Summary: A recent article asks what gives life purpose. Researchers suggest our defining drive is to extract meaning from the world around us.
Source: The Conversation.
What is the purpose of life? You may have your own answer, but that answer can sometimes feel incomplete. How could a single sentence fully capture why any living creature exists?
After 18 years studying how the human brain processes language, one consistent theme has emerged: a central, enduring impulse in our minds to extract meaning from the world. That drive—to make sense of our surroundings—may be at the heart of what we consider human purpose.
For many scientists, the quest to understand is more than a profession; it is a guiding principle that shapes their actions and ideas. The effort to explain natural phenomena, to identify underlying principles and mechanisms, is often described as the very essence of a scientist’s life. But this appetite for meaning is not limited to scientists alone. Neuroscience methods such as brain imaging and EEG reveal that people from diverse backgrounds share a persistent tendency to seek meaning in sensory input and experience.
Language: a dense container of meaning
Words are a prime example of how efficiently the brain encodes meaning. When a person reads a word, they do more than retrieve a single definition. Their mind activates a whole network of associations: memories, related words, similar-sounding or -looking items, and contextual meanings learned over time. Even invented or nonsensical words can trigger patterns of association based on resemblance to known forms.
Bilingual speakers demonstrate this tendency in a striking way: encountering a word in a second language often automatically triggers translation and associated meanings in their native language, even if they have no conscious intent to translate. This automatic access shows how tightly linked meaning representations are across languages and how compulsively the brain seeks to connect symbols to concepts.
Recent research has shown that abstract stimuli—images, sounds, or smells that appear to lack clear semantic content—nevertheless evoke predictable links to words and concepts in the mind. Even stimuli that seem void of meaning are interpreted and labeled by our brains, typically in similar ways across different people, because we share many experiences and associative patterns.
Consider the image above. It lacks clear, distinctive features that would immediately identify it or make naming straightforward. Yet most people are more inclined to associate it with a concept like “grace” rather than “violence,” despite an inability to fully explain that preference. The mind applies interpretive frames—often subconsciously—that bias how we translate perception into meaning.
Meaning beyond words
The human drive to understand is not confined to language. It appears to guide our perceptions, decisions, art, and scientific inquiry alike. Arguably, our species is propelled by an impulse to achieve fuller understanding of ourselves and the world—in effect, an ongoing loop in which meaning-seeking begets more questions and deeper interpretation from earliest consciousness to the end of life.
This perspective resonates with certain ideas in physics and cosmology that give a central role to information. Some thinkers have proposed that information—the patterns that constitute atoms, molecules, cells, and systems—plays a fundamental role in explaining existence. Seen this way, living systems can be described as information-processing entities that are continually interpreting and reinterpreting signals from their environment.
That pursuit of meaning can be seen everywhere: in the way DNA replicates and organizes biological information, in how societies develop shared narratives, and in efforts to build artificial systems that mimic human understanding. Whether or not one finds this explanation philosophically satisfying, the very act of asking “what is the purpose of life?” may be part of why life feels purposeful: the search itself creates significance.
Author: Guillaume Thierry – The Conversation
Publisher: Organized by NeuroscienceNews.com.
Image source: Image adapted from The Conversation news release.
The Conversation. “Life’s Purpose Rests in Brain’s Drive to Extract Meaning From the World.” NeuroscienceNews, 8 September 2018.