**Links to**: [[Margaret Masterman]], [[On Dialogical Reason]], [[Catarina Dutihl Novaes]], [[Physiological]].     >It may be that language *feels*: that it *breathes*. > >Margaret Masterman, ‘Classification, Concept Formation and Language’. >Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, September 1959 (In Chapter 3, 2005: _Language, Cohesion and Form_, p. 69).   What is the **point** of punctuation? What determines the length of a sentence? And of a thought? Running out of breath is one constraint we rarely think of (possibly, because in thought: stream of consciousness can go on without breath pauses). If we think about the fact that we need to pause for breath to speak, we can understand how, in more ways that one: breath was the first **proto-logic gate**, the constraint that determined how (linguistic) computations ought to be chunked. Inspired—pardon the pun—by Margaret Masterman’s work on the subject, this workshop comprises two elements: **1)** a presentation exploring breath as logic (and speech as song), and the consequences for our interactions with interfaces such as *LLMs through chatbots*—where the chatbot functions as a breathable layer we can parse, as humans—**2)** a brief practical exploration of these topics, by looking at how we can extend our thoughts, with and without breath.     Some additional thoughts on this are in: [[02 Introduction to the Poltergeist]], [[13 Conclusion]], [[04 Concepts as pre-dictions]], and [[Breath]]. Yorick Wilks, introduction to 2005 _Language, Cohesion and Form_ (p. 12), book compiling Margaret Masterman’s works: >...she developed the notion of a ‘breath group’, corresponding to the chunk^[See: [[Chunk]].] of language produced in a single breath, and that there was therefore a phrasing or punctuation in spoken language, one that left vital structural traces in written language too, and could be used to access its content by computer. ### Footnotes