plant them they will grow watch them waver so

Jim Morrison, American Prayer

It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m [...]]]>

Words dissemble
words be quick
words resemble
walking sticks

plant them
they will grow
watch them waver so

Jim Morrison, American Prayer

It has been suggested in a forum I contribute too that words only have the power that we give them. This is an idea that I would like to explore on several levels. I’m not proposing a certitude either way, I’m just very cautious of coming down to such a binary conclusion.

Words are strange things. I recall a Reith Lecture in which the neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran demonstrated a synaesthetic relationship between word sounds and visual and kinesthetic senses. By showing people two pictures, one of a soft rounded amoeba-like shape, and the other of a spiky, sharp spiny shape, and telling them that one was called a booba and the other a kikki before asking them to identify which they thought was which, he demonstrated that in excess of 90% of people would associate the word booba with the soft rounded shape and the word kikki with the spikey shape. While I’m guessing we could account for this through a learned cultural phenomenon, Ramachandran’s studies into the phenomenon of synesthesia have lead him to conclude that low level synesthesic experiences are common, even normal, and that the root of language development in our species may in part be attributed to this experience which appears to be genetically determined.

So it seems plausible, even likely, that the experience of hearing a word works on at least two levels.

First is the level of sound. But even the experience of hearing that sound goes beyond the sense of hearing itself, and includes visual and kinesthetic experiences at least internally and some of these experiences are common to most of us, independently of culture and learning.

Secondly is the learned meaning of the word, which will overlay the first experience with further visual and kinesthetic representations and associations. But this second experience will have two components… firstly the learned meaning, the received understanding of the word passed down through learning… the definition. Secondly, our own associations of meaning associated with the word. We all know what the word “Father” means, on the first level…. and we all use the word according to a set of rules that allow us to apply it consistently and make sense of that meaning. But do I truly know what the word “Father” means to you? Do I know what the experience of being parented entailed and what associations that word may have, what emotion you may put behind the word?

From the point of view of words having a “magical” inherent power, power over us and power over (maybe) the external world, independent of the power that we give them, I’m most interested in the first point… words working on the level of sound. The second point, about the learned meaning and experience associated with words, is more associated with the power that we give words… but even that is a power not to be dismissed lightly, a power that derives not just from a life filled with association meaning and story, but from the life of the community, the evolution of our language itself; to suggest that we give words that sort of power is only to suggest that it is human derived, it is not to suggest that it is something we can “give” and “take back” lightly. It isn’t.

Tantric sources distinguish between lettered and unlettered sound, and sanskit is interesting because of its direct association with a concept of the subtle body through the chakra system (where by letters/sounds from the Sanskrit system are associated with “petals” of the chakra) and with a complex understanding of the process of coming into being of all existence, of manifestation from the primal source

A very profound doctrine is connected with these Letters which . . . . . . . has been set out in greater detail in the Serpent Power (Kundalini) which projects Consciousness, in Its true nature blissful and beyond all dualism, into the World of good and evil. The movements of Her projection are indicated by the Letters subtle and gross which exist on the Petals of the inner bodily centers or Lotuses.
Sir John Woodroffe, Shakta and Shakti

What is interesting is the way in which Sanskrit letter sounds or phonemes can be arranged according to the part of the mouth used to form the sound. There is a clear correlation between the location of the mouth used and the location of the chakra, so phenomes formed at the rear of the mouth are associated with higher level chakra in the body.

This interests me because psychologists understand that we perceive vowel sounds differently that we perceive sounds formed at the back of the mouth, round, ooo or oh sounds as larger than sounds formed at the front such as ee sounds. Recent research for example seems to show that this effect can be expoited to create a false perception of the size of a price discount… Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22) with the former perceived, on average, as a discount of 28.1% on $3 and the latter as a discount of 24.13% discount on $3! Clearly the discount on the former is significantly less than the latter, but the effect of the sound on our perception of the size of the cost has a direct impact on our judgement. This effect appears to be cross cultural. In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value. While this research is not yet released formally and is reported in a newspaper (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/business/18drill.html) it is none the less indicative of a psychological power that resides in words beyond the simply learned.

Moving even further in to the realms of speculation, we can wonder where such responses to sound-in-language came from. I strongly suspect that they are evolved responses and they they are pre-linguistic. As a species evolves, it’s neurology develops to respond to sensory stimuli in particular ways to adapt it to its environment. So somewhere along the line we have evolved to associate certain sound “shapes” (in this example “oooo” and “eee”) with an internal perception of size (and probably more).

It can be an interesting experience to stand in an empty room and close your eyes, before starting to intone vowel sounds, resonating different parts of the body and paying attention to the internal sensory experience.

So, so far we have considered a range of effects that words and lettered sound may have upon us as human animals at a psychological level. It isn’t clear how these effects relate to language and its development, but it would make sense to assume that we have a somewhat chicken and egg scenario… where (from Ramachandran and others) internal experiences of sounds correspond to external world experiences beyond the onomatopoeic and into the realm of true synesthesia as a mode of engaging with experience.

Words

• Have a learned effect
• as language, learned meaning
• according to the way that they are layered with personal and individual meaning from life experience
• and an unlearned effect, yet still psychological
• as sound creates consistent internal experiences that engage the full sensory spectrum, an internal landscape

I haven’t even made a start on considering the direct physical effects that the vibrations of words are capable of having on the human and other animal. On the whole, I strongly suspect that this can be discounted in any real empirical sense… the world bathes us in the experience of sound vibration all the time, and words make up a minute proportion of that experience, and I suspect that there is no correlation between any physical effect and the development of language (though I wouldn’t immediately discount the possibility in some contexts). However, in specific ritualistic contexts, when experiential variables are highly controlled, and those present are functioning in highly altered states of consciousness, I don’t think we can entirely rule out the possibility that direct physical experience of vibration of words could have a very specific and manipulable effect.

I don’t plan to leave this here… I would like to cover other related areas… the use of a person’s “true name” in folklore or the use of specific words of power, for one. And a consideration of the animated nature of words, words with spirit, for another. But in the mean time I would like to leave you with a video. I don’t know if you have ever come across the phenomena of Chladni plates before. A Chladni plate is a metal plate undergoing forced vibration and creating 2D standing wave patterns… granules of a fine material are placed on the plate and gather at the points where the plate undergoes least vibration. The artist in this video used this phenomena to engage artistically with her voice and the geometrical patterns created.