Radiolab - Words

Episode Date: August 9, 2010

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N.Y. See? Yeah.

And NPR. Okay, let us begin. Hello, hello. With an unusual encounter, which comes from this lady. I'm Susan Schaller, and where do you want me to start? Her story starts off. Actually, it starts kind of abruptly. I was, indeed, riding a bicycle.

bicycle to high school. And a catering truck hit me. And I was put in the hospital with a concussion. I was 17 years old. And the concussion was bad enough that it slowed my brain enough that I couldn't read. And so naturally I couldn't go to school. Which sucked for her. At 17, I was very much a nerd.

And I was bored out of my mind. So imagine Susan sitting there in the house. hospital. One day, one of her friends. A friend of mine who was just a little older and had graduated a semester before me, suggested going to the nearby university and crashing classes. Wait a second. Why would you go, if your brain was working slowly, why wouldn't you go swimming? I couldn't read, but I could listen and I could hear, and the person was saying that, oh, it's a lot better than high school. And so one day, she was at this college. Just kind of wandering down a random hallway. And I opened the first door on the left.

That was the accident that changed my whole life, just picking that door. At the front of the room, there was this older guy. He was thin, he was bald, and he was tracing shapes in the air with his hands. It was as if there were pictures being painted in the air, and then they immediately disappeared. Then another picture appeared. I was mesmerized. The professor was signing. This class was actually one of the first classes to teach sign at a regular hearing university ever.

I had also walked into history but didn't know it. Fast forward five years, Susan now is fluent in sign. She moves to Los Angeles. It's the late 1970s. And I was snatched and put into interpreter training programs because at that time there were very, very few interpreters. And I found myself in a classroom. In a community college. In something called a reading skills class. So she walks into the class.

She's kids all over the classroom, making big, excited gestures one to the other. And at the door, I saw this man holding himself. Kind of off by himself. Making his own straight jacket. She went over to the instructor, and she pointed at the guy. She said, who's that guy over there? I mean, instructor said, well, he was born deaf.

His uncle, he has this kind of insistent uncle who brings him here every day. We don't know exactly what to do with him, though. What did this guy look like? He was a beautiful, well, now I know, I don't know if I would have had it in my head at the time, but a beautiful-looking Mayan, you know, high cheekbones and black hair, black eyes. And something about his eyes caught her attention. He was studying mouths. And I walked up to him and said, hello, my name is Susan.

And this is where things start to get a little weird. He looks at her, and instead of signing his name, whatever it was, He brings up his hands. And signs right back to her. Hello, my name is Susan. Susan, like, shakes her. And he says, no, no, I'm Susan. And he responds, no, I'm Susan.

Everything you said he tried to say? Exactly. I call it visual echolalia. Ecolalia. And I remember thinking... Why is he doing this? I mean, Susan, did he look like he had some kind of disability or condition? He was intelligent.

I wouldn't have been able to answer if you had asked me, how can you see intelligence? But you can actually see intelligence in people's eyes. He was just missing something. To copy me meant that he didn't really know what I was doing. And that's when it occurred to him. This man doesn't have language. Wait, how old was this guy?

He was 27 years old. In all that time, no one had taught him sign language or anything? Well, he didn't know he was deaf. He was born deaf. He didn't know there was sound. Really? 27 years. No idea.

idea that there was sound. He could see the mouth moving, could see people responding. He thought we figured all the stuff out visually. And he thought, I must be stupid. And so here's the question for our hour. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. Words. What do words do for us? Are they necessary? Can you live without them? Can you think without them? Can you dream without them? Can you? Can you swim? Back to the story. So this man that Susan met, we don't actually know his real name, but when she wrote about him in her book, a man without words,

she called him Il Defonso. There they are, sitting in the classroom. She's right there with him. Of course, she's wondering. What have you been doing for 27 years? So she thinks, let me see if I can teach him some just basic sign language. In an interesting case, she takes out a book and makes the sign book. But the sign for book, it looks like opening up a book.

So he thought I was ordering him to open a book. So he grabs the book and he opens it. Because he thought I was asking him to do something. It was very difficult. If I gave him the sign for standing up, he thought I wanted him to stand up. And so I couldn't have a conversation with him. And it was the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life. Wait a second.

How long did this go on for? Well, weeks. It was weeks. Oftentimes when we said goodbye or just laughed, we couldn't really say goodbye. I really believed that we wouldn't see each other again. And I was oftentimes very surprised when he would be sitting there at the table. And I think sometimes he looked surprised that I showed up. But after a couple of weeks of him...

Constantly miming, copping me. She had an idea. Perhaps it's just possible that if I died tomorrow, I would have had only one really, really good thought in my life. And this was it. I thought, I'm going to ignore him. I taught an invisible student. I stopped talking to him and I stopped having eye contact and I set up an empty chair.

And then she says she would hold up to this empty chair a picture of a cat. And I was trying to explain to this invisible student that this creature, a cat, so I'd be miming a cat and petting a cat. And then I sign the sign for cat. Then she would hop to the other seat, the invisible student's seat, pretend to get it. Oh, oh, I know with my facial expression, oh, I get it. So you're playing all the parts. You're both the teacher and the invisible student. That's right. That's right. Doing all these crazy things, and he just watched me. He stopped copying her, which was good.

But I'd do this over and over and over for days and days and days. And she says he just didn't get it. He looked bored a lot of times. But one day, in the middle of one of these endless pretend student exercises, something happened. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him shift his body. And he looked, it's interesting, how. his body was upright and he looked like something was about to happen.

He looked around the room. This is a 27-year-old man and he looks around the room as if he had just landed from Mars and it was the first time he ever saw anything. Something was about to happen. His eyes grew wider, she says, and then wider. And then... He slaps his hands on the table. Oh, everything has a name.

And he looks at me in this demanding way, and I sign table. And he points to the door, and I sign door, and he points to the clock, and he points to me, and I sign Susan. And then he started crying. He just collapsed, and he started crying. What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols, and we start trading symbols? It changes our thinking. It changes our ideas.

It is no longer the thing, a table that we eat on, There's something about the symbol table that makes the table look different. Ildefonso was in love. He was in love. It's like everything has a name. And for the first couple weeks, he had this list of names that kept growing and growing. Paper. Eagle.

Clock. Green. I kept copying words for him. Cats. I like a cat. Carnot. Gave him the sign for door. Door.

Door. Door. Then I would. Door. Door. D-O-O-R. Serpent, Caesar, and he folded this paper.

Paper? As if it was treasure. Treasure. And he would pull it out every day, and he would lie in, carefully unfold it. Tiger. And he would add to it. Orange juice, apple, do jay, thinking, leaves,

course, leaf, ideas, lamb, blue, table, bird, wall, dough, name, add to it. Pig, left, from right, Cows, hawk, left of the blue wall. Octopus. Symbols. Word.

Eggs. And apoptim. What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols? Symbols. You know, once you have begun to put words onto things, you can look at a thing, say this symbolic sound, table, and the person opposite you knows that you're talking about. But she seems to be saying something.

deeper, though, that like when you get the word for table, that suddenly the table, like this table right here looks different. Like, it's somehow the word changes the world in some fundamental way. Now, I don't know if that's true about the table thing, but consider what happens when you put words together, okay, when you link them up. Good. Okay. So I want to tell you about this experiment. Fantastic. That I learned about from a fellow I talk to sometimes. Charles. I'm Charles Fernieho. I'm a psychologist at Durham University in the UK. And when I first read about this experiment in Charles' book, called A Thousand Days of Wonder, it blew my mind out of my nose and onto the book.

It was a little messy. I never want to be with you in a library. It takes a little journey to get to the mind-blowing part. But luckily, I'll let Charles explain. The whole thing happens in a room. Yeah, you're put into this room which is colored completely white. The walls are white, the ceiling's white, the floors. So it's all white.

All white. Everything's white. and you can tell where you are to the extent that some of the walls are longer than others. So on your left hand. Are we in a rectangle? Is what you're just going? Yeah, it's a rectangular room. Are you with me so far?

I'm with you so far. Okay, just to give you a sense of the baseline conditions here, imagine you are a rat in this room. Okay? And somebody comes along and hides an object in one corner of the room. What? It can be anything. I mean, for rats, you'd use food. Like a biscuit or something?

Yeah. They hide a biscuit in one of the four corners. In one corner. You see it. Okay. But before you can get to it, they pick you up. by your tails, spin you around a bunch of times. So you don't know where you are, you don't know which direction you're facing it.

And then they say, right, now go find the biscuit. So if you do this with a rat, what will happen is it'll say, all right, let me go find the biscuit, and it will... Go to one corner which looks right. But of course, the room also looks like that if you turn around through 180 degrees and face exactly the opposite direction. Because it's a rectangle. So they get it right about 50% of the time.

Because corners of rectangles are two of them are identical. All right, so should we get on with this? Because I'm well aware of rectangles. I just needed to get that out of the way because the cool part is coming up. I hope so. What the experimenters did next is they took one of the four white walls and they turned it blue. So imagine this scenario. You're in this room.

You've got these four white walls, rather three white walls. One of them is blue. Right. Well, now you're not confused anymore. You can relate everything to the blue wall. You can be like, oh, the corner with the biscuit was left of the blue wall, or right of the blue wall. Well, they get to the left. You now have the blue wall as a...

Navigational clue. Yes. That makes sense. You know, we would all be able to do that. That's not going to be difficult for us. All right. We got to the good part yet? Yeah, it's coming.

It's coming. Turns out, though... The rats, he says. They're still scoring 50-50. What? It's as if they can't take any notice of the blue wall. Even with the blue wall, they're only finding the biscuit. 50% of the time. Wait a second. Can a rat see color? Yeah. Rats can do color. They do color pretty

well. Okay. They also do left, right? Just fine. But what they can't do is connect those two bits of information together. In other words, they can only, well, they can do left. That they can do blue. They can do blue, but it's, they're both separate. They can't do left of blue. These different kinds of knowledge can't talk to each other. How does anyone know that? I mean, who, who, what rats have been interviewed for this survey? What? David, they infer this based on studying the rats. So the rat doesn't have what? Doesn't have the neurons?

Doesn't have the, what does he doesn't have? The rat can't do it. That's all that you need to know. And I'm going to make it weirder right now. Neither can some humans. I spent the first 10 or 15 years of my scientific life studying creatures who don't talk yet. That's Elizabeth Spelke. She's a psychologist at Harvard, quite famous for her work with,

Kind. As you can hear. Babies, and I was interested in their abilities in relation to abilities of other animals. Come on, kid out. We're going to go to the monkey room. So she began the baby development lab, which is filled with toys.

And on any given day, five or six, really tiny kids. She used six months. Who's this? I'm a big kid. Yeah. Toddlers, too. How old are you? Three and a half.

Big time. So, at a certain point, Elizabeth Spelke decided to build a version of the white room in this lab because she wondered if rats have so much trouble connecting the idea of left to blue. What about... Surely, baby humans. A self-respecting 18-month-old human child will succeed in putting them together. But... No.

What we find is that children behave just like the rats. Just like the rats. Just like the rats? Just like the rats or almost just like the rats? Well, we don't test them with food. We don't test them with digging. So in superficial ways, superficial features of the studies are different. But she says kids, like the rats, cannot connect the idea of left to the idea of blue.

They just can't do it. And they can't do it at one. They can't do it at two. They can't do it at three. Four. Five. And we find that those children start performing like adults around six years of age. Now I'm interested.

Good. Something happens at the ripe old age of six. It is shockingly late. right? Yeah. Well, something happens at the age of six that suddenly allows the kid to connect concepts like left to concepts like blue. And the question is what? What happens? Several people have suggested that one candidate for a process that's doing this is language. What do you mean is the language? Kids are talking certainly at three, four, five, and six. They're talking like a, like a, you know, too much. But what they're not, what they haven't yet

started to use is spatial language and particularly the kinds of spatial language that adults would use in this situation to describe what they're doing. And somewhere around the age of six, they start to use phrases like, Left of the blue wall. And those aren't just words that come out of the child's mouth. Liz thinks that inside the child's brain, what that phrase does is link these concepts together. Plink. And at that moment, left of the blue wall.

The child leaves the rats behind. I can, you should, that, she doesn't think that kids have that. What, let me put it to you a different way? Okay. And this is my best understanding of what she thinks. Her basic idea is that a child's brain begins as a series of islands. And on one island, way over here, in the brain you've got, say, color. You can call that the blue island.

Blue blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. That's the part of you that perceives the color blue. Way on the other side of the brain, you've got the part of you that perceives spatial stuff, like left. Left, left, left, left, left, left. Maybe on a third objects, like wall. Wall, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. These things are there from the beginning, but they're separate. Then you get to where it's left, blue wall.

And then the child, for the first time, comes upon the phrase, left of the blue wall. And in that moment, all the islands come together. It is literally the phrase itself, she says, that creates that internal connection. Everybody's always talked about how language is this incredible tool for communication. It allows us to exchange information with other people so much more richly and effectively than other animals can. But language also seems to me to serve as a mechanism of communication between different systems within a single mind. There you go. Wouldn't it be just as possible, just listen to me here, that the kid's brain is developing some new connections

and what follows then follows from the changes in the brain. The words are like an after, after, after. After fact? After a fact. Yeah, well, that's a good. That's, um, no, no. The experimenters actually accounted for that. What the experimenters did next is that they thought, okay, if language is adding this extra element, let's try and knock it out. How would you do that? Would you, like, shoot something into their brain that kills the language part or something? It's a much simpler way of doing it and a much more humane thing you can do. What we did is put adults in the room. And then she says she gave him an eye. They've got headphones on. Playing through those headphones as someone talking. Yep. And their job while they're in the room is to just repeat what the person is saying. Continuously listening to speech and repeating it the whole time they were in there. It's actually a really hard thing to do.

If you've ever tried shadowing somebody speaking. Can we try it? You go and I'll and I'll shadow you. Okay, Jan. Okay, Jan. I'm going to start speaking now. And I want you to say it right back to me. Exactly as I say.

Oh my God. You hurt my head. That's really hard. It is hard, yeah. And what that does is it knocks out your capacity to use language for yourself. Basically battering the words out of the adult's head. Why are they doing this again? Well, they want to see, like if you blast the words out of somebody's head. What would happen?

Can they find the biscuit? Will they be able to form that simple thought left of the blue wall, or will they be like the rats? Who can't? And? And we actually got very dramatic results? They went right back to being like the rats. Wow. Yeah. But Charles, what I'm wondering is if language allows you to construct a thought that is so basic as the biscuit is left of the blue wall.

What is thought without language? Well, I don't think it's very much at all. What do you mean? I'm going to put it in a different way, and this involves making quite a controversial statement. I don't think very young children do think. Like think period? Was there a period at the end of that sense? I don't think they think in the way that I want to call thinking, which is a bit of a cheat,

but let me say what I mean by thinking. If you reflect on your own experience, if you think about what's going on inside your head as you're just walking to work or sitting on a subway train, much of what's going on in your head at that point is actually verbal. I want to suggest that the central thread of all that is actually language. It's a stream of inner speech. That's what most of us think of as thinking. Well, on the other hand, what I'm most aware of when I'm reflecting is the stuff that I can't put into words. I think that he's exaggerating the role of language here.

This all really hinges on how you would define thinking? And Liz would say, take a musician. I'll give you my example, Bill Evans. Here is a form of thought that carries. you through a definite sequence of phrases, feelings, emotions, changes. And there are no words. But there's something that we get access to when we gain a full natural language that we can use not only to communicate with other people, but with ourselves.

Two, she-feros. Test testing. Test, test, test, test. Language is fundamentally a combinatorial system. As we head up the steps, what is this? This is a building of Columbia University. See, we'd gotten interested in the last thing that Liz Spelke said about language being a combinatorial thing. System. Right.

And that led us to Columbia. Here's the deal. You have words now. You have words in combination now. Now you can play with the combinations. And that, as you'll hear. Just us three then, right? It's just us three.

opens up a kind of an infinity. Head to foot now is he total gulls, hardly tricked with blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, baked in and pasted with the parching streets that lend a tyranness and damned a light to their vile murders. This is Shakespeare.

When I sat in middle school, and they gave her Shakespeare, roasted and wrath and fire, and thus oarsized with coagulate gourd. I was completely confused, and I felt stupid. Can you just introduce yourself? This is James Shapiro. He is a Shakespeare scholar.

obviously. At Columbia University, where I've taught for 25 years. And one reason he says that Shakespeare can be confusing is that often Shakespeare behave not so much like a writer,

but more like a... Like a chemist combining elements. He's taking words and he's shoving them together, smashing them together, if you will, combining...

Sometimes these word experiments, they didn't go so well. Yes, the prince's organ. Orgulus has not stuck. No. That goes to me. What does it mean? You got me?

I mean, I should know. But look what he did just by adding a little prefix, un. There's so many words that we're now familiar with, unnerved. You know, we don't know what that means. But nobody had heard unnerved, unaware, uncomfortable. He made up uncomfortable? He was the first to use that word. On a stage.

Right. Unearthly. Unhand. undress, uneducated, un- un-migated, un-published, something that's near and dear to me. Unpublished. Un-solicited, unswayed, unclog, un-appeased, unchanging, unreal.

He made up unreal. He's the first to use it, in print or on stage. Would an audience at that time have understood what the un-prefix meant? Not real? I think it takes you a split second. Unreal. To kind of put that on, on the real.

But then suddenly, you've got this new concept that there's something real, but not. He's taking words that ordinarily are not stuck together. Things like mad cap, ladybird, shoving them together, eye drops to achieve a kind of atomic power. Eyesore. Eyeball. He did eyeball? Yes.

That's hard to understand how someone could think of that up. It seems like it's always been there. If you ask me what his greatest gift is, he's putting them together. into phrases that have stuck in our heads. So, truth will out. Truth will out. What's done is done. I could go on and on.

He wants you to go on and on. Crack of doom. My favorite, dead as a doorknail. A dish fit for the gods. Dog will have his day. Faint-hearted, fools paradise. Forever and a day foregone conclusion. The game is a foot.

The game is up. Greek to me, in a pickle, in my heart of hearts, in my mind's eye. Kill with kindness. Believe it or not, knock, knock, who's there? Oh! Laff your stuff into stitches. Love is blind.

What the dickens. Balls well and ends well. Something wicked this way comes. And a sorry sight. Wow. That's a champion. That's pretty fantastic. How did he create phrases that stick in the mind?

then make it seem as if they always existed. Yeah, how? You're taking out a book. Thinking of a passage here. That is maybe the biggest book I've ever seen. Nonsense. It was at least 3,000 pages. Shakespeare doesn't write a lot about process.

But there are one or two places where he does in a poem called Lucrease, in which a woman is raped. Lucrease is raped. And she has to write a letter to her husband, explaining what happened to her. And she's struggling to find the words in which to do this. And finally, she picks up the pen and it goes,

she prepares to write. First, hovering all the paper with her quill. Conceit and grief an eager combat fight. What wit sets down is blotted straight with will, this too curious good, this blunt and ill, much like oppressive people at a door throng her inventions, which shall go before. I'll read that couplet again.

Much like oppressive people at a door throng her inventions, which shall go before. If you want to extrapolate from this, something that Shakespeare might have himself experienced, you have a situation which all these ideas are pressing. It's like a throng of them. Who's getting through that doorway first? It's a little bit maybe like that experience you might have at a nightmare New York club, where you've got like thousands of people in a tiny, space and everyone's trying to push their way out

and they're like, God, let me through the door, get it on my way and it's just like this... ...of images, of sounds, concedes, thoughts, ideas, and they are providing the pressure that's needed to produce words. You know what?

What? This makes sense to me. This interpretation. Not just for Shakespeare, maybe for anybody. Certainly the guy, we met at the beginning, Ildefonso. Who just learned words for the first time? Yeah, I mean, as you move through the world, if you're sensitive at all and you're observant,

you're going to get filled up with all of these things which you have to express but can't until you get those words. Then, boom, the door opens. And thanks to James Shapiro, professor at Columbia University, whose newest book is Contested Will. Who wrote Shakespeare? Also thanks to our kids, Louisa Krasnow, Stella Story and Isaiah Harrison,

and also thanks to the moms that brought them in. Teresa Tripoli, Carrie Donahue, and Patricia Starak. Hello, this is Susan Scholar. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Charles Soneyho. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab.

This hour. Words. Word of words. Power of words. So once words into your head, once they tickle in there, and we just explained how that happens. Sort of. Then they're always there. What if they're not?

What would happen if that throng that is in your head? What if all of that stuff, whatever is in your head, suddenly went, got yanked right out of your head. What would be left? Well, this got us thinking about a very famous talk at one of the TED conferences. I grew up to study the brain. A talk given by a neuroanatomist named Jill Boltey, is it Boltey or Boltie? Boltey?

Boltey Taylor. Yeah. And all you really need to know is that one morning in December of 1996, Dr. Taylor woke up and she had a headache. I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. and it just gripped me, and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, okay, I'll just start my normal routine.

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full body, full exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, whoa, I am a weird-looking thing. thing. So I get off the machine. And I'm standing in my bathroom, getting ready to step into the shower. And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I'm asking myself, what is wrong with me? What is going on? And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed

by my side. In fact, a blood vessel in the left hemisphere of Jill's brain had popped, and that part of her brain was starting to shut down. And it was the shutdown that really caught our attention. In that moment, my brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. So here I am in this space and my job and any stress related to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, hey, I'm having a stroke. We got to get some help. And I'm going, oh, I got a problem. I got a problem. So it's like, okay. Okay, I got a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out.

And I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. So I'm just watching my brain become more and more incapable of functioning. That is Jill Boltey Taylor herself. Hi, Robert. We actually got her into a studio. Hello, Jed. Hello? Because we wanted to ask her some questions about that moment when her inner voices went away.

So let's talk about brain chatter for a moment. In the story that we've told so far, you're still asking yourself questions. Now, did that stop? On the morning of the stroke, I was doing this wafting dance between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere. So language would come back on. But once I got to the emergency room and I passed out, when I woke later that afternoon, I had absolutely no language. Did you know your name? No.

Did you know your address? No. Did you know about your summer from 1983? No. You know, like, my mom is so... I didn't know any then. None of it. I didn't know any of that.

Just imagine, she's lying in her bed, her head is shaved, wrapped in bandages. She's had hours of brain surgery. She's got tubes coming out of her mouth. She's got her nose. She's lost her career. She's lost her language. I lost all my memories. And yet, she says, sitting there in that suddenly wordless space?

I had found a piece. inside of myself that I had not known before. I had pure silence inside of my mind. Pure silence. Pure silence? Pure silence. You know, not that little voice that, you know, you wake up in the morning and the first thing your brain says is, oh, man, the sun is shining.

Well, imagine that you don't hear that little voice saying, man, the sun is shining. You just experience the sun and the shining. Is this the absence of the sun? of reflection of any kind? Is it just sensual intake and period? That is exactly what it was. It was all of the present moment.

Did you have thoughts? I had joy. I just had joy. I had this magnificent experience of, I'm this collection of these beautiful cells. I'm organic. I'm this organic entity. Did you have a deadhead period by any chance?

You know, I missed that by a few years. But I get a lot of that. And the other thing that she told us is that lying in that bed without words, she says she felt connected to things, to everything, in a way that she never had before. Oh, yeah. I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world. You mean like you couldn't figure out where you ended?

How much of that was about language? A little part? A lot? I mean... Well, I would say it was huge. Language is an ongoing information processing. It's the constant reminder. I am. This is my name. This is all the data related to me. These are my likes and my dislikes. These are my beliefs. I am an individual. I am a single. I'm a solid. I'm separate from you. Now, as fruity as this may sound, to pin all this on language, We have run into this idea before. A couple seasons ago, Paul Brock's remember him, neurosyologist. If you want to ask me about myself, he told me that there is a theory out there,

which he believes, actually, that all a person is in the end, like all the personhood of a person, the I or the you of a person, all that is, in the end, is... A story. A story you tell yourself. What we normally think of

when we think about ourselves is really a story. It's the story of what's happened to that body over time. I did not have that portion of my language center that tells a story. Curious little Jill. Me, Jill, Boltey Taylor, climbing the Harvard ladder. Through language.

Loves dissection, cutting up things. That language was gone. I got to essentially become an infant again. I mean, this is the problem here. What do you mean? When you drop out of the eyeness of yourself or the story of yourself, then you are left, she says at peace. I could argue that that's just stranded.

That's stranded in the sunshine with the wind in the now. But, I mean, it's not like she stayed there. Well, that's true. We wouldn't be to dogging to her if she had. And as she started to recover, she ran into something kind of interesting, which sounded to me sort of like what maybe the rats and the babies go through in the white room. She would have these disparate thoughts and then stall out. Like she couldn't bring them together.

Yeah. When people would speak to me, I remembered in pictures. So if somebody would ask me who's the president of the United States of America, this is a huge question. So for the next several hours, I'd be pondering, president, president, president, what's a president? And then I would get a picture in my mind of a president as a leader. Was it a picture of a specific guy? It was, actually, it still flashes into my mind.

It's a picture of a silhouette, of a male. A presidential profile. Like maybe the idea of a president, basically. So that was her president. And then I had to figure out a United States. And so eventually I come up with this map in my mind, this picture of the United States. Like a line drawing. So now she's got this map.

She's got this silhouette of a guy. And she said, after hours. President, United States. President, United States. And it's like, oh, my God. She still couldn't somehow bring him together. I didn't have the road that I had to travel in order to come up with. I think it was Clinton at the time.

Yeah, it was Clinton at the time. Now, as Jill starts to get better. This is after eight years of hard work and recovery. Finally, the words start to trickle back. And when they did, she says, that silence that she loved so much got pushed out. That was one of the sacrifices. For me, that was one of the sacrifices. Wow.

Wow. We're doing a language show here. You're the anti-queen of our language show. You're like saying, who needs it? No, no, no, no, no. No, but what I am saying is that in order for us to communicate with language, we pull ourselves away from a different kind of experience. I do believe that there are times when you need to let your brain chatter be quiet.

But is it fair to say? This is like, please agree or disagree with this statement. I think that words and language and grammar are necessary, but not half as good as wind in my hair, a smell in my nose, and that old right brain sensual immediacy. Yeah. You know, if I had to choose, which is essentially what you're saying, if I had to choose,

that would be a really, really, really tough decision. Joe Bolte Taylor is the author of, what's it called? The book? My Stroke of Insight. Yes. Check our website,radioLab.org, for any details. And if you subscribe to our podcast, there is a bonus video that goes along with this hour. And it's pretty great.

I'm Louis Henderson, calling from Christchurch, New Zealand. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. I'm Chad Aboumrod. Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. Our topic today. Words. Power of words of language.

Okay, so Nicaragua 1970s. That's where our next story starts. You with me? So imagine you're a kid that's deaf in Nicaragua at this time. Born deaf or? Born deaf. Born deaf. You've always been deaf and you're the only one in your family that's deaf. So you're in this situation where everybody's talking, their mouths are moving, you can't hear it.

And you don't know sign language because no one's taught you. There was no deaf school in Nicaragua then? Nothing. No deaf education of any kind. So if you were this kid, all you've really got are a couple of gestures, really crude gestures you've worked out to talk to your family and friends. But beyond that, you're cut off. Like Ildefonzo, the guy we met at the beginning of this show, except in Nicaragua, in the 70s, there were hundreds,

maybe thousands of these El DeFonzo's. Really? Yeah. But then, everything changes. In the late 70s, Hope Samosa, who was the wife of the then dictator, established a new school for special education. I think she had someone in her family who had a disability, not deafness. But the school would include deaf people,

And that, says psychology professor Anne Senghaz, was the first. Because now, instead of deaf kids scattered about, they were together in the same room. There were 50 deaf kids in that first entering class. Preschooled a sixth grade. The late 70s. And for most of them, this was the first time they'd ever met another deaf person. Before the world was going on around them and everyone was all talking and they were cut off from that. And suddenly for the first time, they were all there and they were what was.

happening and they were what there was to talk about. But they didn't have a way of talking. These were 50 different kids who'd never learned a language and had 50 different sets of rudimentary gestures that they used to. Well, that must have been. Yeah, like 50 people with 50 different ways to try and ask for breakfast or say they want to go outside. I mean, nothing was shared.

It's not like the teachers were using sign in the classroom. Everything in the classroom was Spanish. Which none of them knew. Copying it into their notebooks. A lot of it was going right over there. So at the beginning, things were completely confusing. But they're riding on the bus for an hour every day, and they're playing out of recess for an hour every day, and they're getting together at the park. And no one knows how it happened.

Like maybe one of the kids who was very charismatic. He invented a sign for, say, ball, then told it to another kid who was... Very, you know, socially active. And that second kid then spread the sign, however it worked. Over time, the signs that these 50 kids used... ...started to converge into a common system. And when you step back from it all, what that means? They created a language.

They didn't just take it from somewhere else. They couldn't take it from somewhere else. They created their own. But how unusual is that? Like this has happened with languages all over the world, but not while people were watching. And so you're saying this is the first time we've been able to watch a language being born? Yeah. Wow.

And for the last 20 years, that is what Anne has been doing. She's been going to Nicaragua to that school and watching. So, oh, you wanted to describe that, so I may have gotten a recording of this, but when you arrive at the school, the buses come around, the kids are all screaming and leaning out the windows and signing to each other. And the kids pile out and they line up in rows on the basketball court that's in the center of the schoolyard. And they all sing the national hymn.

And the deaf kids all sign the national hymn. They all have one hand over their heart and sign with the other hand while the hearing kids sing it. And visited the school for the first time in 1990, about 10 years after it was formed. She'd been working at the time with a linguist. Named Judy Kegel. Studying basic linguist type stuff. Right. Trying to figure out how the verbs work and whether they have agreement with their grammatical objects. And along the way, her and her and.

a collaborator, Jeddie Pires, stumbled into something really surprising about the power of certain words. So to set it up, when she got there the first time to Nicaragua, those original 50 kids who'd invented this thing had grown up already. And there were these younger generations of kids coming in behind them, growing up with the language, using it, inventing new signs. And at a certain point, she got curious to just compare the original signers, the older kids to the younger kids.

Yeah. In terms of how they sign. So we show everyone this little one-minute cartoon about this guy who's trying to fly. He sees a bird flying and he puts all these feathers on his body and climbs up to the top of a mountain. Flaps his arm

and jumps and crashes on the ground. So she showed deaf kids of different generations this cartoon and asked them pretty simply to describe what they saw. Describe it and sign. Describe the whole story. The differences were striking. First

of all. So I'll just show you an example of each. So you're opening up a movie here. So this is a first cohort signer talking about. She got out of her laptop and showed me some video. First of this woman in her 40s with dark hair and a colorful t-shirt. She was one of the original signers. And when you see

older signers like her describe this guy who's trying to fly, it's really spastic. It's almost like they become the cartoon. She's flapping her hands. Moving all around. A lot of full body movements. She's talking about someone who's moving in a crazy way, she's going to be moving in a crazy way.

Then she showed me a young kid who's about eight, the backwards cap. So here's Sylvester, and now he talks about the manner. When he described the man jumping and then falling, it was all in the wrist. All the movement is now in the hand, and it's very stylish. You know, they're trimming these signs down. But more of the point, there was one thing she noticed that was really unexpected, had nothing to do with movement. Couldn't help noticing that different people in the community talked about different things in this story.

The older signers tended to describe all the events in this story. And only the events. And the younger kids... They would talk about the guy's feelings. That this guy was trying to fly, wanted to fly, but failed. The kids, she says, just seem to be better at... Thinking about... Thinking.

Thinking. Like other people's thinking. So Anne and Jenny decided, let's take all the different generations of deaf kids. 40-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 10-year-olds. Let me test them on how well they can think about thinking. So what they did was they showed everybody a comic strip, different from before. This one was about two brothers. There's a big brother who's playing with the train, and then little brother is, like, wanting to play with the...

train and the big brother's playing with the train. And then the big brother puts it under the bed and goes into the kitchen to eat a sandwich. And maybe before he goes, he looks at the little brother and says, hey, don't touch my train. Don't touch it. And then little brother, while the big brother's out of the room, takes the train out and hides it in the toy box. And then the big brother comes back and the question is, where's the big brother going to go to find his train? Is he going to look under the bed or is he going to look in the toy box? Well, he's going to look under the bed. Yeah.

Because as far as he knows, that's where he left it. Yeah. He didn't see it moves. And if you ask kids over the age of five, most of them would say he's going to look under the bed because that's where he left it and he doesn't know that it's been moved to the toy box. But here's the thing when she asked the older signers. They would say, oh, look in the toy box. Really? They would pick the wrong one.

These are 35-year-olds. 35-year-olds would get this wrong? They would fail this task, yeah. Seven out of eight, she says. And then all of the younger signers that we worked with. passed. At this point, she's just confused. Like, why would this be? Why can't the older people pass this simple test? You know, it involves thinking about someone else's thinking. What's going on here? And then it occurred to her. You might have something to do with certain words because

the older signers, they don't really have that many words for the concept of thinking. I mean, they have mainly just one sign pointing at your forehead. Yeah. Basically, you just point at your forehead with your index finger. By the time you get to the younger kids. They've got tons of words for thinking. Things like, I know something and I know that you don't know it. I know something and I know you do know it. They've got a sign for understand, believe, believe, remember, forget. How many roughly were there? 10 or 12. Wow. So from 30 years, we go from just a couple to. We went from like knowing and not knowing. Right. To 12? Yeah. And somehow that makes all the difference, she says. The more of these think words you've got,

The more you can think. Am I right to say that? You're tiptoeing toward that. Maybe you don't want to go there all the way. Yeah, I'm trying to think that. I guess I don't think it's so simple that you could just go in and say, hey, I'm going to teach you 10 signs today, and now suddenly you're going to have better cognitive capacity.

But you are saying, though, that the verb, think, is somehow implicated in my ability to think about your thinking. Right. Thinking about thinking. understanding how other people understand. That's something that having language makes you better at. There are certain words, she says, that don't just give you a name for something. Somehow, they give you access to a concept that would otherwise be really hard to get.

Or even talk about it. It's really hard to talk about thoughts without the word thoughts. Or what is time without the word thoughts? word time. It's a really freaking hard concept. These words are like bridges. Somehow they get you to some new mental place that otherwise you'd be cut off from. But that's sad though. I mean, these young kids have something that the people who actually invented the language don't. But we went back two years later, tested the same people. And then suddenly some of them were performing a lot better than they had the two years.

before on the same kinds of tasks. Do you mean the older signers? Yeah. They were passing suddenly? Some of them were passing. Yeah. What happened? What happened in the past two years?

Yeah. Those younger kids grew up and started hanging out at the Deaf Association. Wait, what? So what had happened in the meantime? So here's the strange twist of the whole thing. The Deaf Association is this place where the older signers would hang out. Yeah, it's a social club. So they'd play chess, do whatever.

Well, at a certain point, these youngsters, start showing up, you know, because they've graduated and they want to hang out at the Deaf Association too, but they bring with them all of their new mental verbs, you know, all these words for thinking. They start using it with the older kids, the older kids pick it up. Suddenly these older kids are now passing the test. So there was learning that took place in adulthood that actually gives them new insight into other people's thinking and motivation and now they could pass these tasks. That's super interesting. So that's the story. It's really cool.

Anne Senghass is an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York. The thing, of course, you wonder is once you've gotten this new facility in you, like, there's a lot of literature about this. My fair lady is about this. My fair lady's about this? Yeah, it's about a woman who learns proper English and she can no longer be a flower girl in Cumberland Garden. She's now a lady.

Yeah, I guess it is kind of like this. You want, like, remember, our program began with the story of Il Defonso. Right, which we heard from Susan Schaller. Ildefonso, who was the guy who for 27 years, had no language at all. So you kind of wonder. I can tell you that I... Like, what happened to Il Defonzo once he got language? Right, and after that first breakthrough where Ilifonso realized things have names, Susan ended up leaving for a few years.

Let's see, it was about four years, I think, four or five. But then she decided to write a book about him. And so I went and found him again. Then he had language, and I could ask him all kinds of questions. Were you able then to sit down with him and ask him about his life and to really get the sort of his biography? Somewhat, somewhat. One area that everyone wants to know about is what was it like to be languishless?

You know, what was going on in his head? Yeah. And I asked and I asked and I asked. And he starts telling me that was the dark time in his life. Learning language is like the lights went on. And I tell him, well, we know about language, and we want to know what it's like not to have language. And he doesn't want to talk about it. But there was a day, she says, when she was writing the book, and she met Ildefonso in a restaurant.

And there he was sitting with his brother Mario, who she never met before. And she quickly learned that Mario also was deaf. And languageless. Really? So I was shocked. And because I was so amazed, going, I can't believe you have a languishless brother. That's when Il de Fonzo said, well, let's... Let me introduce you to some of my friends.

So they get in a car and they drive for a while? We stop at this apartment, we walk into this small little room, and there were these six Mexican men doing this mime routine. Wait, all these guys were like Il-Lefonzo used to be? They had no language. They were all born deaf, and they didn't know that they were deaf. And what were they doing? One man would stand up, and he would start miming.

He would just start acting out a bullfight. So he'd be the bull, and he'd be the bull, and he'd be. He'd be charging, and then he'd be the matador, and then he'd be somebody in the crowd watching, and then he would add a detail. For example... A hat. And then they'd swap, so then another guy would get up to take over the story.

But they'd start miming. They'd reenact the matador. Describe the hat. But now the second storyteller would add a new detail. Like another person with a pair of glasses or something. So each one would stand up, take the bullfight, the same bullfight to a different point and add a detail. Exactly, exactly.

Oh, my God. In other words, it would take him maybe 45 minutes to say, do you remember the time when we were at the bullfight and this woman did such and such? It was like drawing a picture. Let me ask you a pull-it-all-together question. I was about to think that what a language is is a great connector, but this last story makes me wonder, these are five men really sure. sharing and connecting on details.

So is the difference that language makes just efficiency, or does it affect your heart or your whole way of, I can't tell, I'm not sure anymore? Well, I'll give you Il Defonzo's answer, which when I saw him a couple years later, after this incident, I asked him about his friends, and he said he couldn't talk to them anymore. He wasn't willing to go through that tedious effort of all the miming anymore.

but the interesting thing that he said was he can't even think that way anymore he said he can't think the way he used to think and when I pushed him to ask about what it was like to be languishless the closest he ever came to any kind of an answer was exactly that

I don't know I don't remember I think differently now Susan Schaller is author of the book A Man Without Words Go to radio lab.org for more info and if you go there Or if you're subscribed to our podcast, you'll get this automatically. But there's a beautiful short film directed by two really talented guys, Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante.

That is all about words. Message 7. Hi, this is Anne Senghast, just back from Nicaragua, just in time to read in the credits. Radio Lab is produced by Jad Abhamrad and Pat Walters. Our staff includes Ellen Horn. Thorne Wheeler. Renafarrow. Luloo Miller.

Tim Howard. and Lynn Levy. With help from Sharon Chaddock, Raymond, Cungacar, Nicole Corey, and Sam Rowden. Special thanks to Posi Grunner. Bye-bye. End of message.