Being a professional language translation expert I have frequently wondered how we understand each other? Please don’t think that I have lost it :-) I was referring to how our brain understands or deciphers a word or a series of words, and makes sense. Fortunately I was idling around so I thought why not try to solve this mystery with the help of Google. As it turned out I came to know some pretty interesting facts.
Firstly, I realized that my thoughts weren’t as stupid as I felt before, since there are many learned people around the world, scientists to be precise, who had the same questions. And thankfully unlike me they had taken the trouble of scientifically investigating the phenomenon of how our brain deciphers words and sentences.
According to the latest findings the brain is constantly relating words and sentences, even voice and tone to the context of a given topic. It takes just about a fraction of a second to catch if anything is out of place. When we are reading or having a conversation, our brain is continuously trying to predict the information that is going to come.
To sum it up, while you are enjoying that interesting novel or I am reading a source document for language translation, our brains are rapidly and constantly predicting, analyzing and classifying information which results in understanding. Whew! Heady stuff! I still can’t believe that any part of me works so hard!
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