Using mechanical tools improves our language skills, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Using mechanical tools improves our language skills, study finds

sciencedaily.com

81 pointspseudolus15 comments

I just started reading Thousand Brain’s Theory, which is a really great book so far (recommended by Bill Gates)

One thing it talks about is how the neo-cortex is basically the same all over. Even specialised bits still look the same as other bits that specialise in something completely different. The implication being that all ‘intelligence’ is basically the same thing. Seeing is hearing is poetry is tool use etc

I’m probably doing a crap job explaining it though so read it for yourself!

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54503521-a-thousand-b...

This is consistent with the findings of positive manifold and singular g-factor from psychometry.

I don’t know anything about neuroscience so I’m just naval gazing out loud, but my grandpa always answered “the more synapse connections in your brain, the better. Don’t worry about when you will use this” when I whined about learning something. I suspect intelligence and knowledge acquisition is something like training layers in a neural net. Having pretrained edge detections and such is valuable even when the specific task is changed. There’s an underlying structure to most of the part of reality that we interface with.

The article’s summary: Research has revealed a correlation between being particularly proficient in tool use and having good syntactic ability. A new study has now shown that both skills rely on the same neurological resources, which are located in the same brain region. Furthermore, motor training using a tool improves our ability to understand the syntax of complex sentences and -- vice-versa -- syntactic training improves our proficiency in using tools.

I find both parts fascinating but especially the second, that improving proficiency in understanding complex sentences improves tool mastery.

Sounds like we need we word problems in shop and shop in language class.

A book on mathematical proof made the point that algebraic operators are similar to syntactic compound terms in natural language, like and and or. There's even a distributive property. Although algebra was kinda late to the party, the roots it leverages are not.

Manipulating natural language and algebraic expressions have both always felt mechanical to me.

(in the wonderful and joyful engineering sense, of being fun)

My father used mechanical tools. Every time he skinned his knuckles my vocabulary expanded.

I came here to mention something very similar, haha.

I've always admire YouTuber AvE's ability to string together seemingly off-the-cuff sentences which I would never think of but make perfect sense upon reflection. I'm sure there's many reasons for this ability, but it's fun to think his tool proficiency might be playing a part.

Can you give an example?

Any of his videos. He is captivating to watch

It's mostly a lot of creative (though crass) sexual innuendo.

I am reminded of a passage from a paper on working memory constraints by Dwight Read, Professor of Anthropology at UCLA.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049080060...

"Around 300,000 BP a major innovation in stone tool technology — the Levallois technique for flake removals — changed stone tool knapping from iterative flake removal to the repeated execution of an algorithm: “The characterization of the Levallois method given by Boëda (1995) clearly shows the sense in which this method becomes an algorithm for the production of flakes, rather than simply a particular method for the removal of a flake” (Read and van der Leeuw, 2008, p. 1963). The algorithm is used to prepare the surface of a flint nodule from which a flake will be removed. The removed flake is then shaped into the desired stone tool. Next, the surface of the nodule with the scar due to the flake removal is reworked so that the Levallois algorithm can be used again to remove another flake. This might be repeated for two or three flake removals.

The Levallois algorithm for flake production is not fully recursive since the stone surface that is the output of the algorithm (the stone surface with a scar due to the flake removal) must be modified before another flake can be removed using the Levallois algorithm. Around 50,000 BP, during the Upper Paleolithic, yet another technology — prismatic blade tool production — becomes widespread and is based on true recursion. For prismatic blade production, a stone nodule with a flat, striking platform is formed and then blades are recursively removed by striking the edge of the striking platform. The removal of one blade prepares the core for the removal of the next blade without any intermediate, preparatory steps (Read and van der Leeuw, 2008 and references therein); that is, the algorithm for blade removal has as its output a form on which the algorithm can be directly applied, and so on, until perhaps 100s of blades (as would be expected with true recursion) have been removed.iv

Blade technology flourished during the Upper Paleolithic and gave rise to a plethora of tools based on recursion (Hoffecker, 2007). Coolidge and Wynn (2004, 2005) have suggested that this florescence may relate to a genetic mutation expanding the capacity of the central executive component of working memory around 80,000 BP, between Stages vi and vii. Associated with this florescence is the appearance of new and more complex forms of social organization dependent upon culturally constructed kinship systems based on the recursive logic of genealogical tracing (Read 2001, Read in press a). By cultural, as opposed to biological, kin is meant kin determined through a culturally constructed system of kin relations expressed as a society specific kinship terminology (Parkin, 1997; Read, 2001, in press a). (A kinship terminology is a generative, conceptual system of kin terms through which the relation conditions that determine those who are one's relatives [Read, 1984, 2001, in press] can be computed. Briefly, person B is kin to person A [and reciprocally, person A is kin to person B] when person A has a kin term that may be used [properly] to refer to person B, where the kin terms have been conceptually generated in a manner similar to an algebraic structure.) A kinship terminology is transmitted through enculturation with the consequence that a kinship terminology is composed of shared knowledge (Read, Lane, and van der Leeuw, in press). Cultural kinship is grounded in (though not determined by) reproduction as it is culturally understood (Scheffler and Lounsbury, 1971; Keesing, 1975), not by the facts of biological reproduction. The neurological changes that enabled recursion to become part of the cognitive repertoire of Homo thus had profound consequences reaching far beyond the implications it had for language production."

That's well interesting, but the last paragraph seems to be unfounded speculation. I don't really see where the notion of non-familiar kinshipncomes in, as genetic inheritence is usualy enough for a first lesson in recursion, the father of the father of the father. Although, this didn't get me very far in class, as unrolling of more involved recursive loops in an itterative declaration style is notoriously difficult and in fact associated with increased complexity.

What might be more instructive for logic is negation, I suspect, as 50kya would roughly be the time of Aurignacian expansion and Cro Magnon meeting Neandertaler in Europe, though I'm not sure if that's the area they are looking at.

Path recursion would surely play a role, too, for nomadic hunter gatherers, but material evidence is of course substantial.

In that sense, locative expressions might suffice to generate terminology, eg. mary @ john, or master of engineering (in the gravel pit). This requires no social construct perse, only tolerance to the fact. Analysis in post hoc rationalization could thus be an emergent property. But! Bridestealing might require risk awareness, ie. predictive power, so it's a back and forth and survival ofthe fittest at play, if bride stealing played as much a role as it later did.

My language skills improve every time I hit a finger with a hammer :)

Paper: we found correlation between A and B. Title: A causes B

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