Linguistic poverty wrt bodily sensations
Our languages are lacking words for our inner senses, and this has medical consequences. Can this be fixed?
(Based on a post from 2012)
Interoception is hard to work with. Our sensory neurons give us rich inputs about what’s happening inside us. Unfortunately, our languages (as they exist today) don’t offer a way to capture these inputs with high fidelity, potentially resulting in missed diagnoses. The poverty of language can kill you.
Have you ever complained to a doctor about a specific sensation, maybe in your spine or stomach, and found it impossible to confirm that your experience was understood?
– “Well, yes, doctor, it’s a sharp pain in my lumbar spine but not like an ordinary sharp pain in my lumbar spine” … “If only we had more words!”, you think … “Not like a bulging disc, it’s a weird sharp pain”.
Doctor doesn’t know what to make of this, and assumes the weirdness is in your head.
– “Can we connect our brains together, so that you can feel it yourself?”1
Doctor smiles.
– “No? Okay, well, I guess an MRI will suffice.”
It may not suffice. Strange sensations can start a while before they are detectable in an MRI, and the latter could lull you into a false sense of security. Just ask a neuro-oncologist.
What’s wrong here?
A patient is trying to communicate relevant information, but cannot find a channel for doing so. It’s not only that the doctor is unable to receive the message: the patient themself doesn’t even have a crisp concept for it. In theory, a very motivated patient could embark on a project to characterize the phenomenology of lumbar pains, describing the properties of different sensation-clusters and so on, but welp, that project would be uniquely painful and even if they are successful, good luck getting other people to adopt the new concepts.
Q: Why are these sensory inputs hard to work with, when we can easily manage the same for e.g. visual inputs?
Imagine you found a novel piece of machinery on the street. You could describe it in terms of size, shape, color, texture, and similarities to well-known objects, and there’s a pretty good chance that any mechanical engineer, upon hearing your words, would know exactly what you saw and be able to answer questions about it. Why is it so much harder when we describe our pains and other inner sensations?
Possible answers:
Maybe interoceptive inputs aren’t that rich afterall. (Status: maybe true, but not sufficient.)
Failures of intersubjectivity:
Humans are very uniform wrt how we process visual inputs, but very diverse when it comes to our sensations of pain. (Status: not sure!)
Unlike most senses, with interoception, it is impossible to experience joint attention: with vision, you can jointly see something and talk about it (“oh, it’s a bicycle”); in fact much language acquisition works this way. This does not work with interoception: it is hard to imagine two people jointly saying “oh, it’s stomach sensation #62”, unless they are being stimulated in the exact same way.2 Smell and taste are an intermediate case: you rarely experience the stimuli at the exact same time and there seems to be a strong subjective component.
Poverty of exemplars. Without a strong shared vocabulary of related sensations, it will be hard to have useful reference points. Describing complex inputs is hard in general, but much less hard when you already have such a basis.
Much of human language is related to plans that involve manipulating the outside world, which tends to privilege visual and auditory inputs. Nobody makes complicated plans with “When stomach feels X, do Y”.
Complex bodily sensations, especially unpleasant ones, do not make enjoyable conversation or good stories, so they are not socially reinforced.
Could we fix this, e.g. by creating a culture where we develop fluency in describing physical sensations (and by the same measure, become more competent at perceiving them), even in the absence of neurotech? Preferably without inflicting too much pain?
Maybe! I believe that meditation teachers sometimes manage analogous feats, but they may be using strong priors. Do people in culinary or wine school develop a rich language for describing taste, and become better at communicating this to each other?
UPDATE: @henriknordmark points me to Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology – apparently develops “concepts adequate to an understanding of embodied experience.”
Maybe your face and body already convey the precise quality of the pain, and a hyper-attuned empath could feel it automatically, without any advanced neurotech. I personally think this is unlikely.
You could bring up the label-switching problem (namely that, just because you and I are in verbal agreement doesn't mean that our experiences agree), but let’s be practical here: how can we develop a shared vocabulary that would allow me to better convey my sensation to you, so that you may make better predictions about what is physically happening in my body?
Here's an index of subjective effects (from drugs or states of consciousness more generally)
wrt-- https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Subjective_effect_index
Probably the Hindus have much to say on it and other Indians. I am mostly a fan of Jainism for its simplicity. Anyway any religion with meditation likely has some ontology for subjectivity.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Dhyana_in_Hinduism
As a thought experiment, consider the english language is already perfect. And requires no updates. In a paranormal way.