{"id":45363,"date":"2021-04-06T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clearvoice.com\/resources\/concept-creation\/"},"modified":"2023-08-24T08:55:18","modified_gmt":"2023-08-24T15:55:18","slug":"concept-creation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clearvoice.com\/resources\/concept-creation\/","title":{"rendered":"Concept Creation: How the Words You Choose Affect Consumer Perception"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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There are a few things that separate us from our closest primate cousins, the bonobos and chimps. Even though bonobo brain circuitry has similar evolutionary structures as humans, according to neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, these apes cannot form \u201cgoal-based concepts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor can monkeys teach each other goal-based concepts the way humans can. Bonobos can\u2019t then use these concepts to build trust, trade or build networks to communicate with each other across the globe.<\/p>\n

As Barrett says:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe human capacity for social reality appears unique in the animal kingdom. Only we can create and share purely mental concepts using words. Only we can use these concepts to more effectively regulate our own body budgets and each other\u2019s, while we cooperate and compete with one another. Only we have concepts for mental states, such as emotion concepts, for predicting and making sense of sensations. Social reality is a human superpower.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lisa Feldman Barrett\u2019s book ‘How Emotions Are Made<\/a>‘ <\/em>offers a compelling look at how the human brain simulates emotions and concepts in an interplay of mind, body and culture. Her findings help us explore the neuroscience behind emotions in ways that could help us communicate complexity better and understand our role in concept creation.<\/p>\n

In this seven-part blog series, I take highlights from Barrett’s findings and explore the implications of these processes for writing. Let\u2019s first take a step back to see how Barrett\u2019s research informs us how concepts are made.<\/p>\n

\"What<\/p>\n

What is the concept cascade?<\/h2>\n

We live in a world full of sensory inputs that besiege our senses. I\u2019m talking sources beyond our smartphones, TVs, and computer monitors. I mean all the sounds, smells, tastes, textures to touch and things to see in every atom of our environment. As infants, we learned within the first year to take all this enormous noise (data points) and make sense of it.<\/p>\n

Barrett calls this process the \u201cconcept cascade.\u201d Starting at the lower part of the brain, sensory inputs enter. The brain immediately finds the similar sounds or sights and the different ones and begins a process of categorization.<\/p>\n

Through statistical learning, we sharpen these categories and mold them into concepts \u2014 from which the brain forms predictions. These predictions then activate our actions. If the predictions aren\u2019t exactly right, prediction error occurs, and the brain attempts to course correct, issuing a new set of predictions and actions<\/a> after resynthesizing new inputs. All this happens in a matter of milliseconds, faster than the blink of an eye.<\/p>\n

Barrett claims that we don\u2019t \u201cstore\u201d any of these concepts in a part of the brain. We don\u2019t catalog them and hide them in a \u201cdata bank\u201d in the layers of our grey matter, but as we interact with the outside world and communicate with others, our brain filters up instances of concepts anew every time. With each interaction, a concept cascade is activated.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s activate this concept cascade.<\/p>\n

Take this list of items:<\/p>\n