How humans create reality through language and beliefs

"When we are born, our brains are only about 40% of the size they will reach by adulthood. As we grow, our environments, experiences, and cultures shape both our understanding of the world and the way our brains develop. This is why language is so important: it gives us a tool for growth, thought, and cultural expansion. Daniel Dennett, PhD, Ethan Kross, PhD, and Agustín Fuentes, PhD explain how belief, language, inner chatter, and rituals work together to make us distinctively human."

"Humans are particularly distinctive, right? We have these giant brains that develop mostly after we're born. That allows us to do some things that aren't seen in other animals. One of those is this incredible human capacity for belief. It's our ability to take our experiences and imaginations, combine them into ideas or ideologies or perceptions, and commit to them so fully that they become our reality."

"One of the problems that has challenged philosophers and cognitive scientists for the last 30 or 40 years is how the brain represents information. An eternally appealing idea is something like a "language of thought." The brain writes sentences in Mentalese that store beliefs. We have a big library of sentences - those are our beliefs. But you can't have an isolated belief. They don't parcel themselves out the way services do; they come in systems."

Human brains are about 40% of adult size at birth and continue to develop substantially after birth under the influence of environment, experience, and culture. Language functions as a tool for cognitive growth, thought formation, and cultural transmission. Humans form beliefs by combining experiences and imagination into committed perceptions that can shape reality. Cognitive theorists propose a "language of thought" or Mentalese where sentence-like representations store beliefs. Beliefs are interconnected and operate within systems rather than existing in isolation, a concept called holism. Persistent inner chatter occupies a large portion of mental life and presents significant cognitive challenges.

Read at Big Think