The Human Oscillome and Its Explanatory Potential

Abstract

My intention in this piece is to briefly outline a novel hypothesis regarding the neurobiological implementation of feature-set binding, the labeling of featuresets, and the resolution of linguistic dependencies arising from the cyclic combination of these labeled objects. One of the numerous motivations for this was reading Robert C. Berwick & Noam Chomsky’s (BC henceforth WOU), which struck me as moderately comprehensive in its interdisciplinary scope (including good critical commentary on recent work in comparative neuroprimatology and theoretical biology) but severely impoverished in its range of linking hypotheses between these disciplines. While the authors are correct to point out that the Strong Minimalist Thesis follows the ‘divide-and-conquer’ approach which helps narrow the gap between disciplines, their actual implementation of this approach is fairly mild and uninstructive. There is lots of talk about how language is “an ‘organ of the body’, more or less on a par with the visual or digestive or immune system” and how it is “a subcomponent of a complex organism” (p. 56), accompanied by the usual discussion of the Newtonian dispelling of the mind–body problem—all of which is true, unequivocal, undeniable, but directionless and intensely vague. B&C discuss Lenneberg’s early work on language evolution, deeming it “a model of nuanced evolutionary thinking” (p. 5), but as Lenneberg (1964: 76) himself noted, “[n]othing is gained by labeling the propensity for language as biological unless we can use this insight for new research directions—unless more specific correlates can be uncovered”. The absence of concrete linking hypotheses between the domains of the life, cognitive, and biological sciences in WOU, and its concern with isolated and disparate sources of evidence which lend support to an emergentist model of language evolution, whatever its merits, does not promote this kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration. I think that from the perspective of brain dynamics, what the authors call the “Basic Property” (Merge) can be explored in a number of interesting and fruitful ways, promoting further interdisciplinary work and relying on a neurolinguistic perspective which, unlike WOU, goes beyond the cortex and examines the important role of subcortical structures like the thalamus and basal ganglia. To set the scene for what follows, it is useful to consider the framework in Boeckx & Theofanopolou (2015), which highlights the inadequacy of standard