THE ETIOLOGY OF MESS COMMUNICATION
SEMIOSLUDGE AND THE BREAKDOWN OFMODERN
COMMUNICATION
ore the current tendency is to merge entertainment and information into what has been called "infotainment". But any person looking for entertainment and/or information plus knowledge should go a step beyond, trying to find the now increasingly scarce sources of intelligent, significant information that used to be
the prevailing one decades ago.

Think about this: How many mass media outlets of today could provide you the steady supply of both information and education you used to have readily available when you were going through your years
of formal education? How many sources of modern communication will indeed help you improve your knowledge consistently, day after day, year after year?

I firmly believe that to be the kind of communication we need. An articulate, educative, informative, mentally stimulating and intellectualy challenging communication.

As an old and very aggressive advocate of that kind of communication I have derived my position from a very fortunate and not so common perpective: That of a successful writer and educator.

People who consistently look for my writing do so because they perceive that I know a lot about how
to inform, entertain and educate readers at the sa
me time.
They know that I have a well deserved reputation
for providing readers with the sort of creative writing they would most better themselves from.

Knowledge and the most effective and engaging
ways to incentive people to acquire it, and improve their resources, skills and abilities play a key role in
the writing I always strive to provide.

Unless you avoid the junk when you become an increasingly avid consumer of the "goods" offered by our current media, you will become loaded (and -
eventually - overloaded) with stultifying garbage,
and you risk to become addicted to such nonsense and well on your way to idiocy.

This is a basic axiom that everything in my experien
ce as a teacher and a writer has reinforced. Mental laziness and slowness, atrophied analytical capaci
ties, slumbered mental processes, permanently increasing shallowness, fuzzy grammatical and semantic notions, and eminently contrived view
points are familiar obstacles to the educators who
try to instill knowledge and impart education to the modern consumer of mass communication.

It is not an accidental state of mental drift imbued
in the brains of modern individuals by this torrentous sludge seeping as the detritus of accumulated inani
ties produced by what we call "the media", but, rather, the syndromic manifestation of a basic systemic breakdown closely related to the strate
gies from the media manipulators following and implementing the not so hidden agenda by the ruling classes.

I have spent a significant part of my productive
years warning my students not to fall into that ideological trap and telling them to avoid letting their awareness be deluged and sunk into the resulting sludge from the overload of useless, vapid messinformation assaulting our cognitive system.

The honest truth is that most of my students didn't come to me in a quest for higher knowledge of the kind that promotes awareness. They first wanted a fast and practical approach to the task of becoming fluent in English or quickly improving their gramma
tical competence for better and more effective writing.

The discerning and discriminating habits they developed before the vast supply of mass culture
and mass media products available gave them that benefitial side effect from quite successful tutoring programs where reading was one of the most important components in the curricula.


II - THE STATUS OF CURRENT COMMUNICATION

1 - Almost all JUNK FOOD FOR THOUGHT exist for economic reasons. Most semiotic studies have shown that the Junk Food for Thought addict is quite able
to overcome that condition and become a judicious consumer of messages.

2 - The basis of the Systemic Communication Breakdown has been only scratched on its surface
by the scientists and researchers on communication over the last twenty years. Those efforts haven't
had to do with the effects of the semiosludge you accumulate, but with the spurious contradictions between two groups whose existence is the result
of an effort to evade responsibilities instead of any
real spontaneous emergence of two different sets of values and expectations before the consumer goods offered by today's communications industry.

3 - The ill effects of the mental sludge created by the addictive consumption of Junk Food for Thought can be turned negligible by restricting the percenta
ge of trivialized content being consumed.

4 - The benefits of that restriction are so striking that many will be able to repair the damage and absorb much more and better communicative messages than under the uncontrolled addiction to Junk Food for Thought.

5 - The excessive accumulation of Junk Food for Tought creates what I have called MESS (Media Effused SemioSludge) which has brought about half
of the population of the planet to the first stage of
a perilous Systemic Communication Breakdown.

Early manifestations of such breakdown can already be found once you understand how MESS affects
our mental fitness and the Afferent/Efferent structures of our sensimotor brain operational design. If you don't understand and acknowledge it, chan
ces are you will try to solve the malady attacking on
ly the symptoms instead of the cause. Ritalin and
ADD are examples of such misapproach.

III - THE PREY OF SEMIOSLUDGE

3.1 WHERE CHOMSKY SIDES WITH LORD GREYSTOKE

Language is our main system of communication and yet its origins and very early development remain a mystery.

Because brains don't fossilize Archeology can only give us some clues on the size of the human brain
at the earlier stages of our evolution. Recent and exciting improvements on MRI and imaging techno logies have allowed us to observe the brain reac
tions to external stimuli, and how the nervous sys
tem works from the moment reality turns into either sensation or perception, which becomes informa
tion carried out to the brain. At that point the next stage occurs: Action triggers reaction as the brain processes the data.

If the content of the message requires a physical response, the brain activates the muscles and chemical reactions needed, while simultaneously creating some sort of a mental record that is stored for future reference.

If the message doesn't require a response that includes physical action and movement, the brain processes the data and files the information. By around they are seven years old, barring all the possible exceptions (autism and other abnor-
malities), most human individuals have already stored in their brain "files" all that they need to know about movement and the risks involved in carelesly roving
around their spatial surroundings.

The mysterious part, which holds the key to our full understanding of how the human cognitive system develops, unfolds very early in life, and that is where Noam Chomsky sides with Lord Greystoke


3.2. IS HUMAN SPEECH INSTINCTIVE?

According to Noam Chomsky we have all been pre-programmed to develop skills and knowledge necessary to add performance to our "wired" competence for acquiring our language.

If we accept Chomsky's formulation and language is instintive, since all instincts are inborn and don't depend on learning, then we have spent centuries wasting our time when we have adviced parents to talk to their babies, and when we have talked to
our own newborns in parentese.

It might seem impossible to argue with absolute tags where abstracts like "nature", "instinct", "biological" and "inborn" replace explanations only to work as
evasive ways to refer back to the Genesis.

The problem with the theory of an instinctual origin
of language, is that instincts are very basic biological drives which are present in all living beings (no mat
terhow microscopic), and consistenly appear to be commonly shared by all the individuals of a given species. I don't really know for sure what are the boundaries drawn by Chomsky for the categorization of instincts as opposed to learned behavior. I consi
der as instinctive any innate mode of operation in which there is afixed association of some specific combinations of nervous reactions to specific
stimuli.

Purely instinctive operations can be a starting plattform for the development of learning, but lear
ning can in no way be a starting plattform for the development of instincts.
"A sign we all are, perhaps not yet deciphered", Hölderlin stated. It is quite common to find scientists and researchers, including semiologists and linguists, whoshould know better, interchanging the terms Language and Communication as if they were exactly the same. But they are not.
Communication, which appears to be universal and
not dependent either on the sender or the receiver (Since, as Hölderlin says, everything is a sign, a symbol- in potency - and a message), is common to all animals. Language is not.

It may seem excessive to say it here, but sometimes it is better to cover all fronts and go into overkill, so I won't neglect to mention that what distinguishes
language from communication is that language is a two way, most frequently extensive interchange of messages, not just the reception and immediate reactive response of the receptor.

When oceanic predators approach a fish that turns and displays the colors that convey the message: "Look, I am poisonous" and the predator turns
around and goes elsewhere, that is communication.

If, instead of turning away, the predator bares its teeth, and the toxic fish points to carcasses around showing the result of not paying attention to its message, and the predator rebukes that with a subsequent contradicting message, That is
language.

Sending and receiving messages to communicate is instinctive to all species. As purely instinctive, it usually promotes instant, automatic reactions. Contrast that with the way we humans communicate. We also have an organic system for conveying messages in such a primal manner. Early puberty is, perhaps, our peak period for this development. Pubic hair marks our genitalia as a sign of maturity and readiness for reproductive copulation.

Such messages are not limited to the visual. The cosmetics industry makes a bundle out of the paranoid concerns teenagers experience about their armpits.
Proxemics in general (gestures, movements and mimics) are also messages we send when we feel
the need to communicate without using explicit words.

Dogs wag their tails, we smile. Dogs bark excitedly, we laugh. Dogs show their teeth, we show our fists. That is all communication.

Barking dogs are not the only animals that use sound to communicate, the way we humans do when we
cry or laugh (notice I am not including words). Whales have an apparently rich system of sonic messages (sonic, to be precise, means having a frequency within the auditability range of the human ear) which we have not been intelligent or commited enough to decode.

I may be going against what Chomsky thinks, but words (words, not random noises) are formed by the way of learned performance. They follow the pattern
of many other activities, which have evolved from tasks associated with the responses to instinctual drives triggered by external stimuli. Dogs, for instan
ce, have used - or have been forced to use - many
of their learned performances evolved from instinc
tual drives, in order to strenghten their partnership with humans.

The "Pet tricks" segments on TV programs, amazing acts performed by trained animals in the circus, and the stories of Toto, Chita, Benji, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin,
Mr. Ed, and many other Hollywood and TV stars are examples of such capabilities. Teaching and training are, undeniably, the key factor for pet tricks, as well
as for human speech.

It is not less undeniable that imitation, one of the basic tools of learning, are also an important and - perhaps - inextricable part of the way babies go
from the mere utterance of sounds to words.

Unless, of course, you have been fortunate enough
to have known Lord Greystoke, and know how baby Tarzan could go from the indifferentiated sounds that
apes make while they breathe out, to the vast range of differentiated and modulated sounds unique to human speech and vocalization.

Instincts work by autonomous behavior patterns that do not have to be learned.
An instinct is, in other words, an inherited body of reflexes which don't need previous external stimuli in the subject in order to be generated. They are built
in an individual without the need for past direct experiences and the occurrence of repeated successful responses, to establish the patterns of behavior required to effectively handle the demands and challenges of external reality.


Instincts have another important mark: they are consistently present, without major aberrations, in
all the normal, healthy members of the same group. Leading behavior, packing, circling before lying down, guarding behavior are present in all dogs, regardless of race. It took years and years of desperate frustration from dog breeders, to lessen some canine behaviors that go back even to the times when they hadn't yet evolved from their wolf ancestors.

What makes the theory of the instinctual origin of language so tenuous is that, in many respects, language differs from the known attributes we recognize as the constitutive elements and features of instincts. The commonality of similar drives
and reflexes among all the members of any given species, the fact that instinctual responses are neither geographically or historically determined, the objectively clear evidence that it takes thousands
and thousands of years for species to evolve into new, and more refined or specialized individuals with gradual and very slow developments of new organic structures, and new competences and performances, all point to the conclusion that language is not instinctive.

Mammals have always fed their immature in the same manner regardless of time or space. In the remotest and most isolated tribal group in the jungle, as
well as in the superindustrialized countries of the west, females lactate without having to be taught how to do it, and their babies suck without having to be told that that is the right and natural way for
them to be fed.

Evolution takes hundreds of thousands of years to develop new individuals with new and more compe
tent structures. It takes so long, that we don't have any document from the very remote time when what we now know as mammals, hadn't evolved to that system of nourishment. In that sense instincts are
not historical.

We can't say the same about language. Even
speech, the utterance of articulated vocalizations that turn mere sounds into words have to be learned. A baby starts by the simplest gutural sounds, and go from goo to boo and then moo until they run out of possibilities. It is a complete waste of time and effort when dense parents expect babies to imitate sounds like too and doo before the poor creatures have any teeth.

Once they have teeth they can go on to those consonants they couldn't produce before. But they will always be limited to monosyllables, until their brains start flexing their cerebellums' muscles and develop a sense of order and sequence.

How, once he could walk and his cerebellum started its sensimotor miraculous tricks, could baby Tarzan say "banana" instead of "abnnaa" or "naanab" is a
total mystery to me. He could have, by mere chance, said "banana". How he applied that specific sound to the same fruit we have given that name is an even more remarkable enigma.

Maybe Chomsky knew Cheetah

For everybody else, but Lord Greystoke, that trick is accomplished through learning.

The human capacity for making articulated, modula
ted sounds is, like in any other species, a tool for communication. It is not a tool for language. If the capacity to emit sounds were a tool for the development of language then parrots, whales and many other animals would have developed some system of communication like ours (a language), and
I would have been a Zootranslator instead of a semiologist.

3.3 - SOUND, WORDS, SPEECH AND TALK

Eristratus, or Erasistratus, as he is also known, was the disciple of Herophilus who described how the epiglottis stops the food from entering the windpipe while we are eating, and the peristaltic action of
food trevelling along the alimentary canal by muscu
lar action.

He caused quite a stir during his time when he was accused of performing vivisections and narrowly escaped ostracism. Most importantly, he was the
first anatomist who studied the cerebellum and its functions and properties. He was remarkably accura
te in his observations, and when he claimed that animals that could run as fast as hares or deers had
a better-developed cerebellum, he knew
that far back that the cerebellum was closely con nected with the handling and coordination of movement and balance in all animals.

The cerebellum, situated at the back of the brain, avobe the stem and right below the cerebral cortex,
is more highly developed in humans than in any
other animal, and accounts for almost 11 percent of the brain weight. From birth to age two the cerebellum grows much faster than the cerebral cortex, almost reaching in that period the size it will have during our adult life. It is the time when
children learn all their basic movements. These movement patterns are recorded in the cerebellum and are used by the brain whenever a movement is needed.

The cellular structure of the cerebellum is quite different from any other section of the brain. Its
cells are located in a precise and organized way. The matrix is almost rectangular while the cerebral cortex, for instance, has a less defined pattern. Not only
the structure is different. Its functions are also unique. It is the only body of cells in our whole nervous system whose function works more by
inhibiting than exciting and restrain rather than action.

Most people find it highly surprising, but it should be logically expected on learning that the cerebellum controls and organizes the flow of movements initiated in the cerebral cortex, and thus it enables the human developing child to move in an orderly
and safe fashion. The reason making this mode of function so expected is, precisely, that flow control would be an impossibility for any entity lacking
the power to restrict and stop, which is as impor
tant as to spur and init for such type of control to
be done effectively.

It is on that endless activity that the cerebellum works by stopping movement in one area, allowing more or less in other area, and thus changing the whole operation so it can rapidly and effectively control the ongoing movement pattern.

That is why whenever you have a resource that is used by more than one organ or system in the body, you would have to look at the cerebellum, in order
to comprehend the overall way in which the operations using such resource are dependent on
the brain to increase the share of that resource to the area where the need is more compelling, or urgent, while decreasing it to the area or areas
whose function is not that significant at that specific moment.

Oxygen, or air, is one of such resources. It is an essential need for speech, and - at the same time - the main element for breathing. Since in the factory of life the cerebellum can be thought of as the Sup
ply Department, it is the part where the
flow of movements get its economy and its law of supply and demand. Keep in mind that the cerebellum is also the area of the brain that monitors movement
and the main place where our sensimotor system lies.

Now I come back to sound, words, speech and talk. As I said before, the capacity to utter sounds is not
a human privilege. Most vertebrates share that ca
pacity and use it with different degrees of development and specialization. Evolution gave us the capacity for better modulation and vocalization because the bigger size of our brains and our cerebellums, which is uniquely human.

The capacity for better articulation and modulation of sounds and the linguistic competence in humans,
may reside in the same brain structures, but it
doesn't necessarily make them manifestations or results of the same process. Linguists and resear
chers who think so would greatly benefit from a trip to the Amazon jungle, where they will surely be stunned by the loquacity and excellent mimics
of the extremely talkative parrots in that area.

We don't have our complex and miraculous competence for language because
of the human capacity to talk. We have the human capacity to talk because of our complex and miraculous competence for language.

When parrots in the amazonian jungle make the
sound "pata" (paw, or female duck, in Spanish) they are not talking like humans. They are simply mimic
king a sound. Exactly the same can be said of an american child who shortly after arriving to that area repeats "pata". He, like the parrot, is simply mimic
king a sound, not saying a word. It will only become
a word after the child give it a linguistic application
by inserting it in a meaningful utterance with semantics, syntax and contextuality. In other words, when he learns the conventional decodification of
the sound, and the ideal concept it represents in
the local language.

Words are vocal representations tagged to concepts either for particular or categorical entities. Sounds, unless onomatopoeic, are not.

Once integrated to the code of utterance=meaning making communication possible, sounds become words. Any combination of noises can become articu
lated enough to be recognized as "sound". But it will take the step just mentioned for that sound to be accepted as a word. And it is not dependent on quality or quantity at all. Two individuals who agree on giving any arbitrary combination of sounds the category of words, would be entirely free to consider it as such.

"Bum dla cutina/Bm dla veriqüeca/pm nla peripiqüinga/nla mamptollrra/neperinué."

The former is gibberish used by a group of students
to cheat during a particularly difficult college exam. For years the members of such group have greeted one another with such apparent nonsense, which helped a few earn their degree.
With time we, the cheaters, gave added meanings
to some of those made-up words. Finally "veriqüeca" became groin, "peripiqüinga" became penis, and cu
tina became vagina, or the other way around, I can't be sure after such a long time. One of us, Alfonso Segura, used it in a poem and as part of the colorful
lexicon of one of his characters in his radio show.
For us, they were real words.

We can clearly see the close relation between movement and speech (not mere sound) when we carefully track the first two years in the develop
ment of babies.

The first easily noticeable manifestation of mimics by the baby is his/her smile, which generally occurs between the first five and/or sixth week. It corresponds to a period between the fourth and eleventh week when the baby watches the face
of people talking to him.

Between the first and third month the baby develops the capacity to follow things as they move within his visual field. This is also the period when his oral pha
se starts and he checks everything by taking it to
his mouth. Another important step is the discovery
of the relationship between pushing and causing movement. It is his first encounter with the cause-effect equation.

Shortly before the fifth month most babies can get into crawling position.

The period between the fifth and the sixth month opens a new development: the baby goes from ba
by noises to baby sounds. Open vowels and the consonants G-B-K-M-P are combined to produce
what is commonly called "cooing". From the primal
and gutural Goo (which is the first articulation for most babies) he progresses to the use of the only resources he has which are limited to the lips and
the capacity for the first oclusive consonants. The letter P follows, but if a baby has alert parents who have made an effort to learn how to help him most effectively he can accomplish that consonant earlier by mimicking his parents.

The seventh month has the baby sitting straight af
ter a lot of nosedives. He is already trying to grab things effectively but all he can achieve that early is what we call the "pincer grip". Between the eigth
and nineth month most babies will be able to stand
by supporting themselves on furniture o an adults helping hand.

Here it becomes important to those early walkers
who can advance by themselves and notice how
soon after they become able, at last, of putting two syllables together.

These early walkers are the ones who can utter their first words by their first year and before they are 16 months old are getting words together. Most of the time only their parents will be able to understand them, but they are already talking, nonetheless, and they have acquired speech.

The average progression is about six to seven
months for the early articulation of modulated sounds. Nine to ten months for their first strings (syllables) which coincides with their first steps leading to walking and from there to ten months, when they are already walking and going from goo to goo goo and from maa and daa to maa maa and daa daa.

Walking, in my opinion, dramatically accelerates the process and only after two months they are finally able to try words.

It is important to clarify, in order to avoid misunderstandings, that I use walking
as a representation of movement, or, better, the human capacity to go from one place to the other
at will, regardless of the mechanisms involved. It
can be by walking, boarding a vehicle, pushing a wheelchair, etc.


The importance of this capacity lies on it being the best and most efficient way for the cerebellum to prepare for its main function of restraining and inhibiting.
It must be a two-way, codependent process. The cerebellum refines and develops its ability to manage
the flow of init, continue and stop by, let's say it
this way, "practicing" and training itself through movement.


It gives our brain the capacity to deal with continui
ty, progression, order and, most important, sequence. And it accounts for the filing and storing of the resul
ting sensory experience generating the corresponding concepts which would not have been possible with
out movement.

If there is any researcher who can find any other
way to explain the manner in which we acquire the concepts of start, continue and finish, let me know
it, and I'll discard my theory. The ones I have already asked invariably turn to our perception of time, and immediately after, they check their watches to see if they have enough time to present their views on it.

3.4 BORGES AND HIS REFUTATION OF TIME

I owe Enrique Uribe White, my first professor of philosophy, the development of the approach to speculative and analytical thinking that made the formulation of Semiokinetics possible.

It is both a system and a method which consists in going step by step from the broadest analytical study of any given phenomenon, to each and every one of its details, no matter how small or how distantly related to the object of study at hand.

In other words, going from the whole to its parts in
a deconstructing manner, and then the other way around. That system and a deeply analytical reading
of "New Refutation of Time", by Jorge Luis Borges, made me aware of the fact that there is only one achievement beyond any man's possibilities: That of absolute repose.

Motion is our perpetual state from which we could only escape by stopping our planet's rotary movement. I soon realized, while thinking about it, that movement was a key factor of the equation in almost all the discoveries that made a real difference for our scientific knowledge about the world and its nature.

I developed Semiokinetics as a logical system of philosophical inquiry and as a methodology that I ha
ve been able to apply, quite successfully, to langua
ge tutoring and motivational speech. I have also achieved moderate success using some of its principles to obtain some progress in the verbal communication of severe autistic children.

During a class discussion on the topic of competen
ce and perfomance I recall having mentioned, for the first time, the probability of movement as a catalyst for the development of language in our brain. It was 1995 and nobody paid attention to it. One of the professors on the staff of the Comunications Department at the Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia) seized the opportunity to joke about my
compulsion for having an original theory on everything.

I remember having supported that proposal by asser ting, quite strongly, that no human being can speak normally immediately after an attempt to break the standing world record for the 100 meters. That was quickly dismissed as a clear case of "lack of air"
which seemed to me a reinforcement of my asser
tion instead of a reason for immediate dismissal.

If the brain structures that make speech and move ment possible were not either interdependent or at least inter-related, nature would have evolved the necessary, and separate, respiratory design and air ducts for us to be able to speak without any difficul
ty after strenuous running.

Recent discoveries by neurobiologists have led some linguists to seriously consider the possibility of our sensimotor structures being an important part in the whole constitutive organization of our cognitive system.

When I said, back in 1995, that movement probably played a key role in the development of language I made two big mistakes. The major one was having used the word language when I was actually talking about syntax. The second was not having made it sufficiently clear that I was not claiming that movement played
a key role in the development of syntax, but only in the development of our capacity for it.

When I first read "New Refutation of Time" I could
not shake off the feeling that Borges had gone over the main theoretical formulations of the metaphysical view of time through history in order to reject them.
I failed to pinpoint where or how he had done it un
til I read the mathematical formulas of Stephen Hawking on his "Brief History of Time" to annotate event horizons and singularities.

Then I went back to Borges and realized that he was saying something I had always thought but, similarly, not found a way to say it without stopping at the
mere unmasking of the shocking truth.

We are completely clueless about the dimension whe call "TIME".

We may have the aprioristic knowledge about what we call time, but it hasn't given us any help. So far we have intellectualy cheated ourselves from A to Z
about time because everything we have applied to manage and make sense of it has been arbitrarily taken from what we have achieved to manage and make sense of space.

Space is concrete. Time is not. Space is objective. Time is not. We don't use figures of speech and metaphors to talk about space. Borges points to it when he contrasts the Heraclitian waters against
the legend of Achille and the snail and the paradox
of Zeno.

We can measure space and establish conversion tables for the different systems we have achieved
to this date. We can mark a spot on the ground and advance or retreat a few meters/feet, and the distance will be the same in England, China
or Mexico.

Time is an entirely different matter. Six meters or
their equivalent in any other system are the same everywhere. Three hours are not the same any
where. Days can be longer in Norway while shorter
in Colombia. That is why we can play cute tricks like pushing our clocks back in the winter and keep going as if nothing has really changed.

The main two reasons that keep us, perhaps, condemned to the transfer of our comprehension
and management of space to time are its abstract nature and our very limited capacity to establish empiric referents to handle it. If we kept for an
extended period of time in the darkroom of a photo
lab we would understand why prisoners used to mark the cycle of days/nights on the walls to keep track
of the time. That was back in the times when it
took a long time to travel really far and nobody had experienced the now widely known phenomenon
called jet lag.

High speed on travel and communication has changed the perception of time that the men of other historic periods held. Now it is regarded as more myste
rious and overpowering by the ignorant and less objective and unmanageable by the educated. The theory of relativity and the United States Election
Day reinforce the perception that time is more conventional than previouly thought.
Many people feel time is not what it used to be when, thanks to the modern high speed of communications, they learn that it is only about seven in California while at the exact same moment the votes have already been counted at midnight in the northeast.

Because we measure it based on the earth's movement respect the sun and
the moon the system is purely conventional and somehow arbitrary. Imperfect in the narrow sense that the days in one part of the planet are nights in the opposite side. Arbitrary because the information that an earthquake just occurred in one country on January 1st. can reach, within minutes, another country on December 31 or January 2nd.

There are plenty of examples showing how concepts developed from the way we manage and make sense of space are transferred to time. The adjective ad
vanced which comes from the verb advance meaning - basically - moving ahead, is used metaphorically in the expression "advanced age".

If we try a semiokinetic approach to the origins of language and the way many important abstract concepts developed in our brain, we will find out
that a lot of them would not have been possible without movement.

Let's imagine, for instance, that trees had a langua
ge. Would there be any posssibility for "arborics" (our hypothetical language of trees) to include in its logos
expressions equivalent to the human verbs "advance" and "retreat"?

It is obvious that languages are the best clue about the possibilities as well as the limitations of their speakers. Consider the fact of flying. All languages reveal the cognitive limitations we have about it. Since we can't fly, all our words about flying are limited to what can be seen about it. None have to
do with whatever is felt during flying.

Similarly, if we couldn't move we wouldn't have any of the words made possible because we can carry ourselves from point A to point B and so on. But words are only the end-product of a series of mental processes that make them exist.

If we could not move out of our own volition, how could we have developed concepts like go, stop,
and so many other like them?

Stop and start are the kind of concepts we have borrowed from the objectivity of movement and applied to the subjectivity of time and thought. We can say that we can't stop eating referring to the motions required by that activity. However,
when we say that we can't stop thinking about something we are giving an extended, figurative meaning to the word stop.
Without the possibility of following a mental map
and moving from point A to point B and then proc
ceed to point C (which is what we call order) how could we have developed the concept of sequence?

There are a lot of causalities children could become aware of during their first six months of life, but because they all belong to the realm of biological stimuli and response, those cycles could not be use
ful for all babies. Feeding, for instance, which opens an organic cycle of chemical reactions resulting in bodily needs, like "nature's call", is entirely depen
dent on the parents. If the parents, which is so frequently the case, are not consistent and disci
plined enough, the cycle becomes completely chao
tic and could hardly be used by the brain to
develop a sense or concept of anything.

From all the elements of reality that could have gi
ven us a sense of continuity and sequence, time is the least probable suspect. Our capacity to judge
and accurately perceive and measure the flow of ti
me is very limited. Even if we were to count to sixty (and I am talking about babies here) in order to keep track of the minutes that have passed we would ha
ve to be sure that the intervals are all even and accurate.

Put somebody in the darkroom of a photo lab and tell him/her to perform certain activity every 41 minutes. If you want them to perform such activity on time, you better place an alarm clock in there, because
we have no objective point of reference to "see" and measure the flow of time.

When we walk we can single out a rock in the distance and see how we get near it as we walk in
its direction. We see it when we pass beside it and turning our heads we can see how far ahead we get as we walk forward.

We can't do the same with the flow of time because we lack the capacity (or still have it dormant) to find an empiric referent. That lack of sensory afferents keep us from the ability to see, touch, hear, taste or smell its flowing.

The only other way we could have developed the concept of a starting point and
sequential continuity would be our bodily functions because the regularity of cycles like food intake/defecation; profuse sweating/thirst, etc.

Aside from the argument that they depend largely
on stimuli/response during the first six months of life, and regularity of the cycles depends on parents,
they all occur while our brain and cognitive system develops and come much earlier before speech appears. And they are too constricted to account for the origin of our competence for syntax and langua
ge the way movement can.

The capacity of our brain to develop sequence as a concept is a key element for the development of speech and language because it is the way phone
mes, morphemes and syntax can be implemented.

More importantly, sequence may be the working principle allowing the implementation of symbolic processes in our brain.

3.5 THE HUMAN PATHWAY TO COGNITION

I have a lot to say about the damaging effects of semiosludge and how it preys on human communi cation. But I have to restrain myself and be patient
in order to explain our system of cognition vulnerabi lities before its assault and why it is so perilous tolet it go unchecked.

Trying to help someone or something from his or its predator by learning about the dangers posed by the predator without studying the potential victim is not
a good approach to protection.

Our main tool for communication and the most important manifestation of our cognitive system is language. That is why it is so imperative to have a good working understanding of what it is, where it came from and how it operates.

The Chomskyan theory of an instinctive origin of language and a wired capacity for it (which must include reading and writing, since those are the mo
re advanced performances derived from that competence) would surely give the semiosludgers
the way out to evade responsibility by claiming that, for instance, the flicky/flashy visual handicap afflic
ting our MTV generation are nothing but a
manifestation of the way evolution is leading us to
a new perceptual operational mode.

If we accept Chomsky's proposal, we will have to
find answers to explain why if language is instinctive it seems to be dependent on history, geography and environment to pre-program the competence for reading and writing in some cultures
and not in others which are more primitive or less "civilized".

All animals communicate. Chomsky would have had
an easier task going beyond the specificity of hu
mans and stating that communication is instinctive. Many animals have shapes, odors, body parts and colors whose purpose is to send communicative messages. Many don't even utter sounds. For them body parts, kinesis and chemical secretions/excre
tions are all they need for communication.

We have kept some of those proxemics. Smiles, gestures, sounds like "shhh" to demand silence and cry, along with certain postures we assume when extremely angry and on the brink of aggression or extremely sad and at the edge of an emotional breakdown are all part of our system of communica
tion.

The ability to articulate sounds and pronounce words is not the launching plattform for human language. There is a methodological problem that arises
when researchers use the word "language" when
they are actually talking about communication.

The difference between reflex and performance
(using performance exactly as it has been formula
ted by linguists in the equation competence/perfor mance) is that a reflex (automatic, involuntary response to external stimuli) doesn't have
to be learned and doesn't need repeated successful implementation to be established as a fixed behavior. It doesn't need mimics, imitations or emulation. Lan-
guage, on the other hand, requires all the elements mentioned and some more, in order to be developed.

The early and rudimentary form of "memorization" shown by the baby when he "knows" where the source of nourishment can be found is so sensory originated and oriented (somatic), as opposed to rational (mental), that the hungry babies
when cuddled by mature women will immediately aim for their breasts whereas babies who have been prematurely introduced to the bottle will take the hands to their mouths.
The reason for this is that the first process emerging in the brain is that of association.

It is not uncommon that hungry babies when being held by a man will aim for his chest. It is a manifestation of the rudimentary capacity for association in their developing brains.

The fact is that, contrary to what most researchers seem to assume, association is more a process of exclusions than inclusions. Associations, to be successful, take more than connecting a few related elements together but, more important, disconnecting or dismissing millions of elements that don't belong. Dismissing will always be much easier, and its entropics vastly more economic than the connecting.

The reason for the former is that, following one of
the ways through which our brain implements symbo
lic processes, we form associations by establishing the connection from a few immediately relevant elements while massively (in an abs-tract mode) ignoring the millions of wrong entities which are only considered if they are attached to the elements
being associated. If they are attached because of reasons that make them relevant, they are incorporated. If the reasons why they are attached are not relevant to the specific situation, they are also dismissed.

The operation that makes this system of associations and disassociations so complex and, at the same ti
me, so effective is called representation, which e-
merges as a byproduct of associations and takes on
a whole new and more far reaching area of specialization as the child matures and the brain refines our capacity for memorization.

The capacity for disassociations in an abstract mode is the more complex, mysterious and important part
of our incipient cognitive system and the one babies
haven't fully developed when they aim to the chest of men who hold them. The element they lack is the capacity to form mental concepts which are almost
entirely dependent on the development of language.

Without our language we would have been condemned to a lifetime of limited cognition acting exclusively as a behavior triggered by the drives calling for the
response required for the fulfillment of our biological necessities.

We have, then, a protosystem of cognition within our brain whose first conquest is the capacity for memo
rization of the logistics required to successfuly act out, or perform, the physical responses that are involuntarily (reflex) executed (muscular coordinated movement, chemical changes, etc.) and allow us to feed (sucking), defecate, cry (our first mode of vo
cal communication), etc.

During this first stage of a cognitive protosystem the brain is too busy building upon its rudimentary capacity for associations. As we get better and better at making successful associations and disassociations our brain responds to the permanen
tly increasing amount of information with the launching of another built-in capacity.

It would be impossible to manage the accumulation
of the millions and millions of bits of information that enter through our senses and trigger the synaptic receptors and ejectors for involuntary movements without the central processing unit having a system of storage where to keep the report of past successful associations and disassociations for ready retrieval whenever they could be needed.

This built-in capacity that opens a new stage on the development of our brains pre-dates not only language, but also verbal communication, and is the difference that make us capable of thinking and learning.

Memory, not language, is the operational basis for thinking and learning. It is a marvelous and, so far, mysterious competence. But it is the one that takes us to the next stage.

What makes this stage such a fascinatingphenome
non is that it is clearly the result of two develop
ments which are entirely codependent.

Memory and learning, which both precede language, are at this stage exclusively attached to biological needs and functions.

This stage, of memory refinement, emerges slowly
but steadily thanks to the constant expansion of better associations and disassociations. It is a two
tiered road to specialization: To better associations and disassociations, more efficient memorization; and from more efficient memorization, better and increa
sed competence for associations.

At this stage we are like the individuals of any other species because our brains, like theirs, are exclusive
ly dedicated to the basic biological needs common
to all species: feed, defecate and sleep.

I once told William Burroughs he should give me the funds to conduct an investigation on the chemical mess in his brain during his drunk induced black outs, to find out what breaks down in our brains when our memory fails to register and store external reality. He thought I was joking and I left it at that. But I was
not.

I believe the human capacity for infinite recording
and storing comes from some combination of electri
cal charges and chemical reactions with their own specific connectivity which are not present in other species.

Since I very much doubt that that kind of resear
ching will ever be funded and assigned to me I'll
most probably go on to get recycled before I know
for sure how it works. The storing of sensory information processed by the brain is not as dif
ficult to consider as the retrieving of the stored data.

For the storing part we only need to think about our brain structures and the way photography works. Light and neurons operate with the same material
and the same natural elements. Both use electromag netic charges propelling chemical elements into chemical reactions. The same way light and the shapes and images it generates into a dark camera are traped and kept in a material coated with
the right chemicals, neurotransmiters carry data to our brain as electrical impulses which are trapped
and kept probably in the glia.

If we need a picture taken years back when we we
re in the army, to give an arbitrary example, we go
to the album where we know we keep all the pic
tures taken during our military times. That is what
the brain does. It goes to the structure or file were the specific information needed must have been filed according to the category it belongs to. Photography works with light trapped on paper and our brain works with thoughts trapped in the right chemical elements needed to preserve them in the brain.

Years ago I wrote a short story about a future society that had discovered the way to transfer into images the electrical information stored in the brain
of those individuals who had passed away. Not to have his or her brain projected onto a monitor a member of such society had to have been absolutely mediocre and dull, have acquired fabulous wealth to pay for the right to have their brains respected or have never commited any civil transgression worthy
of study by the government researchers. The story focus on a character who was a genius, but
also a sexual predator and degenerate. Very early in life he sacrificed fame and recognition in order to
keep the necessary clandestinity for his ugly deeds not to be found out posthumously. To achieve it he found a ninconpoop who agreed to fake he was the genius accomplishing all kind of scientific feats. After the ninconpoop passed away the truth was disco vered by a brilliant scientist who had
been tutored by the genius during his early education.

To know how the disciple did it is something the readers of this essay would have to wait until whenever I overcome my repugnance toward edito
rial houses and publishing oufits and kiss a few behinds in order to have my creepy and
weird tales told.

Our human extended capacity for the storing and retrieving of data allows our brain to widen its scope by dedicating its resources and capabilities to better
deal with what I call "the logistics" surrounding the satisfaction of needs in an active and creative way instead of the initial passive/reactive instinctual mode.
The brain accomplishes that by diversification of objective and resources.


The first and primary modus operandi, common to all vertebrates, is the capacity to electrically charge the nerve cells receiving information (data) and release
the neurotransmitters that go through the axon and the protosynapsis all the way to the central processing units in the brain and in fractions of seconds send the instructions to respond to the stimuli.

But then, in humans, thanks to the enhanced system of storage and retrieval, our
brains introduce the element I call diversification of objectives and resources and the element that makes human cognition different than that of all the other species on the planet.

a) The brain can activate its neurons independently
of external stimuli by using the stored data as inter
nal stimuli

b) The two way system of stimuli and response still operates, but in the new diversified mode introduced the stimuli, being internal, accounts for the shift I mentioned above from passive, when the stimuli comes from external sources, to active, when the stimuli is self created by the brain. And from reactive, when the response activates reflexes and body parts to deal with the external reality, to creative, when the response instead of operational commands for immediate activation becomes a sort of back up set
of instructional manual for future responses.

None of the researchers who have discussed this topic with me has been able to find any other earlier manifestation of this most important stage on our road to human cognition than the gradually increa
sing complexity on the functionality of crying.

One of the earlier, if not the earliest association comes from the repeated effect of crying which ne
ver fails to bring the baby's parents into his field of vision. It may very well be the first manifestation
of that love at first sight affair we humans have always had with power. That is also the way we
start using communication to solve emotional and social needs instead of biological ones, and the starting gate for our lifetime capacity for manipula
tion and emotional blackmail.

Parents will despair trying to interpret the baby's crying and find the need that is supposedly bothering the baby. But pain, hunger, thirst, excretary urges and all the other biological needs don't last long as the only cause for crying.

This stage, when the brain frees itself from the exclusivity of external stimuli, opens new neural capabilities and enables the brain to implement the two mechanisms that lead human cognition way beyond the possibilities and limitations of
other species.

By triggering neural activity independently of direct, immediate external stimuli, which is made possible by the system of storage and retrieval, we become able
to think.

Now we have a storage system whose material comes from two different sources (understanding as source the kind of activity that generated the material): a
body of data from sensory input stored as percep
tions and a body of data filed as the result of free associations (free from external, objective direct immediate stimuli) and stored as thoughts. Thoughts are just another name for the result of the activity
of thinking. The most common noun for that result is the word idea.

That is why concepts not originated through the sensory perception of empiric objectivity are called ideal concepts. Which is not the same as to say that ideas cannot be generated through sensory perception. In its origin, the capacity for ideas develop from the ability to activate the neurons without the need for external stimuli, but once it is implemented in the brain it takes over and becomes the main system of processing and storing data.

It is very important to remember that storing data and learning are not the same, at least from the perspective of human learning. All animals have some storing capacity, but it seems minimal compared to ours because other species have brains working exclusively under the tyranny of the demands cau
sed by biological needs and external stimuli.

Human cognition, I reiterate, frees itself from that limiting exclusivity when our brains work without any biological need or external stimuli from objective reali-
ty. The latter is uniquely human because only our brains are capable of neural activation not triggered by instinctual drives to satisfy biological needs and not dependent on internal bodily functions (respiratory, circulatory, digestive, vascular, meta bolic, etc.)

Our capacity to create successful associations, disassociations and memorization take us from the passive/reactive model of sensory perceptions
to the active/creative model of thinking. And that is how we humans soar to the heights of poetry and metaphysics.

Because we reach that stage where, unlike other species, we free our conscience from the facts, activating our neurons not only from the realm of
the factual, but also from the infinite, absolute universe of the ideal. Thus, from purely mental material our brain creates what I call "archetypes". That is what allows us to recall shapes, colors, odors and even facts without having to reexperience them.

Our brain is not entirely dependent on the senses anymore because the archetypes are exact subjec
tive representations of how we perceived the objective reality. More exciting than that, we can al
so recall archetypes which will be stored as new
representations much in the way several mirrors strategically placed will give us a glimpse of how our brains take advantage of one of the most easily ob
servable traits of representations: Its susceptibility
to be recreated ad-infinitum.

I don't give much tought to the discussions about indexicalities and the usually higher sounding "neurobabble" from the computer obssesed cyber- philosophers who feel compelled to obscure their writings with jargon and techno tonguetwisters in order to make them appear more scientific. Measures of blood flood to the brain, EEG and new developments on MRI techniques present us enough data to conclude that the brain and the neurons
work mostly through electrical impulses.

The emanation of gas that has been observed when neurotransmitters go through the axons is, so far, mysterious. I suppose its function is related to the
distribution of data being stored, but that will eventually be explained.

Because of the electrical nature of these processes
a lot of time and effort has been concentrated on connectivity and other related issues which is like trying to learn about how a car worksby concentra
ting the focus entirely on gasoline.

We have evolved into highly complex creatures and our inflated egos make us oblivious to the fact that despite our technological so-called "progress",
achieved at the expense of our stagnant spiritual evolution, we are nothing more than mere accidents, scraps of fleeting energy micropacks in the two dimen
sions that reify and frame our existence and awareness: the spatial and temporal dimensions, the only ones we are consciously aware of, without
which we would entirely cease to "be".


IV - THE PERILS OF HUMAN PERCEPTION

From closely related and interconnected fields like Paleontology, Archeology and Antropology, linguists and semiologists have adopted the view that our
speech specialization of the left brain hemisphere resulted from the early right hand predominant role
in the handling of the first tools by theAustralopithe
cus.

That, and other similar speculative propositions, led some researchers, to jump ahead, out of frustration, and discuss about the phylogenic/ontogenic nature
of the processes through which we acquired such a powerful, unique brain. That may become useful AFTER we know and understand such processes. At this stage I find it highly diffusive and distracting.

I started this essay by pointing out that, since brains don't fossilize, we lack a way to observe the early stages of the human brain development. That, which
is the commonly held view on that (gray) matter may not necessarily be entirely true.

Take, for instance, the theory that right hand dex
tery played a key role in the speech specialization of the brain's left hemisphere.

When I talk about the refinement of the brain structures that constitute our sensimotor system needed for organized, controlled and efficient movement being a precondition for the capacity of
our cognitive system to deal with categories like
order, sequence, continuity and/or discontinuity, I have never meant movementas exclusively walking.

Our sensimotor system is not limited to the control and coordination of our legs.
Seeing, watching, staring, etc. and theaccomplish
ment of framing and focusing all imply eye coordination which can only be achieved through movement.

The ability to stand, remain erect and walk is only
one successful stage in our endless quest for effi
cient movement. After twenty years of semiotic research and observation I can't avoid being aware
of some recurrent patterns of behavior. Clumsy people are usually outspoken and direct. The kind
that think everything they say and say everything they think. That must be the reason why clumsiness is so rare among diplomats, whose main talent con
sist in deceiving with parlance as efficiently as with graceful, ritualized, conventional and protocolary
mannerisms.

What I am going to state next may seem strange
and even laughable to some, but the language instinct proposed by Chomsky make such statement necessary because its increasing appeal might have the effect of obscuring or making not relevant some sets of data paleontologists and archaeologists
search for every time they find fossils.

If we continue this trend we may end up with a yawning instinct and, why not, a laughing, dancing, joking and farting supression instinct.

Moreover, if language is an instinct (one that allows for George Burns and Faulkner along with illiterates) then speech must also be an instinct (one that
allows for Luciano Pavarotti and Frank Sinatra along with Joan Rivers and Charlie Rangel). I will rather
cling to the notion of a communication instinct which accounts for talented writers and illiterates, and for talented orators and Al Gore.

My central and not yet answered question toChoms
ky and everyone else talking about the language instinct is this:
Why birds don't have to learn to fly and we humans have to learn our language?
I have never seen an old bird teaching a young one how to fly, to glide or to land better.

The answer is that we have an instintual drive to communicate, which is biological, and a conventional tool for it, called language, which is social.

The statement above take me back to the left brain, its speech specialization, and archeoantropology.

Barring all exceptions ( newborns with physical anomalies or brain damage due to genetic disorders) human babies are born with the 1350 cc brain of the homo sapiens sapiens. The competences are there, waiting for the not yet completely understood pro
cess of adaptative development needed for the performances required for the challenge of external reality in the near future.

There are the Broca and Wernicke areas. There is
the center of speech, even if speech is minimal. The
re is the cerebellum and the sensimotor system. But
movement is so minimal and inefficient that the baby is almost entirely dependent on the parents and adults in the family unit.

I am not going into every detail because proving my next assertion is not the main purpose of this essay, but anybody who finds it worth checking can
try it:
The first three years of today's infants condense
and illustrate the process that began millions of
years ago with the Ardipithecus Ramidus.

Babies struggle to stand erect, just like the Ardipithecus had to do millions of years ago. Babies desperately try to grasp and handle things like our ramidus ancestors had to do when they started to use clubs to face the big cats on the plains. Eventually they will acquire dextery of hand like the Australopithecus africanus did, between three and two million years ago. And then, like Homo habilis
(2.2 to 1.6 million years ago) he develops some speech.

Finally, after sensimotor capabilities had refined in
his 800 cc brain, Homo erectus got real, structured speech, just like the infant who can already walk and
handle things more effectively around his second birthday.

Up to this point I am talking about speech in the sense of sounds for communication purposes. I am
not talking about words or letters. I might include them, though, along with typewriters, telephones, computers and satellites, the day any scientist proves that those inventions are the result of instinctive language as much as bicycles, cars, trains, plains, and the Apollo, Soyuz and Hubble aerospace rockets are the result of the instinctual drive for territorial exploration of a bipedal, biological and predatory animal called man.

4.1 RYTHM, THE ROOT OF LANGUAGE

I will always have a debt of gratitude with Rubén Blades, the famous musician from Panama. He is a bright, passionate man who greatly impressed me during an open discussion where he was remarkably on target while presenting his observations on the ro
le played by acoustic elements in the development
of our cognitive system.

Then, in a relatively recent Delange Conference on the subject I heard Jacques Mehler reporting on the results of his research with Stefano Cappa, and I quote from the transcript:

"Languages are built on some acoustic abilities of the
human brain and these are properties we share with
other organisms, but these properties are put to very
different uses in humans"

which is, basically, what Ruben Blades was saying almost five years before The Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique tabulated the results of
Jacques Mehler's research.

Now we have begun to find confirmation of some
thing long suspected by musicians: the brain uses rythm to compute the nature of the underlying morphemic principles of word creation in human language. "They bootstrap into the grammar of syllabic complexity of the languages they are listening" (Mehler).

Even before they are two months old babies' brains are already making successful discriminations and picking the available clues to determine if the lan
guage they are listening to is a language of a very simple or a more complex syllabic repertoire.

They have shown patterns of reactions to delexica lizations in a way consistent with the theory that at such a very early stage they (the babies) use rythm to recognize and differentiate not only English from Japanese, or Spanish from French, etc., but also if the speaker is using his/her natural language and not
an adopted second one.

Consequently, what Chomsky and other linguists consider an instinctual, uniquely human competence, seems to be actually built on some cognitive capabi
lities in the brain of several animals (not only hominids)

Jacques Mehler's research is not the only one provi
ding consistent data for that conclusion. Stefano Cappa, Mike Hauser and C. Miller found the same
pattern of reaction and successful discriminations in human babies and tamarind monkeys. Moreover, babies and monkeys showed the same failure when certain sentences were played backwards.

What the most recent experiments seem to indicate
is that babies take the proper elements susceptible of being used as clues about the constitutive of the
auditive communicating messages they perceive. In other words, they go beyond appearence right into the essential generative core of the external, factual lexical world in which they have been born.

Because their brains potential is not yet fully develo ped it must be an eminently sensory input.

One more clue that our sensimotor system and the accomplishment of walking are the last requirement for our brains to reach its maturity and the achieve ment of language is the long period of dependency and passivity of human babies.

If sensory perception (hearing, seeing, touching, etc.) have the double task of providing information for
what sociologists used to call an anthropologic
look, giving the brain the raw material it needs to become a central processing unit for analytical thinking, it explains the long period of physical limita
tions needed for the refinement of such an awesome and complex organon.

The process can be compared to the strategy
applied when youngsters are introduced to highly technical and physically demanding sports or activi
ties like gymnastics, dancing, swimming or athletics. There is an unavoidable period when the training exercises have the double aim of making their bo
dies fit for the physical challenges they will have to face and teaching them the basic tactics, moves
and strategies required to be able to compete.

I have grown increasingly alarmed by the possible (and, I am sure, unintended) consequences of the theories formulated by Chomsky regarding the ins
tinctuality of human language and Jesús Martín Barbero about mediatization.

The first can lead to the complacent and dangerous thought that nothing that men can do in two or
three centuries could radically alter human language because instinctual changes, whether phylogenic or ontogenic, belong to evolution which takes a lot longer than that for any change.

And the second leads to the conclusion that the only way to challenge mass media is through the creation of alternative, popular channels of independent com
munication.

I am not ready to concede, regarding Chomsky's theory because I cannot accept as instinctive anything that has to be learned. Since reading and writing require teaching I can only accept Chomsky's formulation for any other competence that
may appear to be built-in, but I don't accept it for reading and writing.

As with everything else that has to be learned, reading and writing if not used at all, or used badly, can become either atrophied or forgotten, which is almost the same as becoming "unlearned". As in an
ancient Spanish saying, "La letra con sangre
entra", that declares learning to write and read as a bloody affair, a metaphorically painful one, among
the No Pain no Gain category of endeavours.

And, as with all the other No Pain no Gain enterpri
ses, writing and reading can also be placed in the
Use it or Lose it category. Losing it, or even degrading it, can lead to harmful declines or impairments in the sensory/cognitive system at
large.

I have called it The Perils of Human Communication and chart A1. which heads
the second part of this essay is a very summarized presentation of writings previously released both in Spanish and English in the section called The So
ciosemiotic of Modes of Communication in my
writings published through Pinkfeather Editorial and
the journal of Semiotic Studies in Fordham University.