Speaking of Symbolic Communications

by Nancy Sherer

Humans are very smug about our symbolic communications. Even after years of concentrated effort, other primates can barely reach the bar of symbolic thought. "The Symbolic Species" by Terrence W. Deacon discusses human verbosity in great detail. However, there are other examples of symbolic transfer of information that are generally overlooked.

For example, we all learned in 5th grade health class that the eyeballs are not the site of sight. Or to be less succinct, we see with our brains, not our eyeballs. Damage to visual processing parts of the brain result in loss of sight regardless of the health of the eye.

The human brain has thirty sites in the brain that are used for vision. Some sites are to process motion, others to discern pattern, others to perform other tasks. Scientists have mapped and defined some of these areas, and speculate that the many areas relating to vision exist because vision is important to our species.

There's just one other thing to consider before going on. When your eyeballs let in light, they do NOT transmit the image as though they were film projectors showing a movie. The images your eyes focus on are sent to different sites in the brain in the same way every other bit of information travels through your brain– through electro-chemical reactions from brain cell to brain cell. In other words, the eye turns images into chemical messages that are sent through the brain. Then different parts of the brain receive symbolic information and translates it into light, color, motion, and so on.

There are lots of species that have great eyesight, and it functions in the same way as ours does. Doesn't that mean that even a bird brain has symbolic functions? Although our symbolic thought is a matter of great pride to us, could it be that symbolic processes are more directly related to chemical reactions than we previously believed? That is– rather than being a complex function of a large neo-cortex, perhaps symbolic thought is a variation of the basic means of communication for organic molecules in more general applications.