GHOSTS

One of my degrees is in psycholinguistics. The simple definition of psycholinguistics is it is the study of the relationship between the mechanics of hearing and how sound waves are converted into symbolic language by the anatomy and physiology of the brain. At the heart of this process is specifically how the brain creates a conceptual image, a picture if you will, predicated on sound waves it receives through the anatomy of the ear's conductive bone and neural systems and then creates the conceptual image, the picture, of either a three dimensional object like a table or chair or abstract concepts such as love and hate. Understanding how this process unfolds has a practical end as it informs us how to teach people who are partially or completely deaf to speak.

For those who might be interested in how this works let me share with you a research project conducted at the Johns Hopkins University when I was a graduate student there. As a deaf person's brain receives only part of the sound waves we hear or does not receive sound waves at all as a consequence of conductive bone loss or neural disease, the goal of the research project was to determine how to teach a deaf person to express concepts using sound (language) to speak. This is a huge problem because a deaf person has never heard the fullness of sound or sound at all so they do not understand what constitutes sound unimpaired by deafness.

This is why before the development of computers and sophisticated audiological equipment it was virtually impossible to teach a deaf person to speak and why partially deaf people (a phrase that means absolutely nothing), cannot articulate their words as do we. However, with computers and other electronic gizmo's this has changed.

The research project presumed that deaf people have a conceptualization of both objects and abstract concepts. Thus the goal was to develop a means for them to express what they knew conceptually in words, phrases, and sentences. To do this a microphone was connected via computer to an oscilloscope that visually represented sound waves. The sound waves were broken into their component parts such as decibels and pitch with each part represented by a sinusoidal wave on the oscilloscope. Think of a sinusoidal wave as a wavy horizontal line separated horizontally in the middle by a line in the same way a fraction has a numerator and denominator separated by a horizontal line. The hypothesis was that concepts could be represented by their sinusoidal wave on the oscilloscope.

With this framework in place research with subjects began. The subject was shown a visual image of a concept such as “cat.” The word "cat" was spoken into the microphone by the researcher and the sinusoidal wave for "cat" would appear on the oscilloscope. The deaf person would attempt to speak the word "cat" that would also produce a sinusoidal wave. Both the researcher and subject could see the sinusoidal waves side by side on the oscilloscope. The deaf person would continue to try to speak the word "cat" until the researcher’s and subject’s sinusoidal waves matched. At that point the deaf person could speak the word "cat." This process was repeated for every word the subject learned to speak.

However, as deaf people cannot hear the words they speak and do not always have an oscilloscope handy in conversation, the second part of the research was to find a way for them to "remember" the sound so they could repeat it at will without an oscilloscope.  To do this speech was broken into its anatomical parts including breath control and the use of the lips, teeth, tongue, cheeks, hard and soft pallet, glottis and epiglottis. As every word is comprised of one or more phonemes (discrete bits of sound), the relationship between the parts of the anatomy of speech and sound produced is different for every word we speak. Consequently, subjects had to be taught to "feel" how the word they spoke sounded using the parts of the anatomy of speech.

Thus to remember how to speak one word  - for instance the word “cat” - required the subject to not only produce the sound for that word as it appears as a sinusoidal wave on the oscilloscope, but also to remember how producing that sound felt including the positional relationships between the anatomical parts of speech for that word.

The hypothesis was successfully proven that even the profoundly deaf can be taught to speak. However, given the process you can see why much of the deaf community rejects speech in favor of sign.

Now let me tie this into the question of whether or not ghosts exist. Herbert Mower wrote a book back in the early 1960s titled, Learning Theory and the Symbolic Process that first explored the relationship between "the concept" and how we "learn" the concept; that is, how we give meaning to the concept. The basic question of the time was, "Is it possible for a person to ‘know’ a concept but not have the language to identify or describe the concept?" In other words, "Is it possible for a concept to exist if we do not have a way to represent the concept linguistically; that is, if we do not have the words to express it?”

What Mower determined is that the concept must exist prior to the linguistic representation of it (the symbol). For example, if my linguistic representation is symbolized as   "H O T E" which I then verbalize in sound, it has no meaning if "H O T E" does not represent a concept. In that case "H O TE" is simply a random relationship of letters that can be converted into sound. Conversely, if I see a three dimensional object that I have never seen before, the concept of that object is immediately created in my brain. I know its size, color, and configuration. However, in order for me to communicate what I saw, the concept, I must now create a linguistic symbol of it that I can write or speak or both. Ergo, I create "H O T E" as that symbol. The same process holds for abstract concepts beginning as expressions of our emotions gradually climbing the tree of higher abstract concepts such as honor and dignity which we derive from a complex amalgamation of behaviors and events.

We have now come to the point where we must conclude that what people mean when they say they have seen a ghost is that they did in fact, either consciously or subconsciously, experience something that to them is dimensionally "real;" it exists, just as the "H O T E" I had never seen before was "real" and which I represented linguistically by creating the symbol “H O T E." In their case, the symbol that represents the reality of the concept they experienced is understood as “G H O S T.”

Where this leaves us is that it is impossible for the human brain to create a linguistic representation (symbol) of a concept if that concept does not in reality exist. Thus our conclusion must be that ghosts do in fact exist.

N.B.: To the more scientifically inclined who will say that it is possible to create linguistic symbols for things that do not exist in a way that we can “see” them, for instance higher mathematics used in theoretical physics, you are correct. However, I would argue that before such symbols could be created the entity they represent must first be "conceptualized" through a process of creating a hypothesis built on conjecture and speculation predicated on existing concepts and their linguistic symbols.