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How the Brain Parses Language

quantamagazine.org

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Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#31

Post by throaway123213 »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #29
lapcat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs might be decent models of Level 1 I don't think so. Fast speakers and hyponotized people are still clearly conscious and "at home" inside, vastly more "human" than any LLM. Deliberation and evaluation imply thinking before you speak but do not imply that you can't otherwise think while you speak.

The body of knowledge on Ericksonian hypnotherapy is pretty clear that the effect of language on Level 1 is orthogonal to, and sometimes even opposed to, conscious processes. I became interested after being medically hypnotized for kidney stone pain. As the hypnotist spoke, I was consciously thinking: "this is dumb, it will never work." And yet it did. That's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" t…

"It's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" the whole time, yet something was processing and acting on the language independently."

It's unclear what you're referring to here. You were conscious, & you wanted to think the thought "this is dumb, it will never work." & you thought that. What was the independent process?

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#32

Post by [deleted] »

netfortius wrote: post #17

Every time I read something like this reminds me of Maturana (of autopoiesis fame), who was among the first scientists from where I started gaining an interest in these areas. Relevant to his view, in the area of language, is the following: "We human beings are living systems that exist in language. This means that although we exist as human beings in language and although our cognitive domains (domains of adequate a…

[deleted]

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#33

Post by adamzwasserman »

throaway123213 wrote: post #31
adamzwasserman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The body of knowledge on Ericksonian hypnotherapy is pretty clear that the effect of language on Level 1 is orthogonal to, and sometimes even opposed to, conscious processes. I became interested after being medically hypnotized for kidney stone pain. As the hypnotist spoke, I was consciously thinking: "this is dumb, it will never work." And yet it did. That's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" t…

"It's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" the whole time, yet something was processing and acting on the language independently." It's unclear what you're referring to here. You were conscious, & you wanted to think the thought "this is dumb, it will never work." & you thought that. What was the independent process?

The hypnotism worked. There was an unconscious process at work whose relationship to the words was completely different from my conscious reaction.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#34

Post by fellowniusmonk »

Anon84 wrote: post #15
liampulles wrote: post #9

What I'm curious about is what the language parts of the human brain look like for babies and toddlers. Humans obviously have a bunch of languages they can speak, and toddlers pick up the language that their guardians speak around their home, so there seems to be machinery there that is for the task of "online" learning.

Me too! Babies and toddlers brains are like sponges. We started teaching my baby 3 languages since birth (essentially I always spoken with her in my native language, my wife in hers and gets English from living in the US). She’s not even 4 yet an fully fluent in all three and seemlessly jumps back and forth between them. (To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence)

If you look at the rate of "new" word use after the first spoken word its very clear that word acquisition and categorizing occurs for a long period before that first word is ever spoken.

Speaking to babies is incredibly important for linguistics but probably for all types of complex brain function, I don't think there is an upper bound on how many words we should expose children too.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#35

Post by lapcat »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #29
lapcat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs might be decent models of Level 1 I don't think so. Fast speakers and hyponotized people are still clearly conscious and "at home" inside, vastly more "human" than any LLM. Deliberation and evaluation imply thinking before you speak but do not imply that you can't otherwise think while you speak.

The body of knowledge on Ericksonian hypnotherapy is pretty clear that the effect of language on Level 1 is orthogonal to, and sometimes even opposed to, conscious processes. I became interested after being medically hypnotized for kidney stone pain. As the hypnotist spoke, I was consciously thinking: "this is dumb, it will never work." And yet it did. That's exactly your point — I was fully conscious and "at home" t…

I think you're creating a false dichotomy between meta-thinking and mere reflex, when in fact most conscious thinking is neither of those.

My understanding is that a hypnotized person is very focused on the hypnotist and suggestible but can otherwise carry on a relatively normal conversation with the hypnotist. And certainly an unhypnotized chattering person is still conscious, aware of the context as well as the subject of their speech. You may find the speech dull and tedious, may even call it "mindless" as insult, yet it's honestly impossible to dispute that there's an active human mind at work.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#36

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

rdtsc wrote: post #26

> But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? With every technological breakthrough we always posit that the brain has to work like the newly discovered thing. At various times brains were hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, like a computer, like a network. Now, of course, the brain has to be like an LLM.

Yes, but at least now we're comparing artificial to real neural networks, so the way it works at least has a chance of being similar.

I do think that a transformer, a somewhat generic hierarchical/parallel predictive architecture, learning from prediction failure, has to be at least somewhat similar to how we learn language, as opposed to a specialized Chompyskan "language organ".

The main difference is perhaps that the LLM is only predicting based on the preceding sequence, while our brain is driving language generation by a combination of sequence prediction and the thoughts being expressed. You can think of the thoughts being a bias to the language generation process, a bit like language being a bias to a diffusion based image generator.

What would be cool would be if we could to some "mechanistic interpretability" work on the brain's language generation circuits, and perhaps discover something similar to induction heads.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#37

Post by fallingfrog »

I've had the experience of having migraines with aphasia- this is essentially a migraine aura that affects the part of the brain that processes language. I can confirm that while this was happening, i was aware of my surroundings and able to have thoughts, but I was unable to speak and unable to understand spoken or written language. It all just looked and sounded like gibberish. I thought about whether I should go to a hospital, what was going on, wondered whether my loved ones were concerned, and so on, but was unable to communicate any of those thoughts to other people. It was a bizarre experience.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#38

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

griffzhowl wrote: post #24

One disanalogy between human language use and LLMs is that language evolved to fit the human brain, which was already structured by millions of years of primate social life. This is more or less the reverse situation to a neural network trained on a large text corpus.

Yes, but animal/human brains (cortex) appear to have evolved to be prediction machines, originally mostly predicting evolving sensory inputs (how external objects behave), and predicting real-world responses to the animal's actions.

Language seems to be taking advantage of this pre-existing predictive architecture, and would have again learnt by predicting sensory inputs (heard language), which as we have seen is enough to induce ability to generate it too.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#39

Post by Grosvenor »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #19

There's an interesting falsifiable prediction lurking here. If the language network is essentially a parser/decoder that exploits statistical regularities in language structure, then languages with richer morphological marking (more redundant grammatical signals) should be "easier" to parse — the structure is more explicitly marked in the signal itself. French has obligatory subject-verb agreement, gender marking on…

And we have those French/English text corpora in the form of Canadian law. All laws in Canada at the federal level are written in English and French.

This was used to build the first modern language translation systems, testing them going from English->french->english. And in reverse.

You could do similar here , understanding that your language is quite stilted legalese.

Edit: there might be other countries with similar rules in place that you could source test data from as well.

Re: How the Brain Parses Language

#40

Post by GolDDranks »

tgv wrote: post #8
GolDDranks wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obvious that she means that it's something _like_ LLMs in some aspects. You are correct in that rhythm and intonation are very important in parsing language. (And also an important cue when learning how to parse language!) It's clear that the human language network is not like LLM in that sense. However, it _is_ a bit like an _early_ LLM (remember GPT2?) in the sense that it can produce and parse languag…

However ... language production and perception are quite separated in our heads. There's basically no parallel to LLMs. Note that the article doesn't give any, and is extremely vague about the biological underpinnings of language.

> language production and perception are quite separated in our heads

Do you have any evidence for this?

I am a former linguistics student (got my masters), and, after years of absenteeism in academia, interested in the current state of the affairs. So: "quite separated in our heads" Evidence for? against?

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