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Events on Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Chaos & Complex Systems Seminar
Dreaming and language evolution
Time: 12:05 pm
Place: 4274 Chamberlin
Speaker: Art Schmaltz, Prairie State College
Abstract: Language evolution has been deemed the hardest problem in science. Part of the problem resides in discovering the prior evolved biological system upon which human language has scaffolded itself. Efforts to locate which simpler features evolved into language have met with problems. The resolution to the dilemma of language evolution may involve a Copernican leap. Instead of a theoretical trajectory going from a simple evolved system to a complex system, the opposite strategy might resolve the problem. Neuroscience has discovered the enormous amount of brain power required for language functioning. The only brain function more complex, involving more information processing in the human brain, occurs during REM dreaming. Dreaming is a biologically hardwired brain function that is in some ways more complex than waking linguistic functioning. Dreaming is also phylogenetically older than human language. Dreaming as the birthplace of language is throughly consistent with Darwinian evolutionary theory.
Host: Sprott
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Theory Seminar (High Energy/Cosmology)
Title to be announced
Time: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Place: 5280 Chamberlin Hall
Speaker: Yang Bai, SLAC
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