A Bicameral Semiotic: The Linguistic Sign as Image-Word Dyad

Eric Alexander La Freniere, paper presented at The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, Charleston, WV, June 2013.

Abstract: This read-visual presentation begins with a review of Julian Jaynes’s thesis that self-awareness was made possible by the emergence of sufficiently abstract and recursive metaphors across the asymmetric human neocortex, where the right hemisphere (RH) emphasizes gestalt, parallel, and affective processing, and the left hemisphere (LH) emphasizes abstract, serial, and cognitive processing. The functional nodes called the brain’s “language centers”— Broca and Wernicke’s areas — are typically LH-localized, and researchers often treat speech exclusively in terms of abstraction. Jaynes argued, however, that the RH analogue of Wernicke’s area communicates emotionally prioritized environmental cues to the LH, where that information was previously hallucinated as the imperative speech of spirits, ancestors, and gods.

The biological evolution of brain asymmetry is then discussed by tracing its origin to the emergence of eyes during the Cambrian radiation. Groups ranging from fish to birds have competing, lateralized avoidance or “fight-or-flight” responses and approach or “feed-orbreed” responses, where the former are more whole-field (gestalt) and automatic and the latter are more isolating-differentiating (abstract) and deliberative. The evolution of the corpus callosum among placental mammals was a profoundly adaptive brain change that allowed for more blended responses to environmental pressures — although the hemispheric poles of the avoidance-approach binary were rapidly driven farthest apart by hominin handedness and tool use, as indicated by the archeological record and by our Yakovlevian-torque enlarged planum temporale.

The most influential theory of the linguistic sign is then examined. Pioneering semiotician Ferdinand Saussure held that the signs are conjunctions of signifier, or speech itself (the utterance), and the signified, or an idea. Speech was thus treated as a component of the linguistic sign — the building block of speech and narrative consciousness — and the structuralist schools that followed Saussure consider(ed) language only as it related to concepts, and cut off from body and environment. That purely non-perceptual and synchronic understanding obviated the need for any theory of language evolution, and reinforced an historical ban on any such speculation.

An alternative bicameral semiotic is then proposed, allowing for a brain-hemispheric theory of the evolution of language and selfawareness. Contingency-based abstraction or conceptualization is viewed as necessary but not sufficient for the emergence of language, since the RH processes sensory input — including human bodies and voices — to establish the ground of attention and meaning upon which LH abstraction operates. The linguistic sign or embodied utterance is thus treated as a gestalt image-abstract word dyad permeated by feedback, and the evolutionary emergence of language is recognized as involving the social sublimation of the avoidance response. Studies are summarized that demonstrate the verbal (LH)-nonverbal (RH) lateralization of visual-written and auditory-spoken stimuli, and to show that more imagistic words are learned more easily.

Language is then envisioned as a kind of Lorenz attractor — a complex dynamical system swirling about the image and word poles of the linguistic sign. The nonlinear bistable system has two low-energy states centered within the brain’s hemispheres and separated by a maximum-energy barrier constituted by the corpus callosum, which is regulated by switching prompts from the cingulate cortex. The evolutionary emergence of language is also depicted as a Koch snowflake, showing the crystallization of word forms from the most imagistic-emotive to the most abstract-recursive: holophrastic exclamations, then nouns and adjectives, then verbs and adverbs, then conjunctions and prepositions, and finally pronominal metawords. Additionally, a bifurcation diagram is used to show how increasingly abstract word forms allowed for better representation through simple sentences, better recombination through compound sentences, and better syntactical recursion through complex sentences. Spurred on by writing, in particular, linguistic recursion eventually allowed for syntactical-metaphorical constructions such as “I Am Who I Am” and “I think, therefore I am.” Thus culture and complex mind sprang reiteratively from a simple avoidance-approach / mapping-signaling system.

This presentation concludes by focusing on the criticality of pronouns in the transition from proto-language to language proper, and in recapitulative fashion, from bicameral mind to self-aware consciousness. Pronouns are abstractions of abstractions that enhance abstraction across all word forms and point to self-reference, as exemplified by the pronoun I. Interestingly, linguist Daniel Everett contends that the often-sung speech of the Amazonian Pirahã people exhibits the smallest known pronoun inventory and lacks complex sentences and syntactical recursion. Moreover, the Pirahã people are concerned almost exclusively with immediate concretes, have no creations myths and barely any art, and regularly hallucinate what we might consider nature spirits, which they feel compelled to obey. Do the Pirahã people represent a proto-linguistic and/or a bicameral survival?