Social Skills – Integration – Language
by pre.
In January of this year, we examined language.
We examined the way language evolved thanks to the undeniable evolutionary benefit it gives to those who speak it. The ability to pass on learned knowledge to your offspring, the ability to learn from those around you and of course to influence them in return. This is the benefit which language gives which enabled us to evolve such a highly complex and structured way to serialize and pass on the very content of our minds. We evolved language.
We talked about how making the words you use more vivid, more expressive and evocative, helps you to capture the attention of those you talk to and increase the efficiency of your communication. We had you practice that, in your sleep, to encourage you to pay more attention to it, and so to learn to do it better.
You also learned how language allows humans to program not only each other’s brains, but also their own. How they can time bind, to learn from experiences which are long gone and pass on our knowledge to generations to come. That this process, over time, leads to an exponential growth of human culture and knowledge.
We even talked about the way learning a language alters your very consciousness, affects the very structure of your mind itself. How learning a language enables us to do things like teach each other how to meditate, showing the absurdity of trying to teach a monkey to do it.
Your very awareness is trained and developed during the course of you learning language by the way people direct it as they talk to you. Every time a person points out another thing, your awareness gets another little boost, another little practice at directing and focusing your mind. Language actually reshapes your mind, builds and improves your ability to focus and concentrate.
When we talked of memory, we considered chunking, the ability to encode memories in a different way in order to learn them more efficiently. Language skills help here immensely, every new word you learn is another chunk to use when storing memories.
Your body awareness is likewise enhanced, with a mental ability to chop up your body into discrete units. Where does that pain hurt? You certainly couldn’t describe it without words but those words themselves also provide a useful handle for locating a position on your body. Not only do you feel that pain just below the elbow, you conceive of it there, a hypnotist can make you feel it there using nothing but words even if your elbow is actually just fine.
Your language affects every one of the spiral skills since your language is the very tool you use to think about those skills. It’s through language that you know what words like awareness,
memory, consciousness, body, cognition, bio-programming, social skills and ethics actually mean.
You lean what each of these skills is, how it works, by talking about it with your family and friends. By learning which words others use in association with those skills, building an associative and semantic network of words which link to each other in ways which define what you mean by those words.
Finally, language also allows the transmission of memes, and we’ll do a special memes article to discuss how that changes your brain and improves all your mental powers next week.