Power Systems Read Online Free PDF

proposals which also just can’t be true, but are still pursued very actively. You read about them in the press, just as you read things about other organisms having language capacity. There’s a lot of mythology about language, which is very popular. I really don’t want to sound too dismissive, but I feel dismissive. I think these ideas can’t be considered seriously.
    Whatever our language faculty is, humans develop it very quickly, on very little data. In some domains, like the meaning of expressions, there’s virtually no data. Nevertheless it’s picked up very quickly and very precisely, in complex ways. Even with sound structure, where there’s a lot of data—there are sounds around, you hear them—it’s still a regular process and it’s distinctively human. Which is striking, because it’s now known that the auditory systems of higher apes, say chimpanzees, appear to be very similar to the human auditory system, even picking out the kinds of sounds that play a distinctive role in human language. Nevertheless, it’s just noise for the ape—they can’t do anything with it. They don’t have the analytical capacities, whatever they are.
    What’s the biological basis for these human capacities? That’s a very difficult problem. We know a lot, for example, about the human visual system, partly through experimentation. At the neural level, we know about it primarily from invasive experiments with other species. If you conduct invasive experiments on other mammals, cats or monkeys, you can find the actual neurons in the visual system that are responding to a light moving in a certain direction. But you can’t do that with language. There is no comparative evidence, because other species don’t have the capacity and you can’t do invasive experiments with humans. Therefore, you have to find much more complex and sophisticated ways to try to tease out some evidence about how the brain is handling all this. There’s been some progress in this extremely difficult problem, but it’s very far from yielding the kind of information you could get from experimentation.
    If you could experiment with humans, say, isolating a child and controlling carefully the data presented to it, you could learn quite a lot about language. But obviously you can’t do that. The closest we’ve come is looking at children with sensory deprivation, blind children, for example. What you find is pretty amazing. For example, a very careful study of the language of the blind found that the blind understand the visual words look , see , glare , gaze , and so on quite precisely, even though they have zero visual experience. That’s astonishing. The most extreme case is actually material that my wife, Carol, worked on, adults who were both deaf and blind. There are techniques for teaching language to the deaf-blind. Actually, Helen Keller, who is the most famous case, invented them for herself. It involves putting your hand on somebody’s face, with your fingers on the cheeks and thumb on the vocal cords. You get some data from that, which is extremely limited. But that’s the data available to the deaf-blind, and they have pretty remarkable language capacity. Helen Keller was incredible, a great writer, very lucid. She’s an extreme case.
    Carol did a study here at MIT. She found in working with people with sensory deprivation that they achieved pretty remarkable language capacity. You have to do quite subtle experiments to find things they don’t know. In fact, they managed to get along by themselves. The primary subject, the one most advanced, was a man who was a tool and die maker, I think. He worked in a factory somewhere in the Midwest. He lived with his wife, who was also deaf-blind, but they found ways to communicate with buzzers in the house and things that you could touch that vibrated. He was able to get from his house to Boston for