Fig. 9

That is why the meaning might be related to the non-verbal representation in the brain; the meaning may be a certain state in the brain, and operation based on such states is not unlikely. It is obvious that the semantic question of meaning goes beyond the symbol or the word, because before giving a name, it is necessary to have an image, a meaning-carrier state of the central nervous system. In case of learning a new notion by purely verbal means, the situation is no doubt different. What really matters is that there must exist structures and states in the brain for meaning. C. Balaceanu and Ed. Nicolau also attempt to find a certain physical interpretation for meaning, considering that the automata (the central nervous system included) manage to extract meanings are semantic systems³⁷. Recent research in psychology seem to show that meaning brings about an appropriate state in the brain, which is independent of word. N. P. Johnson-Laird and others at the "Center for Research Perception and Cognition", Sussex University, G.B., hold that the listeners do not ordinarily retain the syntax of a sentence longer than it is required to grasp the meaning. What they retain is the meaning of the sentence, evidently outside its syntax. The meaning might consist of an associative structure relating the representations of words in sentences. However, if the meaning is separated from syntax, it might be also separated from words³⁸. The psychological experiments conducted by these authors lead to the idea that the "meaning" is somethingwhich could by expressed in words using a convenient syntactical structure, rather than an immediate representation of a word-structured ensemble. The words and the structure may be thrown away as soon as themeaning has been grasped³⁹. Thought is no doubt also an interaction between the semantic (non-verbal) system and the linguistic system. Suffice it to consider how Faraday thought of the electric and magnetic field lines. His thought was not linguistically-oriented. It was rather a geometrical, physical mode of thought, which dispensed with words and any mathematical formulation (which is also contiguous to speech), and which allowed him to imagine even the electromagnetic waves. His intuition was pertinent to a non-verbal mode of thought, though his communication and refining of some aspects of thought finally relies on the verbal manner.

As I was myself preparing my doctoral thesis in electronics, I tried to understand the behavior of the electron passing between various metal structures in vacuum, by "sensing" the electron trajectory under the action of the electric field produced by the electrodes, as if I had been involved in that structure. Professor Tudor Tanasescu, one of the main founders of the Romanian school of electronics, insisted largely on the physical sense of phenomena, before and beyond the linguistic and mathematical treatment. Such a way of thinking is no doubt somewhat geometrical-physical and involves also a mechanical sense of forces. One can hardly set the rules of such a way of thinking, which can only be acquired by one's own immediate experience and by reference to other similar ways of understanding.
However, in entirely new situations, a vague glimpse of a possible image or of a possible thought for which we have no notion may take shape. This image or thought stamps the mind and derives in a mental state (or sometimes in strong emotional constituents), which may be brought again in the memory as if it were symbolized in a certain way. One may say that as the image becomes vaguer, the emotional constituent grows in importance for the internal symbolization qua spiritual state.
This internal symbolization of mental and spiritual states is the first stage in the progression to speech, notion and word. Conversely, the experience of a learnt notion, its reshaping in our mind induced also such a mental-spiritual state.
That thought cannot be reduced to the use of the verbal speech is recognized in all modern treatises onpsychology. Thus, for instance, V. Mare holds that, though mancannot think without linguistic means⁴⁰, and his thought is prevailingly verbal, "the mechanisms of ordinary human thought are essentially verbal mechanisms. However, this does not in the least mean that verbal mechanisms exhaustthe content of thought"⁴¹. Next, the author shows that thinking works also with representations, to which add, as has been shown above, the stamps left by certain mental-spiritual states. The thinking employing representations, images and "stamps" of states makes up the non-verbal system mentioned in Arbib's scheme (see Fig. 9). However, non-verbal thinking might employ a speech, which in psychology is referredto as internal language⁴². Several psychologists hold that this internal language is meaning-carrier and, hence, it is a basic mechanism of voluntary thought and activity. Then the natural speech appears to be an external speech. The internal speech is assumed to have a much more reduced grammatical structure but a remarkable efficiency and readiness. The formation of the meaning of a detailed reasoning in external (natural) or mathematical speech is possible in the internal speech only by fixing some nodal items while omitting the intermediary links. This explains why the internal speech doubles or anticipates external speech processes⁴³. Indeed, we often intuit a correct result which we nevertheless have to demonstrate logically by an effort to build some chain-like reasoning.

Finally, one might say that the internal speech may be conducive to more profound zones that may be intuited in the behavior of the central nervous system, and even further to the zone of the integrating brain effects, after which we revert to the more familiar zone of the brain machine proper.

Towards a Science of Law Formation Zone 39