Are Words the Quanta of Human Language? Extending the Domain of Quantum Cognition

Quantum structures were identified as relevant for describing situations occurring in human cognition in the domain of quantum cognition and were also fruitfully used in information retrieval and natural language processing in the domain of quantum information theory. In the present article, we build on recent prior work and show that additionally to the already identified quantum structures also quantization is present in human cognition. It appears in the form of the words behaving as quanta of human language, very analogous to how photons behave as quanta of electromagnetic radiation. We illustrate this by showing on an example text that Bose-Einstein statistics provides a perfect model while Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics is totally inadequate. Like the indistinguishability of quantum particles introduces a specific form of entanglement this also happens with words. We investigate this entanglement, compute the von Neumann entropy and the amount of non purity of the density matrices of the words and note that non-locality occurs spontaneously. We interpret these results in terms of the prospect of developing a quantum-inspired thermodynamics for the cultural layer of human society, based on a statistical analysis similar to what we propose in this article.