ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® VOCABULARY HUMANIST FAMILY BRAIN STUDY DISCOVER YOUR ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® INTRODUCTION - SECTION 2 DETAILS WHAT DOES THE ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® SYMBOL MEAN? November 19, 2022 The Alphabetical Brain® Symbol represents the unique relationship between your brain and mind and the 26 letters of the American English alphabet. It stands for the importance of understanding the causative relationship between the physical structures of your brain and mental functions of your mind. The 26 letters of the American English alphabet enable you to create complex thoughts to control your own unique behavior in all kinds of social and political and academic relationships or all kinds of emotional situations. Since English is currently the universal language of business and science around the world, it is the "lingua franca" of our modern era in the 21st century. The fact that the same 26 letters are so universally adaptable that they symbolize the hundreds of "sound bits" necessary for the survival of our contemporary American democratic empire and the Western coalition of nations is truly astonishing! HISTORY OF LANGUAGE AND CONSCIOUS SELF-AWARENESS It is important to realize and remember that because of your stable alphabet and ever-changing vocabulary, you have the ability to communicate with others very easily and adapt quickly. You share these language characteristics with all other human beings who have healthy brains and minds. However, your mind is a very fragile organ and your thinking process is susceptible to "fake news" and false political propaganda. Unfortunately, misinformation is maliciously published by unscrupulous lying politicians on the mass media and in the social media. To counter such misinformation and disinformation, you can create your own reliable information. By learning the new scientific brain vocabulary and the new brain knowledge about your mental functions, you can get a new awareness of the genuine source of your natural willpower and creative imagination. They make possible your adaptable self-identity. As an American citizen, you have the intrinsic ability to reason and remember this accurate new brain information. It can ground you in reality. It can motivate you to learn the true causes of your conscious self-awareness and your lifestyle choices. Our alphabet-powered language now represents an amazing number of important life-enhancing ideas. The sources of your new brain knowledge are the American English alphabet and the new scientific research that is described by our written language. Our current American English alphabet has been developing for about 3,000 years since it started in Greece in 800 BCE. It featured four new vowels which were added to the Phoenician Alphabet to create the classic Greek language at that time. Since then, many cultures have used the same basic linguistic structure in their own idioms. Today, the basic American English vocabulary has been supplemented by the addition of thousands of new scientific and technical words during the past few centuries and hundreds of new brain words during the past few decades. By using your alphabet to write down new sensible words to describe the amazing structures of your brain and the functions of your mind, including your previously unknown microscopic neuronal circuits, you can be liberated from ignorance. In other words, you can be empowered to become your best secular and most curious kind self with unlimited opportunities! The following eleven books cited in the information box contain glimpses into the profound impact that the alphabet has had on the quality of human life on Earth. The references describe the great influence that the invention of our English alphabet and our written language have had (and are still having) on human behavior and the evolution of conscious self-awareness! The expansion of our conscious awareness, by understanding how our "emotions are constructed" in our brains, is a primary ongoing evolutionary phenomenon! The first six books are linked to outlines and reviews and the last five books will be linked very soon: Book 1: ALPHA BETA: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World by John Man. Barnes & Noble Books, 2000 (312 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews ALPHA BETA Book 2: HOW LANGUAGE BEGAN: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention by Daniel L. Everett. Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2017 (i-xviii, 330 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews HOW LANGUAGE BEGAN Book 3: LANGUAGE: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Leonard Everett. Pantheon Books, 2012 (351 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews LANGUAGE Book 4: LETTER PERFECT: the Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z by David Sacks. Broadway Books, 2004 (416 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews LETTER PERFECT Book 5: THE LETTER AND THE COSMOS: How the Alphabet has Shaped the Western View of the World by Laurence de Looze. University of Toronto Press, 2016 (218 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews THE LETTER & THE COSMOS Book 6: THE STORY OF ENGLISH IN 100 WORDS: by David Crystal. St. Martin's Press, 2012 (i-xxi, 260 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews THE STORY OF ENGLISH IN 100 WORDS Book 7: THE TALKING APE: How Language Evolved by Robbins Burling. Oxford, 2005 (i-ix, 286 pages) Book 8: THE TALKING BABY: Helping Your Child Discover Language by Margaret Maclagan and Anne Buckley. Finch, 2016 (i-viii, 183 pages) Book 9: THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue by Merritt Ruthlen. John Wiley & Sons, 1994 (i-xi, 239 pages) Book 10: ADAM'S TONGUE: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans by Derek Bickerton. Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009 (237 pages) Book 11: THE STORY OF WRITING: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms by Andrew Robinson. Thames & Hudson, 2007 2nd ed, 1995 (235 pages) As cities became larger trading centers, computation and communication systems became more sophisticated for thousands of years. Written languages were first formulated in the ancient world by the Mesopotamians and Egyptians when cuneiform symbols were used to denote numbers for measuring commodities for trade inside and outside their empires. The primary trading products were grain, beer, bread, wine, and pottery for everybody and luxury goods for the top social elites of the eight distinguishable empires around the Mediterranean Sea before 1200 BCE. That is when all hell broke loose among the leading trading powers due to famine, drought, volcanoes, and wars, which changed the power-sharing structure around the Mediterranean Sea forever. Nevertheless, in earlier more peaceful times, the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols were translated into hieratic script, which was the cursive form of hieroglyphic writing. It was used especially by the pharaonic priests of ancient Egypt for most of the 3,000 years of the empire. They wrote on papyrus leaves, which were beaten into a form of paper. That practical need to write down ceremonial proclamations and rules for everyday behavior made communication easier for the royal families and priestly class to manage the rest of the great majority of uneducated Egyptian people. However, only about 1% or fewer of the Egyptian population could read and write during most of the 3,000 year span of Ancient Egyptian history. Written alphabetical symbols were created about 3200 BCE (5200 years ago) for business and also for describing religious myths and political exaggerations for propaganda purposes. Mandatory rules of behavior and religious rituals glorified the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh-kings and perpetuated their dictatorial control over the masses of people. Their writings included spelling out the magical spells used on the walls of temple art and tombs. Their priests and artisans had to fulfill rigid codes designating proper burials in the futile hope and promise that rulers could transcend death and enable everybody else to become immortal in the process too. The hieroglyphs have recorded their belief in superstitions and magical thinking for more than 50 centuries. In addition, the demotic script was the ancient Egyptian script of and for the common people. It was used in handwritten texts from the early 7th century BCE until the 5th century CE. It was derived from northern Egypt's forms of the hieratic script. It was used primarily in the Nile Delta. [Source: partly from Wikipedia] Our own American English has evolved for almost 3,000 years since our alphabet, was originally created in 800 BC by the Greeks. This process of innovation and progress in the development of written language was accelerated by the invention and proliferation of written materials by the Gutenberg Press starting in the middle of the 15th century. After the moveable printing press was invented and perfected, new social and technical ideas were created by larger numbers of people faster than ever before in human history. That is why the mathematical term "exponential" is now used in the 21st century to describe the fast speed of the creation of new knowledge. It also describes the huge impact that scientific knowledge has had and is having on all aspects of the global growth of national economies and technologies. Historically, our language has continued to evolve from the influences of Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and, ultimately, from the Old English language during the past 2,000 years. For exaple, you can use the original American definition of the word happiness (as in Jefferson's idea of the "pursuit of happiness" in the Constitution), where it meant — at that time in the late 1700s and early 1800s — "social happiness." That meaning of the word "happiness" during the early decades of the existence of The United States was in contrast to the current emphasis in modern American English. Now the word "happiness" usually denotes a profoundly limited meaning as "personal pleasure" rather than "social happiness" for everybody everyday. The older historic Constitutional version of "Social Happiness" involved feeling safe in the neighborhood and friendly toward the people you lived and worked with. In the past, happiness meant that it was your birthright as an American citizen to feel comfortable and positive every day. It was not some imagined reward or pot of gold in the future that you had to work hard to achieve at some later imagined time in your life or the so-called afterlife! As written language grew in its intricacy and complexity, during the 15th and 16th centuries of the Renaissance; and the 17th and 18th centuries of the Enlightenment; and the 19th and 20th centuries of the Industrial Revolution, the American English alphabet has exploded in relevance during the modern Scientific Revolution of the 18th, 19th, 20th, and the 21st centuries with the addition of thousands of new essential scientific words. This great world-wide transformation has been trending upward with the new progressive secular humanistic values that promote science, democracy, and economic growth for billions of people! Now the profound influence that the earliest written alphabets have had on human culture, consciousness, and self-awareness is well-known by liberal educated secular-thinking people. And in addition, we have the scientific words of the new brain vocabulary to represent the literal truth about mental functions. Knowing this, you do not need to accept the traditional mistaken religious and spiritual magical thinking that arose out of the primitive violent past. They were perpetuated by kings and ruling elites to confuse ordinary citizens of their genuine birthright as dignified citizens with infinite personal growth potential. In fact scientific thinking (the scientific method) and religious thinking (the ethics if the Golden Rule) provided significant social unity in the development of the modern world during the past 500 years and especially during the growth of the United States since the Revolution in 1776 and the creation of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The most significant changes in world history have occurred during the past few hundred years because our founders, most notably Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Burr and the Adams brothers, established many classic Greek and Roman democratic ideals (limited as they were then) after they won the Revolutionary War against King George, III and the huge naval fleet of Great Britain. Thereafter, our country has been in the forefront of developing the democratic ideal that all hard working educated (white males) should have equal dignity and opportunity. Since then, our country has absorbed hundreds of millions of immigrants and enlarged our American English language until today the words “Black Lives Matter” can motivate millions of Americans to unite and act politically! With that brief social context, it is now time for you to absorb the full impact of the influence of our alphabet on human thinking. Now in the context of the history of alphabets and the realization that language is essential for complex human consciousness, you will learn how your own "sense-of-self" depends upon how well you think and communicate with other people. In other words, the quality of your socializing with real people and the way you think about imaginary people can make big impacts on your perception of your adaptable self-identity. Whether you fully realize it or not, through the reading of books (literature) or the viewing of movies and seeing pictures or reading text on the screens of phones and tablets and computers from the internet or in theaters or listening to words from radios, your conscious self-awareness can be altered, word by word and picture by picture and sound by sound. These aspects of language can fill your memories with stories that you remember about your past and stories that you imagine about the future. For a well-rounded complete adult education in our digital global society, you need to integrate the new brain knowledge into rich memories so you can take advantage of all the human achievements of the past and also add to them. One of the best ways to become emotionally grounded in reality is to stay focused on the immediate moment. Even though sometimes difficult, you can learn to live in the present moment. However, this coping strategy can be difficult when you are being constantly distracted by excessive amounts of information, including misinformation, and disinformation. However, the new brain knowledge emphasized on this website includes ways to properly evaluate information for its value to you. The 15 brain ideas use thousands of words in your personal active vocabulary that are already a significant strategic resource for you. In addition, you can use thousands of other words from your passive vocabulary that you can use to infer meanings from the contexts of the sentences and paragraphs in which you see and hear them. So the American English language has enormous value for your continuing lifelong learning. The good news is that the new brain words can influence your behavior as you become more aware of how important they are to you for adapting your behavior. Then, it will be easier for you to motivate yourself to achieve your core goals in a changing turbulent social situation that includes the current chaos and uncertainties of the covid pandemic. In addition, the reliable meanings of the new brain-related words emphasized on this website can dramatically improve both your IQ (Intellectual Intelligence) and EQ (Emotional Intelligence). When you add these two kinds of cognitive knowledge, you end up with an essential third type of intelligence called SQ (Social Intelligence). If you learn how the 1,000 trillion synaptic switches of the 100-200 billion neurons in your brain and nervous system (in your connectome) work, you will be able to control your natural willpower and creative imagination. The interactive connections among your many neurons are described in a logical pattern on this website. The neuronal pathways connect the dozens of organs in your brain that cause your consciousness, You can do a critical thought experiment by asking the question: How do babies and children improve their capacity to express themselves? They use their brains to increase the size of their vocabularies to increase their intelligence and improve their personalities. This fantastic fact can be observed on a daily basis if you watch babies and children grow up. Their vocabularies naturally increase as they use the alphabet to figure out how to understand words and to create sentences with which to think. The fact is that newly born babies have no capacity for verbal language. They can only cry or use body language to gain attention. This fact provides objective evidence of the importance of the cultural basis of language. This means that adults must teach children how to speak and read language and get meaning from it. The developmental stages of the language acquisition of babies and the achievement of their grammatical milestones are phenomenal up to age five and even beyond. The total neurons in a child's brain continue to be "pruned" until puberty at about age 12 to 14. That means billions of neurons are lost as neuronal memory circuits become established by synaptic plasticity so routine daily behaviors can flourish during puberty when so many other bodily parts are changing so quickly. It is important to remember that older children enthusiastically seek to name things with words and to follow rules of behavior as they develop their vocabularies and intelligence and personalities. However, we usually take the changes in the language skills of children for granted. This is because the developing self-awareness of babies and children are such slow persistent processes of brain development over many years. Think of your personal vocabulary as your special super-power. Imagine that it can transform your conscious self-awareness and your adaptable self-identity. Any time you choose to use your natural willpower and creative imagination you can improve your ability to reason logically and make fulfilling ethical decisions. This aspect of developing and expanding your own self-awareness, and especially that of your children, should be obvious. However, language skills are often taken for granted and usually adults fail to develop them further after their formal academic education. That is why this website emphasizes using your critical thinking skills and critical reading strategies to think about your potential for developing a growth mindset. For example, the book, Cognitive Neuroscience of Language, whose bibliographic facts are in the following information box, provides ample evidence of the positive impact that language can have on the behavior of both young and old alike: COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF LANGUAGE by David Kemmerer. Psychology Press/Taylor and French, 2015 (599 pages) Click or Tap to Outline and Reviews COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF LANGUAGE However, if you integrate the new brain knowledge into your own long-term memory system, you can use it with your working memory system to transform your self-identity. During your brain study, you will need to focus on the 15 brain ideas presented on this website until they are completely learned. You can memorize them until they become part of your unconscious habitual behavior. Then, the ideas will be ready whenever you need them to augment your willpower and creativity. Then, you will be able to use them purposefully to optimize your creative imagination to solve problems and achieve your goals. The separate "sensory" and "motor" neuronal pathways and connections within the dozens of major organs of your brain and nervous system can be understood only when you have learned the accurate scientific words necessary to describe your brain's structures and your mind's functions. Mysterious spiritual metaphors sound good because of the grammatical "reification structure" of the English language. But those particular traditional religious and spiritual metaphors do not accurately define reality. All historical hunches and religious metaphors purported to relate to human behavior, which involve abstract ancient metaphors from past history, are wrong since the ancients knew nothing about the true functions of their brains! Those faith-based beliefs — with no objective evidence to support the belief in supernatural powers especially involving the claims about eternal life — must be questioned and reevaluated in the here and now. Human brains do not need the help of mysterious superhuman gods or goddesses to solve their problems. Ancient people had nothing but guesses and superstitions because they lacked our modern scientific method and widespread public education. They were dismally ignorant about their brain functions and most of their other bodily functions. On the other hand, the context of this new modern secular "evidence-based" brain knowledge can give you the ability to think and feel and predict the most probable outcomes of your present actions and your planning for the future. Within this context, you can use your own willpower to succeed. What your mind can conceive, you can achieve: if you know how your brain works! RECOMMENDATION: You may print this essay and read it and edit it by adding or deleting brain ideas. Then, you can read your edited version by using an effective reinforcement schedule such as the flash-card technique or the spaced-repetition method of memorization — or both — to speed up your learning of the new brain ideas and their interactions. Such deep introspection can strengthen your willpower and increase your self-esteem and dramatically change your adaptable self-image or identity. REMEMBER ALWAYS: You Are Your Adaptable Memory! instantly go to: INTRODUCTION - SECTION 3 DETAILS WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO LEARN ABOUT YOUR MIND'S FUNCTIONS? or instantly return to: INDEX TO THE INTRODUCTION SECTION 2 - SUMMARY LINK ALPHABETICAL BRAIN® VOCABULARY produced by Infinite Interactive Ideas®