011101010111000000100000011011110111001000100000011001000110111101110111011011100000110100001010

After delving into this weeks reading, I can’t help but get caught up in the idea of our brains as binary machines.  On the days that I moonlight as a philosopher, this is one of my favorite concepts to mull over- not necessarily that of our brains as machines, but more, the binary nature of our action or thoughts.

While, yes, I agree with and am fully aware of the fact that not all aspects of our worlds and perceptions are mutually exclusive, it’s an interesting idea.  You do, or you don’t.  It is, or it isn’t.  Having had some time to digest this weeks reading on development, it’s interesting to think of how children’s brains may develop in a very similar way.   When it comes to binary, as Heidi Klum always says, you are either in or you’re out.

For those of you not familiar with binary (much like myself), it is essentially a system of a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, each meaning just that – in, or out.  Computers run on this business.  As the chapter points out, if humans invented the way a computer ‘thinks’, it must think in a way similar to the way we humans think.  In other words, if computers run on binary, so should we… shouldn’t we?  They certainly make a good case.

Using the example of a child wanting to be picked up, we can easily apply the binary system.  1- the child is in the air, aware that they are not down.  0 – the child is NOT up, so they must be down.  If a child starts to learn in this way, the book points out that  “they may be able to use this same construct for discovering other schema and eventually for learning a language”.

In the human language, we form sentences, and then full thoughts, by stringing words together in an order that has a significant meaning to us.  There are some words that make sense back to back, while others simply do not.  The same goes for the letters in a word- both of these, the letters and the word order stuff, defined by a process formally known as the Markov Process.  Markov’s idea, in a nutshell, is that certain things just go together in a chain, and certain things do not.  “The next state depends only on the current state, and not on the past”, and, “the occurrence of one element in the chain establishes a probability that another particular element will come next”.

To get a better idea of Markov’s work in action, consider the process we go through to spell a name.  My name, for example: Courtney.  My name begins with a “c”, so, if I’m thinking in binary, it may look something like this:

A: 0 B: 0 C:1

Now, once my brain knows we’re starting off with a “c”, according to Markov, there is a probability established for the next letter.  For example, in the English language, “ca” would be a logical pairing, while “cb” or “cc” would not.  So, now, my brain would go through the binary step again, this time, able to eliminate all the letters that wouldn’t really fit.

C +

A:0 B:0 C:0 D:0 E:0 F:0 G:0 H:0 I:0 J:0 K:0 L:0 M: N:0  O:1

And so it would continue, my brain filling in the next letter according to the language rules that are programmed into it.

Bringing it back to the kids, by applying the system of binary thought to child development and learning, we can perhaps better understand how children develop their communication and understanding of the world around them.  By beginning with a simple system of yes or no, or “up or down”, they can go on to develop complex webs of binary relationships, filling in their processes as they go to eventually form Markov chains of ‘appropriate’ behavior.  CRAZY.  STUFF.