Concepts are “artificial percepts” – instead of bringing the mountain or the percept of the mountain directly to the mind, the word brings the mind to the mountain through the concept of the mountain. The concept of the mountain triggers instantaneously all of the mind’s direct experiences of mountains as well as instances where the word mountain was used in any discourses in which that mind participated either as speaker or listener. The word mountain acting as a concept and an attractor not only brings to mind all “mountain” transactions but it also provides a name or a handle for that attractor/concept, which makes it easier to access memories and share them with others. They speed up reaction time and, hence, confer a selection advantage for their users. And at the same time, those languages and those words within a language which most easily capture memories enjoy a selection advantage over alternative languages and words respectively.

In suggesting that the first words were the strange attractors of percepts I did not mean to imply that all words arose in this fashion. I certainly believe that the first words to appear were the strange attractors of percepts, but once a simple lexicon of words and a primitive grammar came into being a new mental dynamic was established. The human mind was now capable of abstract thought and abstract concepts that would need to be represented by new words. These new words would not have emerged as attractors of percepts but rather as representations of abstract concepts.

The first words of this nature would have been, in all likelihood, associated with grammar and categorization. Examples of the former would be function words such as: this, that, and, or, but, if, and so forth; and examples of the words for categorization would be words such as: animals, people, birds, fish, insects, plants, and fruits.

The Origin and Evolution of the Extended Mind
The bifurcation from percept-based thinking to concept-based thinking also represents a fourth bifurcation from the brain to the human mind. Before verbal language, the brain was basically a percept processor. With language and the emergence of the concepts, the human mind also emerges – I define the mind as the brain plus language. Language extends the brain into a human mind.