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Everything you imagine or sense is converted into movement as a symbolic
"lingua franca" for the whole organism.
The rate of muscle firing (about 10Hz) therefore determines the rate at which we can process information that can be used to respond to the physical world with a physical body, and also determines memory (presumably because memories are stored in symbolic form).
Everything you think or imagine, say, see, hear or read (I don’t think I’ve missed anything out) has to be converted into a meaning. When your nervous system evolved there were no such things as fiction novels or Hollywood, so reality was as you experienced it. The external world had to be translated into a biologicalmeaning so that we could respond to it, response equates to movement, and to everything is represented as a meaning by being translated into a real potential movement – i.e. a potential engagement of muscles. In humans and monkeys this representation takes place in Mirror Neurons[1][,] [2] in the pre-frontal cortex (PFC).
The PFC is a zone of the cortex that prepares motions we might possibly make, so it anticipates, and therefore it is not unreasonable for it to anticipate potential responsive movement required by any incoming information, leading to:
Information → Meaning-making (interpreted as movement) →
response (movement)
Muscles have an intrinsic tremor, modulated by the motor nerves through inhibition, that fires at 10Hz (10 cycles per second). This firing rate appears to determine the maximum rate at which we can take in and learn new information – about 10 items of new information per second[3]. Numerous studies on professional memorisers have so far not found anyone who exceeds this rate of information uptake. One conclusion is that movement – sports, musical playing instruments, or even just walking – is an important part of effective education. Another is that the limited window of attention is directly related to the process of meaning making and translation of everything into symbolic form.
Mirrored movements stored in the PMC tend to leak back out as micro-movements, and so the body is always "telling" its meaning-making by subtly feeding that back to the world. This means we subliminally know exactly what someone is thinking, feeling, and how they are responding, whether they are lying, and pet animals and babies and young children can read this like a book.
The modelling performed by the premotor cortex begins to make more sense when we look a little more closely as to how reality is structured in the awareness of each individual.
There are essentially two very different ways to understand the world that are linked to the Left-Right cortex described by McGilchrist. The descriptive tool-making understanding is literally a model of the world used for the purposes of navigating it (in all meanings of the word), interacting with it in a purposeful manner, and predicting it through accumulated experience. Language and writing - and more recently audiovisual media - are part of this way of structuring the world, and the language and means by which we employ language determine our relationship to (and comprehension of) “reality”. So th elanguage one speaks creates a certain shape of world-view that ius inevitably different from a different language. And a story-telling verbal use of language in its intensely personal and self-reflective quality is different from a written language (which far more easily tends towards abstraction and logic).
If Language is used as a metaphor, then it becomes clear that the body itself is also a language with its own verbs (capacities for action), nouns (physical shape / anatomy), and so on. And that the use of that body (including its senses) in navigating the world creates a model of the world that is based on having a body with that shape, those senses, and that capacity for motion.
References & Notes