Prof. William S-Y. WANG, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

Brain + Language = Mind. First International Forum on Neurolinguistics. Nanjing University of Science and Technology (online), 3 December 2022

Abstract
Brain cells in animals began to emerge several hundred millions years ago. As these cells continued to multiply and brains continued to grow, a sharp transition took place in ancient humans with the making of stone tools. Our brain tripled in size over this span of time, presumably co-evolving with the emergence, elaboration, and refinement of language, from a few crude, holistic, multimodal gestures, to the powerful languages of today. Modern language is supported by a full complement of cognitive abilities in the human brain. Many other animals have evolved similar abilities to ours, but varying in degree, and therefore cannot learn a modern language. However, as these abilities reach the necessary levels of development in human infants, they uniformly acquire language and via language gradually acquire a human mind. From an evolutionary perspective, brain and mind, together with other associated entities like consciousness, intelligence, etc., all interacted as complex adaptive systems facilitated by language.