Forms of communication

Posted on by wanderer

Let us briefly explore the main forms of communication that humans tend to use before examining global communication.

Visual/Symbolic Communication

One of the most basic and almost universal forms of communication is visual communication. At some point between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans across the lands they occupied began extensively using pictorial representations to depict the world around them. Even if we cannot understand the language or all the characteristics of the cultures that lived during the Ice Age in the Altamira caves, when we look at the drawings there, we can easily identify what they were trying to represent—impressive buffaloes, as well as various other animals like horses and deer, along with dancing human figures.

It remains a mystery why figurative art in the Homo lineage became dominant worldwide at that time and not earlier. Anatomically modern humans—the term palaeontologists use to describe human remains that resemble us, i.e., Homo sapiens—have existed for approximately 200,000 to 300,000 years. This increase in the use of visual communication may be the result of a gradual accumulation of increasingly complex cultural traits that allowed for more sophisticated pictorial art. Alternatively, our perception may be biased due to a limited sample size and poor preservation of earlier examples of figurative painting. Regardless of the reason, figurative art now appears to be a universal human trait, present in almost all individuals from an early age.

Human infants can identify familiar objects such as a house, a horse, a person, or even smiling and sad faces from a very young age. Moreover, children begin creating geometric figures by the age of two and produce rough paintings of figures by the age of three. By the age of five, their drawings evolve into more standardised and symbolic images.

This symbolic representation in images also appears to be a universal mode of communication among humans. Simple pictorial forms can be used to identify common animals and objects found all over the world. However, some people in cultures unfamiliar with photography struggle to recognise an animal from a picture and require a specific body part to make the identification.

You may have relied on visual communication yourself when travelling to a foreign land where you could not speak the language. In such situations, you might have used gestures to figuratively describe an action or object or even resorted to crude drawings to communicate your needs. However, this form of cross-cultural visual communication has its limitations. I encountered these limitations when I wanted to cross a river in Papua but could not find a bridge. I asked the locals for directions, but despite my best efforts, they could not understand me. Using my hands and gestures, I tried to depict a river and a bridge over it. I then resorted to drawing it in the sand with a stick, using mimics and pointing towards the river, which was not far away. Finally, a combination of all these methods did the trick. I was swiftly guided to a path through the jungle that I would not have found on my own, even if I had searched for days. At the end of the path—after crossing several streams via wooden logs used as makeshift, slippery bridges—I reached the other side of a hanging bridge, with the river rushing 50 metres below me.

Acoustic Communication

Another form of communication that appears to be universal among humans—and likely many non-human animals—is auditory signalling. For example, a high-pitched, loud scream would generally startle you and make you wary of its source. Moreover, if the sound persists—such as the crying of an infant mammal—you might instinctively try to stop it by feeding, warming, or comforting the creature in any way possible. It is not difficult to imagine that we have an inbuilt genetic predisposition to associate certain sounds with specific actions or emotional reactions.

Another largely human—but possibly primate—auditory signal is laughter. All human cultures seem to associate enjoyment and fun with laughter and its characteristic sounds.

Additionally, the intensity and duration of sounds tend to convey universal messages. Loud sounds generally indicate aggression, whereas quieter ones suggest closeness and attentiveness. Similarly, short, abrupt sounds are used to grab attention, while long, howling sounds are often associated with connection and emotional expression.

Language <- Previous Next -> Curiosity and rarity, from the small to the global

Language

Posted on by wanderer

The most critical basis for communication is language. It is difficult to define what a language is and what it entails. At its core, language is something that can capture deeply complex concepts—both external and internal—and transform them into words with specific meanings that can be shared with others. Therefore, it entails both an internal component, in which the brain must link specific concepts to words and structures of the language, and an external component, in which these words and concepts must be translated into structures that can be broadcast to other individuals. These broadcasts can primarily be via sound, visuals, or touch, but in principle, any channel capable of encoding information should work in order to create structured signals in the form of a language.

There is no clear agreement on how old human languages are. Some argue that they started emerging about 100,000 years ago, while others argue for an even earlier origin. Nevertheless, however they came to be, languages are an integral part of being human, shaping both how our brains function and how we understand and influence the world and ourselves.

Some examples illustrate how wired we are to shape our brains for learning a language. The clearest natural experiment demonstrating the spontaneous learning and generation of languages is that of Nicaraguan Sign Language.

In the 1980s, for the first time in Nicaragua, a school for deaf children was created, bringing together children from all over the country to live and learn in one place. Before this initiative, there was no institutionalised system to teach deaf children how to communicate. As a result, at the time of their arrival, these children’s vocabulary was limited to a few hand gestures used within their families or communities of origin, often in the form of idiolects or cryptophasia (“private languages” usually spoken by one person or between twins).

Compounding this initial lack of complex communication, the teachers at the new school aimed to teach the children lip-reading and Spanish through that method. They discouraged the use of any sign language, believing that the children would put less effort into learning to lip-read. However, lip-reading had very limited success—the children were unable to communicate with their teachers.

Despite this, communication flourished outside the classroom among the children themselves. In the courtyard and throughout their daily activities, they combined the hand gestures and signs from their respective communities and created new ones. This process of creation, sharing, and accumulation spontaneously generated a new language, which rapidly evolved into more complex structures, giving rise to grammar and a more elaborate vocabulary. This increase in complexity and fluency was particularly evident among younger generations of students, who picked up the signs from older peers and refined them with intricate flourishes and added layers of meaning.

This entire process was documented by sign language experts, who were called by the teachers after noticing that the children could communicate fluently with one another but remained incomprehensible to the teachers. Initially, these experts also struggled to understand the children, but by filming them, analysing the footage, and interacting with them using the learned hand gestures, they gradually acquired the language. Most interestingly, over the years, they recorded the cumulative process of increasing complexity, allowing us to witness how the language evolved and standardised rapidly.

Notably, the children were already familiar with a small subset of home signs. However, this is not so different from the basic signs shared by social animals or those we can teach our pets. For example, when I was living in Mallorca, I was responsible for a dog named Gordon. I could tell him “sit,” and he would sit; “down,” and he would lie down; “up,” and he would stand on his hind legs; “la pateta,” and he would sit and give me his left paw. Even more complex instructions, like “We are going for a walk, but first, we need to go to the basement,” were followed correctly—Gordon would go straight to the basement instead of heading directly outside. Not only that, but he also communicated with me: for instance, he would touch his water bowl to indicate it was empty or stand patiently by the courtyard door when he wanted me to open it. Through these examples, one might say that he and I shared basic communication and understanding, but no one would, in their wildest dreams, call that a language. Nor would a language ever emerge from these exchanges. This became especially clear when I said more complex things, like “Could you go to the cupboard, open the door, and bring me a kilogram of rice, please?” or “Do not bark at the neighbour’s dogs!” Gordon could open doors, so that part wasn’t a problem, but the rest was beyond his capabilities.

The case of Nicaraguan Sign Language is particularly important because it demonstrates the evolutionary nature of language within a short time frame and its ability to keep expanding—something that does not occur in any other non-human animal. To be fair, dogs can be trained in more complex ways than my simple set of commands (and one particular, named Chaser, learned can more than 1000 words!), and other animals, such as dolphins, elephants, circus animals, horses, buffaloes, parrots, pigeons, and crows, can learn to respond to basic commands from their human carers. Bonobos, in particular, can learn up to hundreds of hand gestures to communicate basic information with their trainers, and similarly, dolphins can understand basic sentence order. However, this is the maximum extent of their communication; it does not go any further. Nor do animals copy human language to communicate among themselves in more complex ways—not even parrots, which can mimic hundreds of human sounds, spontaneously start using them to communicate with each other. Humans, on the other hand, have the unique capacity to transform simple signals into an elaborate and constantly evolving set of communication codifications.

The connection between language and the brain is deeply rooted in humans, with both being intricately linked, as seen in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language shapes the brain, and the brain, in turn, shapes language. The latter is evidenced by the fact that certain sounds seem to be more naturally associated with certain concepts—for instance, sharp objects are commonly linked to words with sharper sounds, while round objects tend to be described using softer pronunciations across multiple languages. Language is integral to memory, abstract thinking, and, fascinatingly, self-awareness. Language has been shown to drive much of the brain’s core “hardware”. Languages shape brains to such an extent that, most of the time, we think in a language—or in multiple languages if we are multilingual.

For those who are born deaf, rather than relying on an “inner voice” as spoken-language users do, their thought processes are shaped by visual sign thinking or the sensation of body gestures. Interestingly, deafness has a significantly greater impact on the brain than blindness. People born completely deaf and who never learn sign language fare only slightly better than the rare individuals who grow up without any language exposure. Without language, they fail to develop an “inner voice”, which is crucial for the brain’s ability to process information. This is especially significant in early childhood. Those who are not taught sign language until later in life often have learning problems throughout their lives. It seems that the brain processes sign language exactly as it does spoken language, using the exact same regions.

Communication - Culture <- Previous Next -> Forms of communication

Collaboration

Posted on by wanderer

Another important behaviour that humans share with many animals is socialisation and collaborative action. This is observed across a wide range of species, including not just animals but also organisms from other biological kingdoms. There are many examples of this collaborative behaviour.

Cetaceans (whales, killer whales, porpoises, and dolphins) engage in social collaboration to achieve common goals, such as developing feeding strategies and defending against aggressors. A species that is particularly close to us in terms of social behaviour is the wolf. Wolves form small packs of up to forty individuals, working together for survival. Their domesticated relatives, dogs, are also highly social animals capable of interacting with many other species, especially humans, to a remarkably sophisticated degree. This is exemplified by cases where humans have been effectively adopted by dogs, such as in the myth of Romulus and Remus—the legendary founders of Rome—or in more recent historical accounts like that of Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja. Marcos lived among wolves for 11 years after his father sold him to a landowner who entrusted him to a goat-keeper, who later died. Marcos recounted:

“One day I went into a wolf den to play with some puppies that lived there and fell asleep. When I woke up, the wolf mother was cutting deer meat for her puppies. I tried to take a piece from her because I was also hungry, and she swiped at me. When she finished feeding her puppies, she looked at me and threw me a piece of meat. I didn’t want to touch it because I thought she was going to attack me, but she kept bringing it closer with her snout. I picked it up, ate it, and then she came up to me. I thought she was going to bite me, but instead, she stuck out her tongue and started licking me. After that, I was already part of the family. We went everywhere together.”

Marcos also recalled that after reuniting with his father, his father simply asked him for the old jacket he had left behind.

If we extend the concept of collaboration further to include infrastructure, we see that insects and arachnids also exhibit highly cooperative behavior, forming vast colonies. However, these types of social structures are not exclusive to invertebrates; similar cooperative infrastructure-building can be observed in birds, beavers, and many mammals that create dens. In the case of insects, some colonies function almost as single superorganisms, with specialized individuals performing specific tasks or switching between roles as needed. Other social animals, such as meerkats, also have fluctuating specialized roles within their groups, such as caring for the young or standing guard to raise alarms against predators.

For social arachnids, as well as some bird species and most den-dwelling animals, collaboration seems to be primarily focused on building communal nesting or feeding structures. However, outside of these specific activities, they tend to act as individuals.

On the looser end of social structures, we find schools of fish and herds of various land animals. These groups function as dynamic, collective entities where decisions about feeding, protection, and movement are made communally.

Expanding the concept of socialization even further, we can consider co-dependent ecosystems. In such ecosystems, plants and animals—or even plants with other plants, bacteria, and fungi—are so interdependent that they cannot be considered separate entities. Biologists refer to these relationships as symbiotic or, in cases where one organism is significantly larger than the others, as holobionts. A common example of a holobiont is the relationship between a human and their gut bacteria, whereas an example of symbiosis is lichen, which is formed by the mutualistic association between fungi and algae.

The scale of communication and collaboration in most living organisms is usually limited. For example, some ant species form supercolonies containing trillions of individuals, such as the Argentinian fire ant supercolony (Linepithema humile). These supercolonies cooperate with genetically related colonies while competing with unrelated ones, allowing them to dominate newly colonized lands by leveraging globalization. However, despite their vast numbers, their communication networks remain limited to neighboring colonies and do not extend much further.

In contrast, human collaboration is, in principle, boundless. Even in the Palaeolithic era, commercial networks facilitated the exchange of materials over vast distances—hundreds or even thousands of kilometers— with materials transported almost 200kms at least as early as 45,000 years ago. This scale of mobility far exceeded that of individual bands and their immediate neighbours. No other species exhibits such an extensive range of cooperative behaviour.

Even among our closest extinct relatives, there is uncertainty regarding the extent of their social networks. Recent genetic research has shown that a group of Neanderthals remained genetically isolated from neighboring groups—less than a ten-day walk away—for more than 50,000 years. However, this genetic isolation is not unique to Neanderthals. Studies suggest that modern humans, too, have lived in genetic isolation from neighboring communities for tens of thousands of years. For instance, the ancestors of African Pygmy foragers are believed to have diverged from other human populations around 60,000 years ago, though they intermixed more recently in several occasions.

Intelligence <- Previous Next -> Communication