In the previous post, I presented the theory of Spatial Thinking. The theory argues that humans developed their unique symbolic language and thought out of navigating the physical terrain, codifying, and committing it to memory. All of our thoughts are in fact memories that originated as a tool for locating our position in space.

In the current post, I will attempt to describe the mechanics of the brain that enable us to symbolize and abstract reality in the first place. I suggest that our strange tendency to think in terms binary oppositions – that is, to believe in the existence of dichotomies, such as “black-white”, “up-down”, “right-left”, and so on – is based in the electric pulses which direct of thoughts. That is, our ability to think in opposites mimics the binary nature of the opposing electric nodes, and it clues us into the way that our memory translates impressions of reality into new thoughts and symbolic language.

Part 1

The Reason for Binary Thinking

My inquiry begins with the assumption that human thought is limited to thinking only of things that it has already encountered. As I wrote in this post, we cannot imagine something that we haven’t already seen. We can, however, recombine our previous impressions into something that does not yet exist; such are the legendary creatures with human heads and animal bodies, and vice versa, which mix and match in order to create things with the imagination. The logic of this idea is that we cannot think about or invent anything that does not in some way mimic the things already existing in nature. Our most outlandish human inventions can always be traced to some naturally recurring element.

However, there is one element of human thinking that seems to run counter to anything else in nature. That is our habit of thinking in binary oppositions.

Binary oppositions are a way of grasping and delineating concepts of the world by mirroring them against each other. This system of creating relations between things allows us to solidify them as concepts; that is, we draw a clearer limit around their fluid form. For example, the opposition “Black-White” cannot be objectively delineated. Colors are a spectrum, and we can only perceive them in a relative way. We currently list as many as 16 shades of black.¹ Additionally, there is no inherent opposition between the two colors. We perceive black as an absence of light, and perceive white as what reflects all wavelengths of light.² In essence, what we do is an idealization of what we perceive, for the sake of simplification and ease of communication. In cultures where there is need for closer detailing, many binary oppositions are often dismantled for the sake of expanding the concept. For instance, in the US nowadays, the desire for diversity is breaking down many identifying binary oppositions, from “Black-White” as a previous ethnic identification, to “Male-Female” gendered identification. So, binary oppositions are not grounded in any inherent dichotomy between things in nature. Nevertheless, humans still utilize the binary mode of thinking throughout our process of conceptualizing. This raises the question, if there are no inherent oppositions around us, how and why have humans devised such a means of perception in the first place?

I would like to offer one explanation for the emergence of our thinking in terms of opposites. Often, the use of oppositions is explained due to their assisting with our perception. While true, this doesn’t give insight into how humans came up with binary oppositions to begin with. I believe that the answer lies in the fact the there actually are real oppositions existing in the natural world. Real binary oppositions appear in the electric current running all through nature and through our own body.

Our body is electrically charged. Humans can hold up to 17 volts and from 100W for a resting adult, which is equal to the power of 100W light bulb, up to seven times greater.³ “Our cells”, in fact, “are specialized to conduct electrical currents. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain, making it possible for us to move, think and feel.”⁴

Thinking as an Electric Activity

Thoughts, then, are what happens when electric pulses, or signals, run through our chemically fabricated body. Electric currents travel through the nervous system and make their way around the brain. Would it not be reasonable to assume, then, that as electric signals, our thought would carry several other characteristics of an electric current?

An electric signal is motioned by a triggering of electrons between positive and negative terminals. I would venture to say that the thoughts in our brains delineate a pattern which is similar to that of an electric charge. The passage of electric pulses through the biological gray matter of the brain, in turn, is what creates the physical pathway structure of the neural system. This bears repeating – the passing of electricity through biological matter, creates the pattern that we find in our neural circuitry. The layout of our synaptic junctions closely resembles patterns made when electricity touches a living surface. For example, Lichtenberg Figures, which are patterns left on the skin as a result of a lightning strike.

As electricity does not have mass, thoughts themselves are weightless. The phenomenon of thinking is the traveling of an electric pulse through a number of synaptic junctions, that engages those synapses. Thoughts are the equivalent to a motion through space. In my previous post I argue that our thought developed in tandem with our survivalist need of navigating through space. What all this means, is that the electric pulse that is the carrier of thoughts, is both actively molded by us into reshaping our synaptic frame of concepts, and also passively goes through the same neural framework, and causes the “buzzing” sensation of unsolicited thinking happening at all times.

So, thoughts are the flow of electricity within our nervous system. This correlation of thoughts with electric pulses still does not tell us much about the content of those thoughts. But it can allow us to speculate that our thoughts really are binary in nature; since they are conveyed through an electric carrier.

I argue that this electric nature is what causes our thoughts to constantly move between sets of binary oppositions. Opposites correspond to the binary electric nodes through which an electric current must pass. So a thought is an electric signal. And, as my Spatial Language Theory assumes, a thought is the chain of memories which are physically coded upon a neural path in our neural circuitry. This means that, since this circuitry is constructed of synaptic nodes through which electricity flows, then each thought has a spatial location in the nervous system that is made of the path that it makes. A thought, thus, is a road that an electric pulse travels, consisting of the binary junctions which it passes on its way. A thought is not exactly a what, but a where. Most thoughts follow an already established path, yet new junctions are constantly being built as new impressions come to be recognized in our mind, or as new connections are made between existing neural junctions.

When we create concepts of the world, they physically translate to synaptic circuitry within the brain, most possibly in the Hippocampus, where our memories are stored. A thought is in fact the set of synaptic junctions through which an electric pulse passes. Thoughts are spatial, in the sense that they move through a physical frame existing in the physical brain. This framework is made of living matter, and is always changing. It has, what is often called, neuroplasticity. We can rewire different synapses by intentionally directing our thinking. We can make new connection between existing concepts, and this, I believe, in fact happens constantly when we create new meanings and metaphors.

This would explain, for example, the power of humor, and of jokes, on us humans. A joke is a long thought, a story, which sends us on a predetermined course through a common and expected, neural path, only to suddenly take a surprising and unexpected turn at the end. The joke takes us through a chin of memories that we recognize, and attaches them an unaccounted neural junction – which we are forced to accept as valid, and as one that we have overlooked. This is why a joke gets its funny reaction only once – when it is still a surprise. Once the connection between the concepts has been made, we usually will not laugh again, since the element of surprise is gone. Does laughter result from a kind of ‘short circuiting’ of the brain? I would argue yes.

Neuroplasticty vs. Trauma

Often enough, though, the rewiring of existing neural thought patterns comes from the outside in malevolent forms; in such cases, the experience of mental rewiring can be unpleasant, depending on the extent of the change that occurs. When our existing mental framework is unready for the new impression it encounters, the untangling of existing neural connections can be, and often is, traumatic. Such was the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. To many of us, the two towers were foreign from our everyday lives; and yet, for many of us, the impact of watching them attacked and collapse was incredible, if not devastating. Here is how George Lakoff describes it:

I grew up in Bayonne, N.J., across the bay from that skyline. The World Trade Center wasn’t there then, but over the years, as the major feature of the skyline, it became for me as for others the symbol of New York—not only of the business center of America, but also the cultural center and the communications center. As such, it became a symbol for America itself—a symbol for what it meant to be able go about your everyday life free of oppression and just do your job and live your life, whether as a secretary or an artist, a manager or a fireman, a salesman or a teacher or a TV star. I wasn’t consciously aware of it, but those images were intimately tied to my identity, both as me and as an American. And all that and so much more was there physically as part of my brain on the morning of September 11.⁵

Metaphors of Terror/ George Lakoff

So, the World Trade Center was a symbol, connected neurally to our concepts of a the USA as powerful, free, safe, indestructible, and possibly many other notions. The destruction of the towers, their disappearance in a matter of minutes, without preparation, meant that we had to mentally detach all of the connections we made to it, and reconnect them – now that they became untangled – to new safe grounds. Often with people who undergo trauma, it is often extremely hard to conceptualize and speak of what they go through. Trauma indicates that the mental connections have been untangled. Notice how hard it is for people who were attacked to refer, for instance, to their attackers. They often grasp hopelessly for an appropriate concept to help reconnect and ground their understanding of their pain. I see this now as people around me try to find the words to describe the attacks of 7/10/23.

To return the matters to the idea of the binary way of thinking, I can say that people are trying to find some concept of the attackers which would be the opposite of how they perceive themselves. The 7/10 attackers are often called “animals”. This concept wishes to negate the inhumanity of their actions with the humanity of the victims. As I sadly overlook the horrid content and focus on the formalizing of new concepts, I see that again, our minds turn to opposites in order to create new concepts of reality.

To summarize, the mind has remarkable neuroplasticity. When we encounter a completely new impression, we try to fit it within our existing conceptual framework. To create a new concept, we must codify the new information. Our mind limits the data through opposing it with other things that we are already assured of. This reveals the limits of our own conscious thinking. Whenever we fail to internalize new impressions and experiences, we might shrug it off, or, in case we cannot disregard them and they persist to bother us, they can lead to trauma.

By now, you might already argue that I have given too much emphasis to the notion of binary concepts. You will be right to say that many, if not most of our concepts have no perceived opposites; for instance ‘history’, ‘cellphone’, ‘chair’ and many nouns, are self standing and do not have a counterpart. I will now argue that, regardless of having no perceivable opposite, humans still use thinking in terms of binary oppositions in order to refer to any concept in their world. That binary thinking is our only way of codifying reality into symbolic language.

Part 2

Our language’s Binary logic

As systems for categorizing and ordering thoughts, human languages have a particular logic. It is easy to identify the analogue part of language. We yell with anger or joy, shriek with fear, grunt with despair and sound out many nuances which reveal our physical condition without any preconceived representation. The digital component of language is also clear. We use letters to compose words, kind of like numerical digits, in order to represent, arbitrarily, actual things in the world. This representation has caused many to consider our own mind, as reflected by this ability to think digitally, as closer to how mathematics views the world. That is, some people believe that the mind orders its categories of the world using exact distinctions and by giving each thought its equal place in the scheme of things.

I argue, however, that the basic rules of mathematical logic do not apply to our mind’s categorizing of concepts. The mind, instead, uses an echoing, negating logic. In order to refer to any single cogent item our mind assigns to any concept a kind of non-mathematical value. This value is given by transference, from other, related concepts, but is by no means a constant. This unveiling of the mind’s mechanics in creating and systematizing concepts will shed light on the driving force behind our unique ability to create language in the first place. This force, as I would tirelessly claim, is mankind’s mapping of space, using stories – which is the key to our survival and dominance as a species.

(A≠A)

The basic tenet of mathematical logic is that a thing is equal to itself. The idea is titled as ‘equality’, but really should be regarded as ‘constancy’. A thing is itself when it perseveres through change, which is another aspect of idealization since nothing in the world remains itself forever. But, since we are talking about the nature of the mind, I argue that mental concepts themselves do not comply with the rule of equality, and for a different reason.

The assumption that a thing (A) is itself reveals an underlying assumption of a system of many things, or of other systems of things, to which that thing (A) belongs. The example used by De Saussure is of a tree, so I will also use it here. Thinking of a tree apart from other knowledge relating to trees (from ‘leaves’ to ‘outside’ to ‘blossoming’) would make the concept of the tree unintelligible. A knowledge of a concept can only arise, as Derrida pointed out, by placing that concept within the free play of all other concepts. That is, we can know what a tree is only from knowing what are leaves, roots, flowers and vegetation; and we can only know those by knowing other concepts, and by extension all concepts engage in a kind of constant reforming where they give meaning to each other. All of our concepts echo each other all the time. And so, mentally speaking, we cannot grasp any concept in and of itself. To put it in the terms of formal mathematics, we perceive A as that which is negating everything other than A, or A=-1/A.

In other words, no concept is born into our minds and remains that way. It is involved in a “play”, as Derrida put it. To think of a concept, then, is to choose it, from out of the assortment of all the other concepts. The consequences of this logic are numerous, yet it first and foremost articulates a certain path, or action taking place when we think. The act of thinking is the same as following a trajectory, into relevant semantic fields, and locating the appropriate clusters of ideas. Notice the spatial language that we commonly use when referring to thinking. We follow a line of thought, reach a point, and take steps to get to a conclusion. The key takeaway here is that thinking is an act of course-setting, not of tallying, such as with numbers. The mind’s logic sees conceptual items and thoughts as physical landmarks in space, and in thinking we journey up, down, on, in, toward and though them.

Metaphoric logic (A=B; B=C; A≠C)

Another point of straying from mathematical logic that our mind utilizes is its non-syllogistic logic. Syllogisms are ways of drawing conclusions based on premises. For example, if all crows are black; and John is a crow. It follows that John is black. I wish to claim that this rule does not apply when regarding the creation of concepts in our language.

To prove this, we’ll recall George Lakoff and the notion that metaphorical thinking is how we create meaning within our language. That is, we equate one thing with another to assign one, or several meanings, from the source concept to the target concept. As with the metaphor “love is a battlefield”, we’ve assigned those qualities of a battlefield to love in order to infuse the latter with meaning. The borrowable features simply lend themselves while the others are discarded. Lakoff presumes that all of language is metaphoric. This would fall in line with Derrida’s logic, that no single concept is concretely embedded, and that meaning is assigned by the free play of all concepts. In other words, we bounce concepts off one another in order to give, alter and enrich their meanings.

The logic of metaphorical thinking assumes that things have some equal features as others, yet are not entirety similar. We say that a thing is another thing, in order to shed light on the target concept. That is, the metaphor uses the more concrete concept of the two, as a magnet to draw in the more abstract concept and reveal its nature by highlighting similar attributes among the two.

This type of metaphorical transference of meaning creates the non-syllogistic logic of our thinking. Take for example the conceptual, extended metaphor TIME=MONEY. This metaphor is evident in how we talk about the more abstract of the concepts, time – in monetary terms: we “spend” time; we “save” time, it “costs” hours of our time, “losing” time, “burrowed” time, etc. And tale also the metaphor MONEY=LIQUID. This is evident in such terms as cash “flow”, “pooling” money, “trickle down” economy, “liquidating” assets, etc. If we wish to use the premises to assert now that Time is a liquid, we would be stressed to find many phrases to show this correspondence. The idea is that concepts get their meaning through any act of bringing them next to other concepts. The mechanism resembles the physical phenomenon of large-mass bodies attracting smaller bodies, where the clearer concepts give meaning by attracting the more abstract ones. Or better yet, of clusters of germs, or amoeba on a petri dish, that can lend some of their items to others and take in some of the others.

To conclude the last two points, we sometimes refer to our concepts and ideas as if they were set in stone. The word “ideal”, of course comes from the word “idea’, and lost its meaning of being fleeting and transitory (as ideas really are), to mean something lofty and singular. The fact is that we do not think digitally, as with mathematics. We think in analog fashion. We are a mimicking organism, and make sense of things by echoing them off of other things that we already know. The human mind is able to translate this ability of equating separate things, and use it to to limit and define so called concepts from out of the flux of ever-changing reality. What our use of binary oppositions revels is not so much how the world works, as how we have come to perceive it.

Human thinking is riddled with categorizing things as oppositions. Up-Down, Light-Darkness, Hot-Cold, Big-Small, Happy-Sad, etc. While we perceive all of these as sets of opposites, they in fact have no inherent contradiction. They are merely different states, or attributes. They are only opposed when we view them in relation to ourselves, to our sensations, stature, or needs. Being alive or dead can be considered as different stages of life. And yet, humans are uniquely capable of viewing the stages as contrasting ideals. The tendency to categorize things as opposites is the one ability that helps humans in every other act of classifying and categorizing.

Abstracting things is the first condition to assigning meaning to impressions. Seeing things as separate and distinct, as our memory does, they still exist in a vacuum, and have nothing to assign them with qualities. That is, until we realize what they are not. When seeing a deer running in the pasture, we can know that it is not a predator. We see it eating grass, and animated in such a way to reveal it is no threat to us humans. When we see a tiger, we notice it animated much differently than a deer, not eating the grass. We assume the two have a unique difference. The binary tendency allows us create categories, since it frames one set of impressions and then connects it to another. It is the origin of all systematic knowledge, including science and the law. We tend to forget that those distinctions exist only in relation to humans.

Part 3

While reality is in a state of constant change, human thinking does the incredible task of solidifying it and committing reality into constants, such as symbols and words. This ‘digitizing’ of our impressions happens by limiting them using binary thinking. While Mathematics no doubt idealizes, and thus limits, the natural world, it does work as a language for creation and communication information. Let’s take a final look at our binary thinking and uncover the reason for its becoming such a fruitful generator of human language.

The Mind as a Computer

Binary thinking is embedded in our mental function. Analyzing our language reveals the operational aspects of our mind, and similarly does observing the technologies that mankind invents. Marshall McLuhan famously referred to the media that man creates as “extensions”. By ‘media’ he included not only newspapers and television, but man-made items, such as light bulbs, cars, etc. Media are created organically, by us, to satisfy an inner need for expression. McLuhan thus called them “extensions” of ourselves. He concluded that all these humanly founded things serve as our extension, as originating in our need to expand and fulfill ourselves, and as a continuation of our own bodily limbs. The creation of media is thus a work of mimicry. We devise the things we wish to be in the world.

McLuhan’s notion of extensions offers a clue to the workings of the human mind. The man-made artifacts that surround us mirror the mechanics and limits of our own thought. When we look at our inventions, our media, we see our desires incarnated. Yet we also notice the intentions, and direction that our mind allows us at any given moment. This was McLuhan’s idea by the maxim “The Medium is the Message”. Our artifacts reveal more about us than they do about them.

We can therefore use McLuhan’s views of devised “extensions” in order to reveal things about our own memory, which might be unconscious in our everyday thought. One such memory-based human invention is the computer. The computer extensively mimics human thinking. We demand of it to remember and to retrieve information at our disposal. A computer’s memory is binary. It can be represented by a set of 0s and 1s. The electric current that runs through the computer allow us to create a code made of a sequence of electric pulses and respites, which is translated into the computer’s operations. The computer stores and retrieves units of data through assigning to them a physical space This operation greatly mimic, I argue, the mechanics of our own memory.

As I have written in the previous post, our thoughts are in fact memories, stringed together. What comprises a thought is the road that it passes between synaptic junctions. We should think about thoughts as similar to a binary code, where a piece of computer language translates to a series of 0’s and 1’s, of Off’s and On’s. A single thought should be looked at according to its particular voyage through neural junctions, and the path of turns that it has taken. Again, thoughts are not a what, but a where.

The comparison of our living biological brain contents and the inanimate computer, should be met with several caveats. First, our neural network is constantly remolding itself. Old synapses are decaying and giving way to new synapses to be generated.⁶ Second, the location of various memories is arbitrary and differs, not only between different persons, but between the same person over time. This means that a human thought will change over time, be given a greater or smaller emphasis, and in general, be less static than that of a computer. Third, our own thinking is less trustworthy than the computer’s memory. Since human memories rest on the ever decaying biological matter of the brain, we tend to distort, exaggerate, forget and invent memories based on the ceaseless activity of our memories. In short, our thinking is untrustworthy.

Nevertheless, our thinking and the memory of a computer are closely similar in the way that we retrieve both of them. Our memory stores our impressions and experiences by giving them a mental space within our neural network. Like a file in a computer, our memories have a location. They correspond to a string of nodes, of binary turns, that we can take in order to retrieve these memories. So our binary thinking is not just thinking in terms of opposites. It allows complexity and depth by memorizing a chain of binary choices. We create a path which can be retraced and re-collected. We don’t think like a computer so much as a computer is designed as mimicry of our own thought.

Binary Thinking and Spatial Memory

Our thinking is a spatial tool. We code our impressions of the world around as if they were coordinates in space, so that we might be able to arrive to them at a later time. The fact that our memory has this spatial bias originates from the times where early humans had to memorize their surroundings in order to survive. For more on this, see my previous post. Like Ariadne’s thread that helped Theseus through the maze, our memory serves as a way to venture far out of our known territory, only to arrive safely back. Thoughts are often equated to threads (as in the saying “string of thought”). Human memory codifies spatial landmarks into abstract symbols, by creating concepts for them. And our concepts of the world are themselves spatial, since they rely on the coding of living moving reality upon the grid of our neural network.

In the previous post, I claimed that when early Hominids’ started to stand upright on two legs, it made the sense of seeing our primary mode of experience, which in turn formed our sense of self – as a location behind our eyes. It creates the spatial “I”, as man first perceived a space from which to “look out” at the world. The first binary opposition was created, then, being ‘me vs. not me’. From this original opposition unfold every distinction and distancing that we perform. Notice that a word for “I”, the first person pronoun, exists in every human language.

In the previous post I also argued that the first metaphors to shape our perception were Orientational Metaphors. That is, that our ability to mentally symbolize space came before we could symbolize objects within that space. In this, I slightly contradict Lakoff and Johnson’s idea that we symbolize and codify objects by using a different metaphoric design, namely Ontological Metaphors, which perceive things, and not space. I think that our habit of thinking in binary oppositions would have to grow in tandem with navigating in space, and only then could it be assigned to objects. Proof of this is that we still our use sets of binary oppositions to categorize the space around us. We refer to space in terms of pairs, such as UP-DOWN, LEFT-RIGHT, FORWARD-BACKWARD, and so on.

I think that we were able to grow our memory and symbolic language from venturing further and further into unseen space, and creating a memory-path in order to return home. We codified space using binary signs, for the turns we made. These helped retrace our steps back to the cave, and allowed us to later find the same spots, like vegetation, shade and waterholes. We grew our memory for symbols, which led to the birth of language, out of this codifying and memorizing of space. The thoughts that we think are memories traveling through the neural pathways that were created from the navigational requirement of surviving outside. I speculate that these abilities situate within the Hippocampus of our brain, which governs the “consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and spatial memory that enables navigation.”⁷ And, interestingly enough, we have two hippocampi. Could they contribute to our ability to think in binary terms?

As Barbara Tverski writes in her book Mind in Motion:

“…the same neural foundation that serves spatial thought serves abstract thought. It’s as though the hippocampus created checkers or tokens for places or memories … I repeat: the brain mechanisms in humans that represent actual places in real spaces also represent ideas in conceptual spaces. Spatial thinking enables abstract thinking.”

The language we use to talk about our thoughts indicates our awareness to their connection with moving through space.

“Where does a thought go when it’s forgotten?”

Sigmund Freud

“Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox”

The Beatles, Across The Universe

This post was a kind of addendum to the previous post. I have tried to flesh out the mental workings of the Spatial Thinking Theory. I tried to offer more proof to the theory based on the existence of binary oppositions in our thought process. I concluded by relating the binary oppositions back to the navigational influence on our thought and language, claiming that these ideal electric oppositions were the source for our Orientational Metaphors, and as a consequence, to all of language.

In the next posts, I will start using the theory as a given tool, in order to analyze works of fiction, like various myths and ancient stories, on the one hand, and human behavior, like the historic expansion of civilizations, on the other.

Influences:

Marshall McLuhan / Understanding Media; The Medium is the Message.

Barbara Tversky / Mind in Motion (2019)

Ferdinand De Saussure/ A Course in General Linguistics

Jacques Derrida/ Sign, Structure, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences