What you are reading now are just a collection of symbols. Your brain decodes theses symbols into meaning. Your brain has developed a knack for reading language, and that has given you a major advantage over other species.
Yet scientists still don’t know when and how we began using language.
Instead, language has allowed us to cooperate in groups of millions instead of dozens, he says. It also lets us share the complex ideas produced by our brains, and it’s flexible in ways you don’t find in the communication systems of other species.
Bees, for example, use an elaborate communication system to tell one another precisely how to get from the hive to a source of pollen, Elman says. “But that’s all it does,” he says. “They can’t talk about politics. They can’t talk about who’s having an affair with what other bee — and these are things that we can do.”
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