Agents Transforming the Perception of Language through Visual Agencies

Taken from The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care),
By DAN HURLEY
Published: June 3, 2008
http://www.nytimes.co...

?I was testing people?s ability to detect sarcasm based entirely on paralinguistic cues, the manner of expression,? Dr. Rankin said.
In one videotaped exchange, a man walks into the room of a colleague named Ruth to tell her that he cannot take a class of hers that he had previously promised to take. ?Don?t be silly, you shouldn?t feel bad about it,? she replies, hitting the kind of high and low registers of a voice usually reserved for talking to toddlers. ?I know you?re busy ? it probably wasn?t fair to expect you to squeeze it in,? she says, her lips curled in derision.
Although people with mild Alzheimer?s disease perceived the sarcasm as well as anyone, it went over the heads of many of those with semantic dementia, a progressive brain disease in which people forget words and their meanings.
?You would think that because they lose language, they would pay close attention to the paralinguistic elements of the communication,? Dr. Rankin said.
To her surprise, though, the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.
?The right parahippocampal gyrus must be involved in detecting more than just visual context ? it perceives social context as well,? Dr. Rankin said.

The quote above supports the tenets of interchangeability in brain functioning as described by Marvin Minsky in his book The Society of Mind. In what are called paranomes:

...agents often find that the information they need is already available when they need it. This is the result of the use of paranomes. As described earlier, when one pronome of a paranome produces a particular state in terms of one representation, the other pronomes simultaneously update their representations so that they enter corresponding states. Here, communication happens not by sending explicit messages, but rather at all times different agencies are separately looking at the same property, object, event, situation, or other type of thing from their own unique perspective, and any changes to one representation are immediately reflected in the other corresponding representations.
Preceding section taken from Examining the Society of Mind
By Push Singh
28 October 2003
http://web.media.mit....

The implication here is that the mind having once established a core of agency in visual perception, can then be called upon to apply it to language perception through substitutions of inputs and corrected responses. That is to say, the engine works pretty much the same, but produces a new product from different raw materials.