top of page
Search

Just A Random How Did We Do It

  • Writer: Choo Boon Linn
    Choo Boon Linn
  • Oct 27, 2020
  • 3 min read

Updated: Oct 29, 2020

Did adaptation civilized us or judgement formed our civilization?

Just another short glimpse of thoughts.

Did 'kuku' sounds sharp to you?

Yes? Why? Because you heard the high pitched roaster crowing before? Or because 'kuku' means nails in Malay language, which indirectly referring to something sharp too? Or is it related to how we placed our tongue, shaped our lips and utter the word which gives some sort of vibration (strength of air blown out and points the air touched around the mouth) and frequency which we subconsciously categorized as sharp?


You can read, you can judge a word one after another, but how?

While you are reading, have you thought of how do you distinguish the spaces between characters and which of them made a word and how this one complete sentence formed a meaning? Is there anything come into your mind when you are picking up these words from the white space? So, when you are reading a dictionary, you flipped to the content page and check which page you have to navigate to read about the meaning of that word you are looking for. Have you ever think of how did you just able to judge on how to turn the paper?


Should adaptation and judgement never occur, would Homo sapiens and the existing animals been able to survive the natural selections up to date? Especially for humans, how did our ancestors first judged the way to make sharp tools to hunt for food and to cut down trees for shelter building, while not getting hurt by the sharp blades themselves when using the tools? Before the formation of languages, humans have probably been using body signs language and drawings to communicate as per archaeological findings. On the other hand, taking the bouba-kiki effect as example, it seems like humans have long associate meaning or sound of a word with shape unconsciously. As another concrete example, Chinese characters are mostly formed from drawings which eventually underwent multiple evolutions to become the words they are today.


And how did these happen? Non-arguably that it is our ability to judge a shape by differentiating the edge with others and decide how much distance existed between these items. I cannot argue that if humans have the congenital abilities and knowledge from the pre-existing evolution which will be carried throughout one’s life just as hippopotamus knows how to go up to the water surface to breathe before sink backdown to the water while it is asleep, so as there were experiments which proven an infant knows how to kick and hold the breathe in water, but appears to lost the ability in later days when the skill is left unpracticed due to neurons pruning processes that sacrifice one to adapt better to another activations. However, I can say that we are what we are today because we have been learning about the concept of shapes and spaces, and how to put a force or determine the moving direction to change the items, or to achieve one’s motive to go further or closer to them via trial and error since we were first born to these three dimensional world. In short, perhaps we learned to adapt the right way of spatial navigation based on our judgement of space perception in our civilization history. So, perhaps we have been learning to judge first before deciding an adaptation.


(Oh, well, this article ends with such a play of words. And this is the power of language.)

 
 
 

Comments


  • LinkedIn Clean Grey

© 2020 by Boon Linn, Choo. Proudly created with Wix.com

bottom of page