OUR GREATEST SUPERPOWER

A quick flick through the shows currently playing in (or coming soon to) London’s West End reveals a 2,500 year chronology of stories.  They may be radically re-imagined, or translated into Musicals, or both, but the core narratives still speak to us down the millennia…   

Oedipus 420 BCE

Electra 410 BCE

Richard II 1595

Much Ado 1599

Oliver! 1838

Les Misérables 1862

The Phantom of the Opera 1910

The Great Gatsby 1925

The Mousetrap 1947

But this is just the tip of a VERY big iceberg.

Research published this week* uses genetic markers (single nucleotide polymorphisms) to date the initial population division within Homo Sapiens to around 135,000 years ago and makes the point that:

‘Given that this and all subsequent divisions led to populations with full linguistic capacity, it is reasonable to assume that the potential for language must have been around 135,000 years ago, before the first division occurred.’

And while it might have taken a wee while for the West Midlands Chapter of The Business Of Pleasure to come up with lines like:

‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.’

And slightly longer for Shakespeare’s near near-neighbour, Albert Eric Maschwitz (born Edgbaston, 1901) to pen:

‘A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces.’

...the functional iceberg these lyrics sit atop makes Antarctica look about the size, of the contents, of a tiny ice-cream cone (like those pesky amuse bouches posh nosheries like to present with a Houdini-like flourish)

Without the (language) ability to externalise mental representations in a form that can be stored and shared, mathematics (and all its scientific siblings and offspring, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, IT, AI, et al) are unlikely to have progressed beyond the finger-counting/finger-pointing level.

Laws, also, would have failed to make much of an impression without the cohesion of language, and their siblings and offspring ...cities, trade, commerce, culture.

And of course, those bastions of The Business of Pleasure, Art, Literature, Theatre, Music, Dance and Cinema would all be (almost) non-starters, But because we are kind of programmed to think of language primarily in terms of communication, we tend to overlook its vital role in our individual internal information management; storage, organising and processing.  Just try memorising, and then retrieving, your thoughts on that film you saw last night …without words.  Good luck with that! 

As the earliest cities began to emerge (probably 8,000 to 10,000 years ago) life became exponentially more complicated. Soon there was too much language-based information for these newly-minted citizens to hold in their heads, so we (as a species) started notching clay tablets, inscribing scrolls, etc. Or so one theory proposes** 

Then, when there was way too much information for us to enter manually in individual manuscripts, the printing presses served us well for several centuries. 

But of course, the books those presses mass-produced then generated exponentially more information for us to cope with (through the subsequent development, dissemination and cross-fertilisation of ideas, technologies, arts and culture, etc.) and (relatively) soon there was, once again, 'too much information' for us to manage on the available media (hardback, paperback, and the paper-filled manilla files that were the curse of everyone entering the employemnt world midway through the last century). So next we had to build machines to house all that information in (and keep it usable) followed by machine-based systems that could access and organise all the information in (nearly) all the machines (almost) simultaneously.

Iceberg #3 The REALLY Big One.

Great as it is for us to be able store, process and communicate information. And to compose sonnets, conduct space travel, identify (and one day exploit) every nook and cranny of the Human Genome). Language’s biggest gift makes these benefits look like mere baubles. Because when, at a critical stage of our individual development, we each make the giant leap from external (language) speech to internal (language) speech, a huge percentage of what we perceive as our conscious selves is composed of that inner speech.  Go on, if you don’t believe me; just have a listen to all those words buzzing around your brain box as you read this. Then try to stay across the commentary that they/you produce when you/they read the extract below from Russian Psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s 1934 book: ‘Thought and Language’:

‘Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech -it is a function of itself. It still remains speech, i.e. thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embedded in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought…’

And later (in fact the last paragraphs, of the last page of Vygotsky's last work***)...

‘If language is as old as consciousness itself, and if language is a practical conscious-for-others and, consequently, consciousness-for-myself, then not only one particular thought but all consciousness is connected with the development of the word. The word is a thing in our consciousness, as Feuerbach put it, that is absolutely impossible for one person, but that becomes a reality for two. The word is a direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness. Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun is in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.’

When faced with the 135,000 year-old chicken-and-egg conundrum; did language beget consciousness or consciousness beget language? we turn, once again, to the West Midlands and Birmingham born Punk-Turned-Telly-Tubbie Toyah Wilcox for the final (for now) word on the subject:

‘It's a mystery, it's a mystery, I'm still searching for a clue

It's a mystery to me shot in the dark

The big question mark in history'

 DT

14 March 2025

*Miyagawa, DeSalle, Nóbrega, Nitschke, Okumura, Tattersall 11 March 2025

**Robert K Logan ‘The Extended Mind’

***Vygotsky 'The Father of Russian Psychology' died the same year that 'Thought and Language' was published, 1934, at the grand old age of 37.