“Language” of Sapir and “The True Story of Ah Q”of Lu Xun 12


3.2 Hippocampal model

 Hippocampus known as the brain area of memory lies behind cerebral cortex called the temporal lobe and it is one by one placed right and left. The diameter is about 1 cm and the length is 10 cm and it is cucumber-shaped.
 Hippocampus is the tract of neurons and the cross section has a nerve like character S and the cells are packed closely together in it. The nerve of character S is divided in half. Upper ⊂ is called cornu ammonis and lower ⊃ is called dentate gyrus. The cells of cornu ammonis are triangular pyramidal cells and the cells of dentate gyrus are round and small granular cells. Cornu ammonis is divided into four parts (CA1, CA2, CA3 and CA4).
 The key parts of them are CA1 and CA3. They develop a network connected by nerve fibers with dentate gyrus. The information of hippocampus is transmitted from dentate gyrus to CA1 through CA3 in order and then the information of the five senses each is delivered to the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex. However some perforant path leads to CA3 and some passes it to lead to CA1 straight away.
Ah Q pulled around the town before shooting death saw cheering crowd from a cart. At a certain moment, he remembered the hungry wolf which he met at the base of a mountain four years ago. The mind of cheering crowd was in a state of disorder like “ma-ma-hu-hu” and therefore it could be seen as an unpredictable behavior (non-linearity).
 The input information that the optic nerve of the cart driver and Ah Q received was almost the same at the start. But Ah Q remembered the hungry wolf after a short time. That means the two outputs are very different at the time (indeterminism).
 Such features of chaos are also connected to memory. For example the eyes of the wolf don’t approach Ah Q and don’t even get away from him while they chase him as a criminal. That’s episodic memory and a justification to see the unconscious idea (called “ma-ma-hu-hu” placed in Ah Q and the people around him) as a chaotic world found by recognizing the presence of continuous objects.

4 Conclusion

 I considered how to create a synergic metaphor based on “The True Story of Ah Q” by Lu Xun. As to the difference in the way of thinking between Chinese and Japanese, I referred to Sapir’s linguistics. I also focused on the conscious and the unconscious through Jung’s psychology, which had an impact on Sapir. I associated them with Ah Q’s behavior to seek the relation between synchronization and asynchronization and connected it with chaos theory. Furthermore I linked the chaotic connection to a model of the brain to discuss the question of memory. I hope to inspire people who are interested in synergy to study a synergic metaphor.

[Reference]

Yoshihisa Hanamura: An Introduction of Calculational Literature – Thomas Mann’s irony and fuzzy theory (in German and Japanese), Shinpusha, 2005.
Yoshihisa Hanamura: “Languange” of Sapir and “The True Story of Ah Q”of Lu Xun (in Japanese), my research paper in this book.
Edward Sapir: Languange, An Introduction to the Study of Speech, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2002.

花村嘉英著(2015)「从认知语言学的角度浅析鲁迅作品-魯迅をシナジーで読む」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura


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