Library of Excerpts

Time and Sequence: Lateralization, Language and Heterochrony

"In the first experiment we have two tunnels, side by side. One of them is longer than the other, and children have no difficulty seeing this and pointing to the longer one. Then, for each tunnel we have a miniature doll. The dolls are set up to move on tracks at fixed speeds. In the first phase of the experiment we have the dolls enter the tunnels at exactly the same time and emerge from the tunnels at exactly the same time. It is clear that the doll in the longer tunnel must have gone faster, but the unanimous reply from my youngest subjects is that the two dolls moved at the same speeeds. The children admit that the dolls went into their tunnels at the same time and came out of them at the same time and that one of them had a much longer tunnel to go through, but nonetheless they assert that the two went at the same speed because they came out at the same time." (Piaget, J (1970) Genetic Epistemology. Columbia Univ Press: New York p. 63)

"It is very easy to show that in the development of the notion of time in small children this relationship is not a primitive intuition. Judgements of time are based on how much has been accomplished or on how fast an action has taken place, without the two necessarily having been put into a relationship with one another. Let us look at the development of the notion of simultaneity, for instance. In one of our experiments the experimenter has two little dolls, one in each hand, that walk along the table side by side (they do not actually walk; they go in hops, tapping the table together at the end of each hop). The child says go; the two dolls start off at exactly the same time and the same speed. The child says stop, and the two dolls stop, once again side by side having gone exactly the same distance. In this situation children have no problem in admitting that the dolls started at the same time and stopped at the same time. But if we change the situation slightly, so that one of the dolls has a slightly longer hop each time than the other, then, when the child says stop, one dollwill be further along than the other. In this situation the child will agree that the dolls started at the same time, but he will deny that they stopped at the same time. He will say that one stopped first; it did not go as far. We can then ask him, "When it stopped, was the other one still going?" And he will say no. Then we will ask him, "When the other one stopped, was this one still going?" And he will say no again. This is not, then, a question of perceptual illusion. Finally, we will ask again, "Then did they stop at the same time?" The child will still say, "No, they did not stop at the same time because this one did not get as far." The notion of simultaneity -- two things happening at the same time -- simply does not make sense for these children when if refers to two qualitatively different motions. It makes sense for two qualitatively dimilar motions taking place at the same speed, as in the first situation described, but when two different kinds of motions are involved it simply makes no sense. There is no primitive intuition of simultaneity, and two movements are qualitatively different. This is going to require an intellectual construction." (Piaget, J (1970) Genetic Epistemology. Columbia Univ Press: New York p. 70-71)

"In point of fact, Einstein himself recognized the relevance of psychological factors, and when I had the good chance to meet him for the first time in 1928, he suggested to me that it would be of interest to study the origins in children of notions of time and in particular of notions of simultaneity." (Piaget, J (1970) Genetic Epistemology. Columbia Univ Press: New York p. 7)

"Since the study of variable data is much further advanced in decreolization than it is in acquisition, it should be instructive to look at another situation where variable past-morphine insertion takes place. In creoles, past tense is not a category. But when creoles begin to decreolize, past-tense markers begin to be introduced, occurring sporadically just as they do in child acquisition." (Bickerton, D (1981) Roots of Language. Karoma Publishers: Ann Arbor. p. 164)

"Present-tense time signs occur in a plane parallel to the signer's body and intersecting at the front of the face. Future signs are located on the time line in front of this plane; past signs, behind it." (Siple, Patricia (1978) Linguistic and Psychological Properties of American Sign Language: An Overview. in Understanding Language Through Sign Language Research (P. Siple ed.): Academic Press, New York. p. 13)

"Geschwind (1976), Kimura (1976), and Zangwill (1976) have all emphasized the role of the left hemisphere in the planning and control of purposive, sequential acts, and it has been argued that sequential aspects of perception are tied to the left hemisphere through its prior involvement with motor sequencing (Corballis 1980; Craig 1980)." ( Corballis, M.C. (1981) Towards an evolutionary perspective on hemispheric specialization. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: pp. 69)

"First, one of the recurring themes of the literature is that the right hemisphere is specialised for "holistic" or "gestalt" processing, while the left hemisphere is specialised for "analytic" of "sequential" processing. LEA and LVA are often found when stimuli must be responded to quickly, in a direct global fashion, whereas REA and RVA are often found (even for the same stimulus material) when more complex judgements that take time have to be made. This contrast has been found for judgements of nonverbal stimuli as well as verbal ones, leading to the inference that the essential difference between the hemispheres does not relate to the verbal or nonverbal nature of the stimulus material but rather to the holistic or analytic nature of the processing required. The point here is that sequential and analytic processing must involve mechanisms for holding information over time, which depend, in turn, on the symbolic representation of the material to be analysed. The symbols used are probably verbal for most types of material. Hence, the characterisation of the left hemisphere as sequential or analytic does not add significantly to the original inference that it is specially adapted for carrying information in verbal symbols." (Annett, Marian (1985) Left, Right, Hand and Brain: The Right Shift Theory London: Lawrence Erlbaum pp. 112)

"In addition frontal and parietal regions must somehow be related through antero-posterior connections in the two hemispheres. The general principle is of a unitary and linear sequence in one hemisphere coupled through the corpus callosum with more diverse and spatially distributed associations in the other: from right spatial to left linear anteriorly and left spatial to right linear posteriorly. Within hemispheres canalization must also occur: from linear to spatial parieto-frontally in non-dominant and fronto-temporally in the dominant hemisphere (see Fig. 2). According to this theory it is the bi-hemispheric differentiation, and the separation of sensory and motor components, that confers upon language its recombinational generativity." (Crow TJ (1998) Nuclear schizophrenic symptoms as a window on the relationship between thought and speech. British Journal of Psychiatry 173: 306)

"What is the physiological difference between the hemispheres? The above Saussurean account suggests a resolution. Perhaps it is just that the principle of function of one hemisphere is linear and sequential and that of the other is spatial or parallel. Maybe a consequence of the asynchrony indevelopment introduced by the genetic event that defined the species is that the axonal terminations of callosal fibres in the two hemispheres differ in some subtle respect (Woodward, 1988). Perhaps those in one hemisphere arborise more extensively, and this biases the respective contributions of each hemisphere to each interaction." (Crow TJ (1998) Nuclear schizophrenic symptoms as a window on the relationship between thought and speech. British Journal of Psychiatry 173: 305)

"As a result of this genetic change, some neural process, on which the evolution of language was dependent, become confined to one hemisphere. This component, it is suggested, is the linear output (phonological) sequence. Because it is a temporal sequence, it is one-dimensional, but each component has associations (through the cerebral commissures) in the non-dominant hemisphere that are not so constrained, but are two-dimensional and spatial. This 'bi-hemispheric' theory of language can account for the contrasting 'syntagmatic' and 'paradigmatic' aspects of language to which de Saussure drew attention, i.e. to its generativity." (Crow TJ, (1997) Is schizophrenia the price that Homo sapiens pays fo r language? crow TJ, (1997) Is schizophrenia the price that Homo sapiens pays fo r language? p. 139)

"And the beat goes on. When friends are hooked up to electro-encehalographs, which measure brain activity, the resulting tracings show that even brain waves get "in sync" when two people have a harmonious conversation. In fact, if you sit at the dinner table and watch carefully, you can conduct the conversation with your hand as family members talk and eat. Stressed syllables usually keep the beat. But even silences are rhythmic; as one person pats her mouth, another reaches for the salt--right on cue. Rests and syncopations, voices lowered, elbows raised, these mark the pulse of living as well as of love. Our need to keep each other's time reflects a rhythmic mimicry common to many other animals. On a number of occasions primatologist Wolfgang Kohler entered the chimp enclosure in a primate research center to find a group of males and females trotting in "a rough aproximate rhythm" around and around a pole. Kohler said the animals wagged their heads as they swung along, each leading with the same foot. Chimps sometimes sway from side to side as they stare into one another's eyes just prior to copulation too. In fact, nothing is more basic to courtship in animals than rhythmic movement. Cats circle. Red deer prance. Howler monkeys court with rhythmic tongue movements. Stickleback fish to a zigzag jig. From bears to beetles, courting couples perform rhythmic rituals to express their amorous intentions. To dance is natural. So I think it reasonable to sugget that body synchrony is a universal stage of the human courting process: as we become attracted to each other, we begin to keep a common beat." (Fisher, H. (1992) Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992. pp. 31)

"The ceremonies continue for many nights, many days, uniting the villagers in a fused being that is not biological, essentially, but a living spirit - with numerous heads, many eyes, many voices, numerous feet pounding the earth - lifted even out of temporality and translated into the
no--place, no-time, no-when, no-where of the mythological age, which is here and now." (Campbell, Joseph (1959) The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. Penquin Books: New York p. 170)

"We might even say that is drastically delaying both culinary and sexual gratification, women's action made possible the 'invention' of cultural time. Banning sex would certainly have cleared aside an entirely new and dedicated sector of space/time within which human productive activities could occur. By decisively disjoining sex from work, consumption from production and end from means, it must also have vastly enhanced humans' awareness of how to organise their time (cf. Wagener 1987)." (Knight, C. (1991) Blood Relations; Yale Univ. Press, New Haven p. 326)

"Consciousness is constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves moving about through a physical world with its spacial successiveness which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this results in the conscious conception of time which is a spatialized time in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be conscious of time in any other way than as a space." (Jaynes., Julian (1976) Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Houghton Mifflin: Boston p. 450)

"Recalling my survey of ochre use in ice age burials, it seems significant that so many Aboriginal ceremonies are 'birth' or 'rebirth' rituals which can also be used to bury the dead. Time in the Aboriginal view is cyclical and therefore ultimately reversible; birth and death are seen in ritual terms as cyclical transformations and inversions of one another. Each presupposes the other, and therefore the same rites apply." (Knight, C. (1991) Blood Relations; Yale Univ. Press, New Haven p. 447)

Description of Australian Aboriginal conception of time, and it's cyclical nature Knight, C. (1991) Blood Relations; Yale Univ. Press, New Haven p. 456)

"If lunar, we had a visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic representation of the waxing and waning which at any point indicated to the maker where in the lunar month he was, and it did this non-arithmetically. When the maker had finished his notation, the full serpentine figure represented two months or "moons."" (Marshack, A. (1972) The Roots of Civilzation; McGraw Hill, New York p. 49)

Nachshon and Carmon (1975) also successfully demonstrated a double dissociation, a right-hand superiority for a sequential task and a left-hand superiority for a simultaneous one..." (Bradshaw & Nettleton 1983: 106, Human Cerebral Asymmetry)

"Only humans use complex tolls and verbal and gestural communication. All three demand sequential, time-dependent, syntactic mechanisms for flexibly generating new sequences by rule. We can accordingly link together tool use, gesture, verbal speech, the need for unilateral innervation of the unpaired articulatory organs, the need for a single executive hemisphere, the need for employment of syntactically governed rules for generating new time-dependent sequences, and the need for communication in a changing world. Language is more than just communication; it is also a cognitive and conceptual tool for categorizing the world." (Bradshaw & Nettleton 1983: 181, Human Cerebral Asymmetry)

"Questions about behaviors called play and processes called development are inseparably linked to questions about phenomena called time. Perhaps time itself might profitably be viewed from a sociobiological perspective, in which it (at least subjective time) represents a biological dependent variable, subject in ech individual to effects of competition, manipulation by others, misinformation, and self-deception. I am not speaking of time merely as a limiting resource (as in time-limited foraging), but of the quality of perceived time. From a literary point of view, time appears considerably more malleable and qualitatively heterogeneous than we scientists have led ourselves to believe. In this context, play acquires unique status: it represents timeless experience (Fagen, Robert (1981) Animal Play Behavior; Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford p. 494-495).

"The idea that only a very small difference between the two hemispheres is involved, a capacity to make finer time discriminations on the left side, supplies a hypothesis as to just the sort of developmental nudge that might, in normal circumstances, be sufficient to induce the left hemisphere to serve speech." (Annett, Marian (1985) Left, Right, Hand and Brain: The Right Shift Theory London: Lawrence Erlbaum pp. 113)

"The problem we come to in this chapter is among the most difficult in all religious phenomenology. The difficulty is not simply that magico-religious time and profane time are different in nature; it is rather more the fact that the actual experience of time as such is not always the same for primitive peoples as for modern Western man. Sacred time does differ from profane; but, further, this latter reckoning itselt differs in nature according to whether we are speaking of primitive or of modern society. It is not easy, at first, to determine whether this difference arises from the fact that the primitive's experience of profane time has not yet become completely detached from his ideas of mythico-religious time. But certainly this experience of time gives the primitive a kind of permanent "opening" on to religious time. To simplify the explanation and to some extent to anticipate the results of our study of it, we might say that the very nature of the primitive's experience of time makes it easy for him to change the profane into the sacred. But as this problem is primarily of interest to philosphic anthropology and sociology, we shall only consider it in so far as it brings us to a discussion of hierophanic time." (Eliade, Mircea (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion: Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln p. 388)

"By every sort of ritual, and therefore by every sort of significant action (hunting, fishing,etc.) the primitive is placing himself in "mythical time". For "the mythical period, dzugur, must not be thought of simply as past time, but as present and future, and as a state as well as a period." [quoting A.P. Elkin] That period is "creative" in the sense that it was then, in illo tempore, that the creation and arranging of the Cosmos took place, as well as the revelation of all archetypal activities by gods, ancestors or culture heroes. In illo tempore, in the mythical period, anything was possible." (Eliade, Mircea (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion: Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln p. 395)

"It would be impossible to overstress the tendency---observable in every society, however hightly developed---to bring back the time, mythical time, the Great Time. For this bringing-back is effected without exception by every rite and every significant act. "A rite is the repetition of a fragment of the original time."" (Eliade, Mircea (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion: Univ. of Nebraska Press, Lincoln p. 395)