The Art of Ideation
What is our most powerful sense as a species? Note that the question is not which sense we rely on the most. They are not all equal, which should not come as a surprise. What might be is that the answer is touch. Our skin as largest organ aside, no other sense can kill you if it is denied. Touch is our strongest sense because it binds us to a community, brings us pleasure, pain, comfort, and healing. Denying the sensation of touch can kill infants, it can also be lethal for adults who are suffering from illness. Being denied the sensation of touch means our bodies do not produce some of the healing agents our bodies produce, like oxytocin. The lack of physical contact can trigger psychological ailments as well. Yet with all that power and brain matter devoted to the sense of touch and the skin, it is not a sense we depend upon to make sense of the world at large beyond tactile sensations and ambient temperature. Even smell, which triggers potent memories, feelings, and alerts us to potentially harmful food sources, gives way to the primacy of sight.
There are some highly complex aspects to how our senses operate, but for purposes of this topic, only one type of stimulus matters: oscillations. They come in numerous types, but the two that affect perception are pressure and electromagnetic. Depending on the sense, the wavelength and the medium of transmission, the senses of sight, touch, and hearing are alerted to a stimulus within range of our sense organs. Our eyes perceive electromagnetic, our ears pressure, and our skin both (heat is a form of electromagnetic radiation). To be clear, none of these elements are the same or should be seen as such as the oscillations in a floor do not equate with those from sound. Both are forms of pressure, but one does not normally hear the gentle sway of a building or feel the pressure of the upper registers of sound (though you might be able to observe an object vibrate in resonance of a sound). The same can be said of visible light and heat. Without venturing into territory often reserved for metaphysical studies, the sensations are measured using the same measurement: the number of vibrations per second, known as hertz (Hz). Something that vibrates twice every second is annotated as 2 Hz, for example.
Here is where I completely collapse unrelated systems into their mathematical equivalents with full knowledge that none of these should be construed as forming the same continuum (sound and light are not part of the same spectrum). Each octave has double the oscillations as the one below it. That range denotes all of the sounds (e.g. notes) in the octave. It also helps to explain why the pitch of a note is recognizable despite being from a higher/lower register. The sounds have wave peaks that sync up with a 2:1 ratio per octave shift. From that, we recognize the notes as the same, just different pitch. You might not be aware on a conscious level that your brain is doing this, but you do recognize the harmony of sounds.
Four paragraphs in and I am afraid I may have lost part of my audience or that it may seem that I have gone far afield of my original point of catachrestic dichotomy. This is because the issue of conflated oscillations for three of our senses might not seem related (similar to how this paragraph has been calling attention to itself as an apology). If all frequencies of vibration occupied the same scale, we would have less need to talk about this issue and the artifice of communication from one medium to another. According to Kimberly Myles and Mary S. Binseel, amongst other researchers, the range of our greatest sensitivity to vibrations by touch is .4 Hz and may very well exceed 100 kHz. Our range of sensitivity to sound is 20-20,000 Hz. For light it is 430,000-750,000 GHz, or 430-750 trillion oscillations per second. Translated into “octaves,” touch astoundingly yields an approximate seventeen, hearing has ten (though as we age, most adults can only hear eight), and visible sight is limited to one. The sense we rely upon the most has the smallest range on this conflated scale of octaves.
Stereoscopic vision aside, it seems a weakness that we should, as a predatory species, put so much stock in the most restrictive of our three external world processing senses. Then again, the ramifications for the importance could not be made more manifest. Perhaps it is a consequence of modernity that auditory sensitivity is not given so much weight in our dependence on stimulus receptors. The narrowness of sight does help to explain some of our problems in translating from one medium to another. Namely, how do we pass on knowledge from one person to another?
Try this thought experiment if you do not have the means to do it actively: teach someone a skill without using words. You may use sounds, but no actual language. Odds are quite high that you would demonstrate the skill and use a series of gestures inviting your student to attempt the skill. This would be reinforced with touch and visuals cues (possibly facial expressions) with verbal sounds that convey emotional tones, but no language to transfer the concept to the person being thus instructed. Imagine the tools being created mean life or death. This is likely how our hominid ancestors first began to share knowledge. Primates have exhibited the same behavior when using tools to acquire food, such as chimps using twigs to root out termites. We take in a lot of information without resorting to language.
Neither you nor I need to speak the same language to share knowledge with one another. I could teach you how to do a simple sewing job to return clothing back to operational use. It will not look pretty, but it will get more utility out of the item mended. If you watch how I thread a needle and make my stitches, you will eventually learn how to do it yourself without ever having practiced the skill yourself. That is how I learned to sew. There was plenty of trial-and-error as I learned to make my stitches smaller, and thus increasing the strength of the mend, but no one conveyed the skill to me through language. I internalized the process and improved over time through my observations of others. Should you know how to affix a stone point to a stick so that it creates a serviceable spear that will last longer than a thrust or two and I can watch you make it, I will learn to make a crude version of your copy. There is nothing special in this. Children learn by observing a lot of activities performed by parents. The mimicry is enough to begin the learning process.
Throughout my schooling, I was told that ninety percent of all communication is nonverbal. So, to speed up the learning process, we learn to read the body language and tone of our mentors’ voices while they instruct us. By seeking information through the expressions of a teacher, we learn how much approval, and thus success in replicating the skill, we have in progressing towards mastery of the construction of whatever we are being taught through such means. After all, there is not much in the way of theoretical constructs that can be communicated through nonlinguistic means or is required for basic survival skills. Not even the power of touch allows the transfer of information. We use it to secure the attention of the student or teacher.
Think about the ramifications of this: the sense with the greatest octave range is reserved for the task at hand and for getting our attention while the ten octaves of sound seek out notes of approval or disapproval, and the one with less than a single octave receives the lion’s share in learning what has been communicated. Yet, our eyes do not transfer information from one mind to another in a direct manner the way touch and sound do. Other than some emotional content, eyes cannot share knowledge. What is a predator with a good idea supposed to do when a new idea occurs to him and he wants to share it to increase the group’s survival chances? Then again, how do predators form lasting social bonds to diffuse tension and prevent misunderstandings? Art.
Wait, why art? Aesthetics are pleasing and comforting. A well crafted tool, a pattern worked into fabric, a dyed piece of cloth, worked stones, a joke that makes fun of you instead of others, exaggerated gestures, and a good story are all examples of art. Art also allows for the transcendence and the translation of information from one medium to another. The trouble with most art is that it is semiotic. This makes the meaning of the art transitory, leading to interpretations that are subjective and highly mutable. What, then, is more concrete and yet retains the plasticity necessary to translate information from one medium to another? Language.
Language is symbolic enough to allow words to embody ideas without being inflexible in their meaning. After all the word “tree” does not look like what it symbolizes any more than “arbor,” “Baum,” and “derevo” or “drevo” do in Latin, German, and Russian, respectively. None of these words resembles a tree or each other, yet they all carry the same basic information. In The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker invokes Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man by saying “Darwin concluded that language ability is ‘an instinctive tendency to acquire an art’ a design that is not peculiar to humans but seen in other species such as song-learning birds.” This harkens back to previous examples of the conveyance of information through tonality as that is what music is: harmonious tones that produce a pleasing aesthetic. We do not need words to show people we care about them or wish them ill. Gifts, labor on the behalf of others, and a hug communicate the former as much as a glare or a punch to the face expresses the latter. What possible art does a verbal exchange facilitate beyond emotional states? Eleven paragraphs into this section have shown just that.
Language is an art that translates concepts, actions, and objects from one medium to another for the express purpose of transferring information from one person to another. How do we accomplish this goal? Predominantly through sensory descriptions. Chief amongst these are, to no surprise, visual details. Given our propensity to rely on vision, it should not be much of a shock that this is the case. Consider some of our expressions: “hand of god,” “fickle finger of fate,” “scales of justice,” “long arm of the law,” and “quantum foam.” I would like to see these concepts as objects if anyone knows where they can be found outside of linguistic constructs and artworks.
Each word has a specific idea (a semi-concrete definition), but the words are combined here to create an idea that builds an image of ideas that have no concrete form. There are no literal scales of justice or an arm of unusual length for the legal system. Rather, they describe visually the extent to which the legal system can reach to enforce laws and the inherent belief in a fairness in the system. No instruments exist to prove that there is a foamy structure to a zero-point energy field, but the math suggests the shape and consistency of something akin to sea foam. This emphasis on the visual colors our perspective but by no means is the whole of sensory input used to transfer ideas from one brain to another. Sounds, touch, smell, and taste also find representation in language. Sounds often describe tonality, emphasis, noise, confusion, and volume of quality. Touch sees use in myriad ways as is fitting of a sense that has multiple sources from which to draw (texture, temperature, solidity, pain, pleasure, etc.). Smell and taste are used the least because of their subjectivity (especially amongst novice writers). They are highly subjective and are employed to trigger memory responses or feelings of revulsion or enjoyment. Scents do not nail themselves to your nose or otherwise block the nasal passages, but we describe them as being cloying (“cloy” means to nail, spike, clog, or claw something) when they are inescapable.
Notice how we use sensory descriptions to express an idea that we wish to share but have no physical object to present. However, how does language do this? By assigning fixed meanings to the words so that when an idea is given form, it does so by those meanings contribution to the overall concept. Hence, we understand that the “hand of god” is a description of divine influence or touch on a situation; or for the nonbeliever, an act of nature beyond mortal ken to understand in its full context. But, there is play in the definitions so that words have multiple yet subtle shifts in meaning. Thus, I can like someone or relate the similarity of two items which share a similar quality because the word “like” expresses some sort of affinity between two or more objects. On their own, the words retain their ambiguity for which specific meaning should be applied. That gives way to specificity when the context becomes clear.
Why so much emphasis on sight and mental pictures? This goes back to the primacy of vision in predatory species. This also explains why ninety percent of communication is nonverbal as how a message is delivered is as important as or more so than the message itself. You are more likely to retain knowledge with a mental picture than without it. What evidence is there for this? Plenty as studies have shown that we remember about ten percent of what we hear and double that for what we read on average. With the exception of music and language, art is overwhelmingly rooted in visual sensory experiences. Hence the abundance of imagery in the translations across media that language employs.
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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 1
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Anatomy of Game Design: An Unbridgeable Divide, Part 3