Sentences

The following is a quote from Hyper Focus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey. As usual, any typos are my own.

As you read, your brain is hard at work converting the raw bits of perceptual information into facts, stories and lessons that you remember and internalize. After your eyes register the waves of light emanating from the page, your mind generates words from them. These words temporarily fill your attentional space. You then begin connecting the words to form syntactic units and clauses - the fundamental building blocks of sentences. Finally, using your attentional space as a scratch pad, your brain groups those combinations of words together into complete idea so you can extract their higher-level meaning.

Sentence structure can influence this process and slow down or speed up how quickly you read. Much as the world doesn't combine many groups of data in to sets greater than seven, every book is structured to accommodate a reader's restricted attentional space. Sentences have a limited length and are punctuated by commas, semicolons, and dashes. According ton one study, the period at the end of a sentence is the point when our attentional space "stops being loaded, and what has been present in it up to that moment, must be in some way stored in a summarized form in a short-term memory."

This is super interesting to me, because reading isn't natural! It's an entirely artificial construct that, for the vast majority of people who are literate today, has only been available to our ancestors for a few generations - not nearly long enough for our brains to evolve to accommodate it. (For example, compulsory public education was introduced recently enough in the various places where my ancestors lived that I have personally met the first people in each branch of the family to have access to it. Some were my great-grandparents and some were my grandparents. One of them is still living.)

I always thought of learning to read as simply sounding out words until you can do it automatically, but upon reading this I realize it involves so many more mental processes than I originally thought, not all of which are natural, but all of which the majority of the population can learn to do automatically with just a few years of instruction and practice!

And this also extrapolates to spoken language (although spoken language isn't nearly as recent and our brains have had more time to evolve accordingly). Our brains learn to pick up not just the meaning of words and how syntax works, but the very concept of a sentence - picking up cues that mean "This thought is done, save to memory", and, conversely, conveying those cues.

Language surely did not emerge with a fully-formed grammar, so human brains had to figure out both how to indicate "This thought is done, save to memory" and to process that concept.

I wonder if, in the very early days of human language, processing these concepts was difficult, like how reading is hard work when you're a little kid? I wonder if elders were thinking "Kids Today! Why can't they just point and grunt?"

I wonder if there are, or ever have been, any languages that don't have the concept of a sentence?