A Historical Study of the Mind and Language

Atsuko Iwanami (Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Liberal Arts)

A historical study of the "mind" and "language." You might have found this title a bit strange. There are many disciplines that deal with the mind, such as philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and there are also various approaches within linguistics for studying language. What I want to explore, based on a correct historical understanding, is the power that language—which has connected people to one another—has on the human mind.

When we historically consider the social nature of language, we can see that what we thought were universal human acts and behaviors are, in fact, conditioned by specific eras and cultures. For example, the act of "reading," which we perform casually in our daily lives, is not the same for all humans.

We who live in the modern era perceive silent reading as a perfectly natural act, but until a certain period in Europe, reading books was unthinkable without reading them aloud. The characters written in books were symbols that could only be deciphered when read aloud; they could not be understood without sound.

We Japanese, who use both ideograms and phonograms, "read" sentences in which phonograms (representing sounds) and ideograms (possessing meaning in themselves) are arranged alternately. Being adept at this, we tend to simply assume that the act of reading visually presented characters is the same, regardless of the linguistic symbols used.

However, the part of the cerebral cortex that processes information differs depending on whether phonograms or ideograms are used. Even within the same language, different parts of the cerebral cortex react when understanding auditorily versus visually. Thus, even linguistic acts that we consider to be the same without a second thought actually involve different processes of character recognition, depending on the characteristics of the language.

So why did people in Europe also become able to read silently? Research on the mechanisms of the human mind, which we are most eager to understand, is advancing daily. What is crucial in this research is to draw a line, based on a correct historical understanding, between what is a universal human characteristic and what is a variable one defined by culture. What I aim for from the field of history is an understanding of humanity that is free from erroneous preconceptions.