Motor coordination and expertise. A complex system approach of motor control in physical and sports activities

Rather, when Chomsky says that language is nearly optimal, he seems to mean that its formal structure is surprisingly elegant, in the same sense that string theory is. Just as string theorists conjecture that the complexity of physics can be captured by a small set of basic laws, Chomsky has, since the early 1990s, been trying to capture what he sees as the superficial complexity of language with a small set of laws.* Building on that idea, Chomsky and his collaborators have gone so far as to suggest that language might be a kind of "optimal solution . . . [to] the problem of linking the sensory-motor and conceptual-intentional systems" (or, roughly, connecting sound and meaning). They suggest that language, despite its obvious complexity, might have required only a single evolutionary advance beyond our inheritance from ancestral primates, namely, the introduction of a device known as "recursion." Recursion is a way of building larger structures out of smaller structures. Like mathematics, language is a potentially infinite system ...»