Receptor Sheets To Brain Sheets Mappings Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 19):

Neurones can be anatomically arranged in many ways and are sometimes disposed into maps. Mapping is an important principle in complex brains. Maps relate points on the two-dimensional receptor sheets of the body (such as the skin or the retina of the eye) to corresponding points on the sheets making up the brain. Receptor sheets (for example, touch cells on your fingertips and retinal cells that respond to light) are able to react to the three-dimensional world and provide the brain with spatial signals about pressure or wavelength differences (they react to a four dimensional world if we consider time as well). Furthermore, maps of the brain connect with each other via fibres that are the most numerous of all those in the brain.

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From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory, the mappings between points on receptor sheets and corresponding points on sheets in the brain provide the material means of construing experience as perceptual meaning.

Mappings between these and other sheets in the brain provide the material means of mapping perceptual meanings to the meanings of other semiotic systems, most importantly, those of language.

For humans, the meanings of visual experience are correlated with those of language, yielding a different construal of visual experience from those of other species.