Laws and rules for the effective transfer of ideas through words

Communication between people is one of the most complex and mysterious processes in the world.

Communication between people is one of the most complex and mysterious processes in the world. How, for example, do we manage to convey ideas through words? Such a process begins with an idea that occurs in the mind of a certain person. That person translates the idea into words, and expresses the words (written or spoken), one after the other. This is how a linear sequence of words is created, which is one-dimensional in nature (length only). Another person perceives the sequence and translates it back into an idea that is not one-dimensional. Not always, of course, the person who receives the message actually gets to the bottom of the mind of the owner of the idea. Thus, in fact, expressing ideas effectively that ensures a good understanding of the receiving person is considered a kind of art, or at least a required and important skill.

A team of physicists from the Weizmann Institute of Science recently examined this process using a successful model of transmitting ideas: books, which are considered iron sheep assets of human culture. The team members have developed mathematical tools that make it possible to follow the creation and development of a concept or idea throughout the book. The multinational team included Prof. Elisha Moses from the Department of Physics of Complex Systems and Prof. Jean-Pierre Ekman, a visiting scientist from the University of Geneva, as well as postdoctoral researcher Enrique Alvarez-Lacal and research student Beata Doro from the University of Stuttgart. The article describing their research is currently published in the scientific journal "Records of the American Academy of Sciences", PNAS.

The one-dimensional linear structure of the expression of the message (a sequence of words, written or spoken), creates a certain scarcity. To overcome this one-dimensional poverty, we use our memory. The transmitter of the message "encrypts" a certain hierarchical structure in it, and the listener, the receiver, keeps the transcript in his memory, scans it, and in case the encryption was done effectively, he also manages to decipher the structure and understand the abstract idea from it.

In order to examine structures found in texts that are known to have succeeded in effectively conveying different ideas, the scientists examined several books that are considered successful in the field of conveying complex ideas. Among these are the writings of Albert Einstein, "Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain, "Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka, and more. They processed the word sequences of the books, and tested them in successive groups of 100 words. In each such "window" or "checking station" they marked the words that appear together. When such a test is performed on the sequence of an entire book, a kind of network of connectivity between words is obtained.

Through mathematical generalization, the scientists built a multidimensional space in which a sequence of words from a single "testing station" expresses a certain idea. Many such one-dimensional sequences, existing in multidimensional space at the same time, allow the expression of complex ideas. This is how the central ideas of the book unfold in the complex of different directions in the multidimensional space of ideas.
The scientists suggest that if the text of the book is written in a way that conveys the writer's ideas effectively, the person reading the book can build for himself, in his memory, the multidimensional space of ideas, and place the ideas he encounters while reading in it. When he observes in his mind's eye the set of different directions represented in this space, he understands the complex ideas that he asked the author of the book to convey to him.

The scientists found that the network of ideas in texts that convey ideas effectively is structured in a hierarchical manner, which allows the recipient to remember the individual ideas, place them in a multidimensional structure and in this way decipher the "poet's intention".

Prof. Moses: "The great thinkers, from Wittgenstein to Chomsky, taught us that language has a central role in shaping the human brain and its evolutionary development, and that it is an essential layer in understanding the structure of the brain. Our contribution to research in this basic field is in the creation of mathematical tools by means of which it is possible to link concepts or ideas with the words that express them and are used to convey them to others. In this way it is possible to follow the course of an idea in an abstract mathematical space within a speech or a written text. Theoretically, we also understood how the structure of the text serves the transfer of concepts and their reproduction in the reader. A deep question is whether there is a connection between the abstract mathematical structure we discovered in the text and the aesthetics in it."