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You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen.

The con­tract between you and I is that I will try to say some­thing in a way that you will be able to under­stand, and that in return for your com­mit­ting time and energy to process what I have ren­dered on this screen, I will try to cre­ate a ben­e­fi­cial expe­ri­ence for you.

That’s the way that our mode of com­mu­ni­ca­tions has evolved over the past 5,000 years or so, in a fairly lin­ear fash­ion prompted by tech­no­log­i­cal innovation.

We don’t com­ment on the remark­able fact that we’ve been able to agree on a set of codes and con­ven­tions to achieve that communication.

But at some point in our his­tory — for maybe 25,000 years — man exper­i­mented with a set of signs in order to piece together com­mon understanding.

The ulti­mate goal? To trans­fer knowl­edge. For the human species the abil­ity to abstract and trans­fer knowl­edge over time and space became a crit­i­cal aspect of survival.

The graphic above from New Sci­en­tist shows the inci­dence of cer­tain signs in human arti­facts from as much as 20,000 years ago.

The most fre­quently used signs were the dot, the cir­cle and the cross­hatch. These are sem­i­nal images that res­onated with the human mind and that con­formed to the abil­i­ties of their body and the tools that they had designed.

The impli­ca­tion of this con­clu­sion is that impulse for com­mu­ni­ca­tions, through lan­guage and sign, is core to the human expe­ri­ence, and that its direc­tion and shape is influ­enced sig­nif­i­cantly by our phys­i­cal design.

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