Alessandro Treves

New research in our limbo group (Ryom and Treves, Phys Rev X Life, 2023, and unpublished) and extensive data on language parameters collected by Longobardi and collaborators (Ceolin et al, Phil Trans Roy Soc B, 2021) suggest that language diversity may reflect the disordered freezing dynamics that in a spin glass leads to a multiplicity of ground states. In a simplified model, vectors of binary syntactic parameters interact via strong asymmetric logical implications and weak partly symmetric influences, which can produce critical slowing down through a novel mechanism of percolated freezing.