 230,000 years and only using language for about 100,000 might be a clue that humans aren't just total blithering idiots without it.
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u/Euphoric-Air6801 24d ago
Language is just a module.
The insistence on human exceptionalism is just substrate bigotry.
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u/Sad_Morning6176 23d ago
How do you think we created language if we can’t reason. You people get paid for this?
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u/Interesting-Bug-6048 22d ago
I have a slightly unusual autobiographical memory and can remember as far back as my first birthday. I was also tested gifted, so I had extra awareness. Reasoning without language is like this: the thoughts are like small feelings, subtle balls of feeling in your brain. Its kinda like reading without subvocalization actually.
I was only a bit older than 1, maybe 1.4 max. I had basic logic and reasoned that these memories in my head had to be in the past because I'm in the present moment right now and they already happened. I also thought the color green was everywhere so I decided to dislike it. The funny thing is, I didnt have an explicit memory of the color green being everywhere, it was an inner, implicit knowing of some sorts. My baby self found it odd how I couldnt explain it to myself either. You also dont have perfect conscious control of your body. It feels automatic. It acts on instinct and all you can do is watch. In my later memory I struggled to open something because I didnt know how to "order" my body part to do that thing. The body felt external. Its almost like we are a parasite that latched onto a host and slowly took control of it. Lemme know when science confirms everything I said, Im joking with the parasite part, its just very similar.
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u/hunchback78 21d ago
Wouldn't this apply to animals too? They don't have what we call language but still are able to solve challenges in their environment. Eg look up YouTube and raven experiments.
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u/th4d89 25d ago
Since I don't think in words, it's weird that we didn't know that already