Member-only story
The Light of a Silver Moon
The importance of language via the sounds of my favorite German band.
If you were to ask me if humans have a purpose, I would be inclined to say no, not really. After all, our very existence seems to be the result of a genetic mutation, one which has left us with two fewer chromosomes than our closest primate cousins. The end result of that mutation, our higher-order thinking, makes us an aberration when compared with rest of life on this planet. No other species in the animal kingdom can do the things we do to the scale that we can do them.
The fact remains, however, that this simple quirk of evolution gave us the ability to function as we are, on the highest intellectual level thus far observed; and one of our primary functions, so the evidence shows, is information processing. From birth, we take in data with our various senses, process it mentally, synthesize new connotations relevant to our experiences and then disseminate our personal observations through various forms of communication, whether it be though art, literature, conversation, music, etc.
Language is, of course, our primary form of information dissemination. The more we learn, the more opportunity it gives us to transmit complex ideas in a variety of ways, again, each relevant to our experience. Even when language is non-verbal, it is…
