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Neurology of a Mantra
Poster Session A, Friday, September 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Field House
Bijoy Misra1, Bharani Padmanabhan2, Prem Nagar2, Bela Kosaras2; 1Harvard University, 2India Discovery Center
Mantra as a word comes from Sanskrit texts connoting celestial sounds. Unlike celestial voices heard in other cultures, a mantra has no language, it is defined as an acoustic vibration. We have been analyzing the production of mantra sounds through neurological reasoning for a number of years. We have developed a conceptual language model that proposes that all concepts in the brain are represented by neuronal ensembles, which develop aggregates induced by the incoming sensory stimuli. The energy in the aggregates is released through muscle vibrations that are recorded as speech. These vibrations are heard as phonetic syllables and are parsed later in groups to form words to associate with objects. We suggest that this is how words were originally created when languages formed and have then rolled through imitation, mispronunciation and phonetic substitution. We will present the model architecture and the computational algorithm.
Topic Areas: Computational Approaches, Language Development/Acquisition