Applied Love - страница 4

Consultant: This is despite the fact that, as the Engineer says, we do not see the person directly. There are photons flying to the retina of the eye, there are sound waves, there are molecules of smell, the warmth of touch, and all this is combined with the image of this person in memory, which is refined with each new portion of information. Returning to our previous conversation: there is a person somewhere in the external environment, and in our head we see him only as a float on the surface of our consciousness… People, like fish in the ocean of life, touch our sensory hooks, fishing lines are pulled, and we sit on the shore of our consciousness and talk with floats :(

Writer: Have you ever wondered what “consciousness” is? Tell me, how many fingers do you see?

Engineer: Two.

Consultant: I do confirm, two. But what's the catch? It is the usual test for the presence of consciousness. When a person falls unconscious, after he is brought to his senses, he is asked about the number of fingers to make sure that it is adequate.

Writer: It turns out that you know that there are two of them. And you know. And I know. And we have “co-knowledge” or “co-science”! Latin roots confirm the same meaning: consciousness – shared knowledge. An interesting lesson is to take a close look at English words starting with “co-” and “con-”.

Engineer: It turns out that consciousness is somehow connected with language? We are with you in the Russian mind, the British in the English mind, the Chinese in the Chinese. And when we learn other languages, do we expand our consciousness?

Consultant: Square, triangle, circle…

Engineer: I disagree. “A chair” is “a chair” everywhere despite the wording of the language.

Writer: And what about different associations and connotations?

Engineer: It turns out that there is a certain capacity of the language, and it depends not only on the number of words, but also on the number of connections between them. Just like with human neurons! According to the latest data that I heard, there are about eighty billion of them, and there are more neural connections that these neurons form among themselves than there are stars in the sky! Some incredible numbers.

Consultant: I heard that a child, when he is born, has many more neurons than an adult. During growing up, those neurons that were not activated and did not begin to participate in neural connections die off. How a sculptor gradually removes everything superfluous from a single piece of marble and the figure remains.

Writer: The main question is – what is superfluous in our brain? Returning to the language. From the age of one, my wife and I taught our son three languages at once – English, French and Russian, of course. Courses for toddlers, tutors. The first words he began to speak in English. Apparently, because the words are shorter – "cat", "dog"… The idea to develop a child through learning different languages from childhood belonged to my wife, and at first I looked closely, but then I realized that there was no overload, languages were learned playfully – and I calmed down. It is interesting that during a conversation, the son freely switches from one language to another, never mixes them up. If I see an object, for example, an apple, then the Russian word “apple” appears in my head, which I can “translate” in the same head into “apple” in English. Just the way we learned languages – translation. And the son saw an apple for the first time, when he did not know any name, he just saw a tasty object. Heard three different names and remembered. That is, in my head “object – word 1 – then word 2”, and in his brain all connections are immediately ignited “object – word 1”, “object – word 2”, “object – word 3”.