ABSTRACT
Language and the cognitive function that it requires are the crowning glory of human mental achievement, and this function most clearly distinguishes us from our animal ancestors. Although perception involves concrete structural representations closely coupled to the sensory stimulus, language and cognition inhabit a higher more abstracted realm of representation, much more independent of the concrete sensory and perceptual worlds. Surely human language and cognition did not appear out of nowhere; they must have evolved incrementally from the lower functions of sensation and perception. In this chapter I argue that the fundamental code behind language and cognition is the mental image, and that mental imagery is in turn a more abstracted and elaborate form of amodal perception. Consistent with classical Gestalt theory, therefore, I propose that language and cognition are not as different from perception as they might initially seem, but rather that difference is more a matter of degree of complexity, rather than any fundamental difference in principle of operation.
