Language

Language is a system for representing patterns with sound, one of several ways an organism can encode and communicate the metabolically-driven pattern recognition that forms the biological basis of consciousness. He argued that culture works through language, and that a rule-bound, rigidly verbal relationship to language stifles intelligence and creativity the same way stress hormones do.

Language as pattern recognition

Recognition of pattern, first of things present, then of meaningful sequences, is what is called awareness or consciousness. Naming is naming a pattern, a set of relationships, and any language's grammar and vocabulary are just its particular way of handling that job:

A name for “a thing” is a name for a pattern, a set of relationships. The method of naming or identifying a relationship can make use of any way of patterning sound that can be recognized as making distinctions. Concepts and grammar aren't separable things, “semantics” and “syntax” are just aspects of a particular language's way of handling meaning.

— Ray Peat

A child builds language by comparing the pattern of a new thing to the patterns of things already known; noticing similarities and differences this way is the same process as forming an analogy or metaphor. Similarities become generalizations, and distinctions let things be grouped into categories. This metaphorical-analogical process, not rule-following, is the real engine of thought, traced down to animals: chimpanzees solving a box-opening task used more flexible, adaptive strategies than three-year-old children did, a difference researchers attributed to children's greater susceptibility to cultural convention. A related study by the same research group, using an analogous trap-tube task, quantified this gap directly: only 2 of 6 young chimpanzees (ages 2-7) managed a successful strategy, while 3- to 4-year-old children showed the same limitation as the less successful chimpanzees, and only 5- to 6-year-olds were able to master the task.

Language as a closing-off of thought

Peat described a specific mechanism by which language, once acquired, can shut down the exploratory thinking that built it in the first place. A question answered verbally is useful, but the verbal answer can also short-circuit the underlying process of open-ended inquiry, substituting a fixed rule for what would otherwise stay a live, revisable pattern:

When words are available, questions may be verbalized. The way in which questions are answered verbally may be useful, but it often diverts the questioning process, and provides rules and arbitrary generalizations that may take the place of the normal analogical processes of intelligence. The vocabulary of patterns no longer expands spontaneously, but tends to come to rest in a system of accepted opinions.

— Ray Peat

Idioms and clichés, the stereotyped word-clusters that make up a large share of ordinary speech, work the same way at a larger scale: a mind that can absorb tens of thousands of them by adulthood can just as easily absorb the relatively small, cliché-like rule set that makes up a language's grammar. Once a question is closed by a rule that must be followed rather than left open to revision, subsequent learning becomes analytical and deductive instead of exploratory, and a mind that once thought in open generalizations settles into "a system of accepted opinions."

Digital versus analog thinking

Peat linked this rule-bound mode of thought to what he called "digital," as opposed to "analog," cognition: navigating by a memorized sequence of verbal instructions ("turn left, walk three blocks, turn right") rather than by a direct mental picture of the terrain. He traced the same digital preference into biology and medicine, where treating cancer and inflammation as unrelated categories felt "obvious" only to people already committed to a rule-based, essentialist framework, and seemed like a single continuous process to anyone thinking in analog terms instead.

I thought this style of thinking might have something to do with the growing technological preference for digital, rather than analog, devices. The complexity and continuity of the real world is made to seem more precise and concrete by turning it into rules and numbers.

— Ray Peat

Language, authority, and control

Peat read the mid-20th-century academic enthusiasm for rule-based theories of language, above all Noam Chomsky's "universal grammar," as ideology rather than evidence-based science. He linked it to Konrad Lorenz's near-identical claim of an innate communication "structure," noting that Lorenz's writing on this subject descended directly from material he had produced for the Nazi Office for Race Policy. The popularity of both theories among academics is evidence of an authoritarian personality type that finds rule-bound, rather than open and metaphorical, thinking congenial:

Theories of mind and language that justify arbitrary power, power that can't justify itself in terms of evidence, are more dangerous than merely mistaken scientific theories, because any theory that bases its arguments on evidence is capable of being disproved.

— Ray Peat

George Orwell, whose novels dramatized how language is used to control people, believed language should work like a clear window between minds even though it is habitually used to distort and mislead instead. Peat drew the same connection between language and authority in the clinic: physicians who go on to become rigid rule-followers after a year or two of medical school, he wrote, have had their minds "radically affected" by vocational indoctrination into a profession's accepted language and assumptions, the same mechanism by which culture in general narrows a naturally exploratory, intelligent mind.

Verbal excess and the retreat to painting

Habitual overuse of language, reading, talking, and writing for long stretches, is a literal physiological cost. Alternating into a nonverbal activity like painting or sculpture reversed the damage, because it drew on a different mode of thought:

I found that if I would take a break from reading and talking and writing and do sculpture or painting, that it would prevent the brain damage from too much verbalization. And alternating between painting and sculpture is good, because you have different approaches to dimensional thinking, and using the verbal part of your brain too much tends to deepen the ruts, and you can sort of jump out of old ruts if you paint or sculpt for a while.

— Ray Peat

It is the same mechanism applied to his own working life rather than to culture at large: painting gave him the "different approach to dimensional thinking" that broke the rut, a direct, nonverbal engagement with pattern. See Creativity for the fuller account of how Peat used painting and Blake's example to counter purely verbal, conceptual thinking.

See also

• Creativity
• Intelligence
• Ray Peat's philosophy
• William Blake
• Genetic determinism