My Inaugural Lecture as a Twitter Thread
With gratitude to #WOMENSART
Communication is at the heart of all that humans do
Words allow transient internal thoughts to exist beyond our mind
Writing systems make permanent record of our words
To share ideas with people we’ve never met
Or have not been born
Technologies develop incrementally using this shared knowledge
Changing society for better
Or for worse
Words are the building blocks of complex language
Simple words can combine to express deeply profound ideas
We communicate emotions
Shape complex relationships
Complex computations are needed to understand words
To construct meaningful representations that resemble the thoughts of the speaker
Our minds contain stored knowledge about word meanings
But our mental dictionary is more complex and flexible than any book
Words don’t have fixed, immutable meanings
Their meanings are flexible and context dependent
The meaning the homophone “coach” depends if we’re discussing travel …
… or football
It a take more time and effort to understand homophones
We know this from monitoring readers’ eye-movements …
… or their brain activity
But homophones are weird words
What about more ordinary words like “run”?
Their meanings are also context dependent
Athletes run differently to rivers
or politicians running for election
or films running at the cinema
It means something different to run a bath
than to run a factory
We have very precise knowledge of when and how to use such words
We run baths, but not usually showers or sinks
Even our interpretation of precise words like “piano” are context dependent
We only focus on their heaviness when thinking about moving them
The precise features of “apple” that come to mind depend on whether you will eat or throw it
Dictionaries don’t scratch the surface of the richness, subtlety and flexibility of how the mind respond to words
Words take your mind on a complex journey within your hugely high-dimensional brain
Familiar words take your brain to familiar, stable places with vastly complex brain-space
Familiar words are complex galaxies with endless range of nuanced meanings
Words do not have fixed immutable lists of features
Words are tools that allow your brain to access complex constellations of meaning
Humans are lifetime learners
Ever learning new nuances of meaning
Our word meaning knowledge is an idiosyncratic product of unique experiences
Containing weird legacies of hobbies and interests
Influence by what people around us choose to discuss
Would communication be easier if language was less nebulous?
Perhaps. But less interesting
Lexical flexibility gives language endless capacity for expression
We distort and mutate meanings to express new ideas.
Art produces a highly variable cascade of ideas in our minds
Words work similar magic
Adaptable and often nebulous word meanings are at the heart of human creativity
That’s all
Thank you.
The Word Lab at UCL 