Weird experience of deconstructing language

[Carl-Richard]

So I was doing N-Back training, which for me notably involves memorizing and rehearsing a growing string of letters and their positions in a three-by-three grid.

Then I noticed that the sound of the letters I was rehearsing internally, could just as well have been me rehearsing some bodily movement, like a dance move, because the sound is a byproduct of a mouth movement after all, and because I'm just attaching meaning to the sound, it's not inherent to the sound.

We all have experienced this before where we repeat something enough times and the word loses meaning and just becomes a weird sound. But this was special in that I was noticing it happening as I was storing relationships between different sounds in my memory, and I really got the directly felt experiental sense that all sort of language processing or storing and manipulating symbols and their relationships, their logic — all of it was first seen for what it is with its meaning attached, and then for a short moment, all of that meaning was seen through as a marvelous illusion, and all that was left was the bare bones of the structured noises underneath.

Now, imagine if you had used bodily movements like dance moves to memorize things and communicate instead of sounds. That's what deaf people who speak sign language do after all. Imagine that if you were reading these letters, instead of sounds in your head, dance moves popped up.

Edited 11 hours ago by Carl-Richard