What Makes Humans Different

Giraffes check me out as I check them out.

Attention is much older than the genus Homo but we have turned it into a liberating power. Attention began as a reflex action. Something unexpected happens—there is a sudden noise, bright color, disgusting scent, hard poke—and an animal focuses on it, becomes aware of it. I was once on a walk in Zambia and far away, maybe a quarter of a mile distant, viewed from one ridge to another, a giraffe came out of a clearing and began walking down a slope toward water. It was the first time I ever saw a giraffe before it saw me. One of the people I was with whispered, "Look," and the giraffe heard the word. It stopped and stared straight at us. Then it turned and retreated back into the woodlands. There you have the classic animal use of attention: focus, awareness, action. This behavior is millions of years old and allows animals to include some adaptability in their actions. Animals with attention have an either/or switch in their system. They can focus, become aware and act in either of a couple of ways. They are not bugs accidentally orbiting a light bulb until either they drop in exhaustion or the light goes off.

Attention can also be directed by noticing another's attention. When chimpanzees notice a member of their troop is looking at something, they stop and look too. We do the same thing. We can watch the actions of another and learn from them. Again, attention allows for flexibility and adaptability in individual actions.

People have broadened this flexibility much further, combining it with language to produce a species so different that as somebody said, was it Terrence Deacon?, we are almost a different phylum. The two fundamental powers that make language such an unusual tool are:

1. Communicative: We can cooperate with one another, trust one another to the extent of sharing knowledge, and we do this by directing one another's attention to things physical, visionary, or abstract.
2. Meditative: We can think with words, using them to direct our attention without requiring input from the environment, the way giraffes and apes do. The result of this power is astonishing. A person can sit and meditate and, without anything happening in the environment, the person changes behavior. Things that would have gone unnoticed before the meditation start drawing attention afterwards.

Given the above facts, doesn't it make sense to probe attention in a serious way? Shouldn't we start wondering how language and attention interact? Wouldn't the answers be not only interesting but useful?

In my last post, I mentioned a new collection of papers in a book titled Attention and Meaning. It draws together the work of a variety of scholars around the world who are exploring the relation between attention and language. The first paper, "Operational Linguistics: A Brief Introduction," is by one of the book's editors, Giulio Benedetti. He argues that, "Language…is not a mere 'labeling' of objects…but also has a constructive character," [p. 3] and that the constructions of language are achieved by directing attention. Language's building of sentences and ideas rests on the following mental operations:

• Attentional focalization: the ability to direct attention to some specific location.
• Presence keeping: the ability to bear in mind the existence of one thing while focusing on another.
• Attentional discarding: the ability to forget about something and focus on something else.
• Operation of Representation: the ability to attend to something absent. We can be reminded of something not in the environment.
• Operation of comparison: the ability to perceive a qualitative difference between the thing attended to and something else. An animal paying attention, for example, can tell that one thing is bigger than something else absent.
• Operation of memory: Benedetti lists memory as important in our mental life but is not specific (although presence keeping, representation and comparison are all dependent on memory). Certainly an important element of memory in language is the ability to retain the words of a sentence as they are spoken so that you can understand the sentence as a whole.

Benedetti does not mention binding, but I believe that is another important mental operation. If you look at a field of flowers you see different colors, feel the changes in the air, smell the field, and hear the sounds around you. Despite the fact that these sensations arise via different sense organs and are processed in different parts of the brain, we experience these separate inputs as a whole. That too is a fundamental mental ability.

By the way, these mental operations are not controversial. Cognitive psychologists are well aware of the lot, although how they work is an open question.

Presumably, chimpanzees and many other animals can perform these mental operations. What people can do, thanks to language, that other animals likely cannot do is harness the operations so that we can direct our own and other's thoughts in useful, novel ways. Benedetti's fundamental thesis is: grammatical elements designate sequences of mental operations. [8] Words and phrases pilot attention.

An example of how this piloting works is in the genitive (possessive) case. The phrase glass of water draws attention to (a perhaps imaginary) glass and then to water. When we focus on the water we bear in mind the glass and understand the two things together. The genitive case is found in all languages and has many different uses, leading to enormously complex analysis of what genitive constructions can mean. Benedetti says no, it is simple. The function of the genitive is "to induce the listener's attention to focus on something, A, by means of the relationship that A has with something else, B, and to bear in mind the existence of this relationship." [6] It is simple enough for even a three-year-old to understand and—what do you know?—three year olds can understand it. We have not had to propose that the genitive is universal because somehow the presence of such a complex set of relations is innate. All we need to say is that three-year-olds can focus attention, shift attention, and bear something in mind. If giraffes are smart enough to do it, your kid can do it.