Spatialization and/of Language

Recognizing that semiotic association and division must be mediated spatially through a cerebral cortex, a few speculations begin to coalesce.

Given the relations between and the relations within them, words|concepts have to be moderated in part by patterns involving distance and proximity. What we experience as qualities or attributes or various neural paths along which qualities or attributes might be embodied must lie physically woven, with dendrites and dendrite-streams laced all through one another. Of course, we do know that brains are in part built this way, with areas of greater and lesser passage of electrical energy, and temporal variability of passage mediated quite delicately by constantly shifting chemical balances within and around synapses.

A consequence of all this is that certain metaphors of space-relations are most likely hard-wired -- although that does not mean that they correspond in any one-to-one way with what we see or exactly with each other. For instance, neurologists find that the visual cortex has an area about the size of a credit card in or on which visual images are staged. One has to wonder whether similar areas have not been seen for other spatial systems, for aural or kinetic processing. But it's quite likely that the trouble is simply that we have been looking, not listening or representing in mime. Scans create surfaces of virtual planes within a brain, allowing us view representations thereof. The brain's own representations that we experience as sound or motion might represent less understandably as surface, given that the initial soundings of nerves are not patterned on a single surface.

In any event, at least kinetics, touch, sight, and sound operate spatially in part, and must sharespace at at least some part of their processing. Now, space in this sense may not be totally contiguous and look like our concepts of the space we view or experience; but some interweaving and passage of neural information must happen for association to take place -- for firings in one place to excite firings in another place.

I don't mean that correspondences would always be obvious to visual inspection. For for instance, taking the sort of cellular-looking, sort of cauliflower-shaped layout of the apartment complexes where I live as a very rough model, apartment 3800 10B will predictably be in a certain position in relation to pool and parking lot as is 3700 10B and 3900 10B. There are certain differences; the layouts are not completely symmetrical.

Now, a very interesting aspect of all this is the perspective one gains on Deleuze's constant running visual representations, which I have persisted calling metaphors, and which hereby approach the status of diagrams.