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Babel No More

Page 18

by Michael Erard


  One example of such a brain is Einstein’s. Though its overall mass (at 1,230 grams) was average, its inferior parietal lobe was slightly larger than others’ brains, and it was also more symmetrical from side to side. This “exuberant expansion” would have “allowed him to think and reason and imagine in areas of mathematics and imagery,” Schumann said. Fortunately, he pointed out, Einstein was born at a time when his theories were understandable—you can’t separate the genius from his context.

  So, as a fetus, the person who would become a hyperpolyglot could land extra neural equipment in parts of the brain that are responsible for learning words, for being sensitive to grammatical structures, or for parsing and mimicking speech sounds. Maybe they would get more equipment in one of the three areas. Or maybe they would get more equipment in all three.

  That’s what the brain of Emil Krebs looked like.

  Chapter 12

  Sitting in a chic hotel in Düsseldorf, Germany, I heard a knock on my door. My guide had arrived: a woman in her late fifties with round cheeks, silver spiked hair, and fashionably chunky glasses. Loraine Obler is an American neurolinguist at the City University of New York who was spending part of a summer teaching in Potsdam. She had told me about a team of German neuroscientists in Düsseldorf who had used new methods to analyze Krebs’s brain. What they found sparked outpourings of linguistic pride in Germans. If you wanted to know more about the brains of exceptional language learners, as Loraine and I did, it was galvanizing work that promised many answers. We were off to meet the neuroscientists and hear more about their work.

  Loraine’s journey toward talented language learners began in college, when she was in Israel studying Hebrew. Good at French in high school but not at Latin, she found Hebrew a breeze—she “inhaled” it—all the while watching a classmate, a smart Mormon kid, who just couldn’t get Hebrew to stick. This disparity stayed with her. In graduate school, she studied Arabic and went into linguistics. She wrote a dissertation on Arabic, mainly in Israel, where she also began to study people with more than one language who had lost the ability to find words or produce coherent sentences. Damaged brains, especially those with more than one language, became her focus. She cowrote an influential book, The Bilingual Brain: Neuropsychological and Neurolinguistic Aspects of Bilingualism (1978), one of the earliest attempts to explain how it all works, and coedited The Exceptional Brain: Neuropsychology of Talent and Special Abilities (1988), a collection exploring the “neurological substrate” of talent and unusual abilities—what talented brains are like, where they come from, the personalities of people who achieve, and the social context in which they develop.

  In her introduction to The Exceptional Brain, she explained that exceptional outcomes come from a storm of tiny, interlocked interactions between a neurological bent, a cultural frame, nurturing relationships, and pure happenstance. Some of the loops we understand. Some we haven’t found yet but might be able to understand when we do. Many more are untraceable, especially by currently available methods and modes of thinking. This was one reason why I wanted her as my guide in Düsseldorf.

  The other reason was that she’d done important early work on language talent. She’d begun by studying hyperlexia, a cognitive disorder in which children who are otherwise intellectually impaired are able to read fluidly at a very early age. Though they don’t comprehend what they read, they have powerful word recognition capabilities. (It had been suggested that Christopher was hyperlexic.) This phenomenon got her thinking: Why are some people better readers or language learners than others? Recalling her Mormon classmate, she got a colleague to post flyers around town: do you or does someone you know learn languages very easily?

  That’s how they found C.J. He was a Harvard graduate student, white, twenty-nine years old, raised in a monolingual English-speaking family in the States. In high school he encountered French first. Success there led him to German. He studied Latin and Spanish for a semester apiece. A college French major, he went into the Peace Corps in Morocco, where he learned Moroccan Arabic more easily than his peers, then spent time in Spain and Italy and picked up their languages. He reported that native speakers of his five languages had found him easy to understand, even native-like. (The researchers took him at his word and didn’t assess his language proficiencies.)

  Crucially, Loraine and her colleagues also looked at how C.J. scored on a battery of IQ and cognitive tests. Hyperpolyglots aren’t necessarily exceptionally smart; C.J. turned out to have a fairly average IQ of only 105. (In this he resembled Christopher, whose performance IQ was lower than his verbal IQ, which itself wasn’t stellar.) So high verbal IQ also isn’t a prerequisite for language talent. As a child, C.J. had been slow to read, and his grades indicated mediocre high school and college performance. However, on most parts of the Modern Language Aptitude Test, a test developed in the 1950s to help the US Army find people who can learn foreign languages, C.J. scored extremely high.* He also excelled on any test that required him to spot complex patterns in strings of numbers, letters, or words. His verbal memory was very good: like Christopher, he had a sponge-like memory for prose and lists of words.

  Anecdotally, musical ability and foreign-language ability are often tied together: languages and music both are formal systems involving sequences of discrete units, and an individual must be disciplined to perform well. It’s true that speech sounds and music share areas of the brain, and that there’s also a basic similarity in visual and auditory pattern recognition. But when C.J. took the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability (developed by Carl Seashore in 1919), his scores on a memory test for melody and for sequences of rhythm and pitch were average. In his case, at least, the anecdotal connection didn’t hold.

  Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person’s sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don’t need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is the product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert—even an adult. In fact (the story goes), language learners run the gamut, and the successful ones represent the very, very successful end of this spectrum. Their native languages may be as jealous as anyone else’s, but somehow these people aren’t held back from hearing and producing new sounds, words, and grammatical patterns. Believing that language learning isn’t easy and takes work, they commit themselves to using their time efficiently.

  The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can’t explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation. C.J. came to play an important role in this view, because Loraine had measured in him the cognitive features that support quick, easy foreign-language learning by adults. Presumably these features are more genetically determined than others; though trainable, they seem to be improvable only within certain margins. In time, C.J. would appear as a case study in other people’s work, including linguist Peter Skehan’s at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Skehan suggested that what’s so special about C.J. “seems to be the capacity to deal with large quantities of material to be memorized quickly and easily.”

  Both Christopher and C.J. have talents that aren’t centrally about language at all, Skehan argued. Rather, they possess cognitive abilities that happen to be very well suited for learning languages. That is, they can recognize patterns and remember learned material. These skills are suited for languages, which are “relatively simple codes which can be learned and operated quickly, and which then can be the basis for the retention of material.” When Skehan wondered “whether there can be an exceptional talent for learning languages, qualitatively different from high [linguistic] aptitude,” his answer was a resolute yes.

  Both types of language learners would share a couple of traits. They “would have a high range of lexicalized exemplars, considerable redundancy in their memory systems, and multiple representations of lexical elements. . . . It is assumed t
hat such learners would not value form highly,” he wrote. To translate: they know a lot of words, have many different words for the same meanings, and do not care too much about avoiding errors. People like this have to be biologically different, Skehan suggested. “Exceptionally successful foreign language learners consistently seem to be characterized by the possession of unusual memories, particularly for the retention of verbal material,” he wrote. “Such exceptional learners do not seem to have unusual abilities with respect to input or central processing.” In other words, they learn languages in virtually the same way everyone else does; they just have better memory retention and retrieval.

  What does better retention mean? The average person, over a lifetime, will find it easier to learn new facts than to learn new motor or cognitive skills. In the same way, the average adult language learner will have an easier time picking up new words than picking up grammatical rules. And we know, at least in the early stages of foreign language learning, average adults lean quite heavily on “declarative memory.” This is the part of the memory system that remembers facts and words. It remains fairly robust as one ages, though the plasticity of procedural memory, where motor and cognitive skills as well as grammatical rules are stored, becomes less assured. So “better retention” may mean that hyperpolyglots can cement declarative memories in their brains more quickly. Or that their procedural memories remain plastic longer than most. Or maybe they just have declarative memories with a lot of capacity. The degree to which Christopher, the polyglot savant, has superior memory retention suggests that he’s less like an average adult language learner than he might at first seem.

  For her part, Loraine thought something more might be going on.

  C.J. forgot images and numbers as fast as anyone else did. Why should someone have a good memory for sounds and words but not for other things? In music, he was average; tests of visuospatial ability stumped him; he said he couldn’t read maps or figure out new routes. This intrigued her, since it’s often thought that exceptional verbal abilities are associated with limited visuospatial abilities, or vice versa.

  To give these overlaps some order, she looked to a complex theory known as the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis, which links co-occurrences among dyslexia, gender, handedness, and other traits. As examples, there’s a predominance of left-handers among talented visual artists, and males are overwhelmingly more often dyslexic and autistic. In the 1980s, neurologists Norman Geschwind and Albert Galaburda looked to brain development for an answer. They observed that the left hemispheres of the brains of fetal rats developed more slowly if testosterone spiked at certain developmental moments. The cells destined for the left hemisphere migrated to the right hemisphere, which acquired more of the raw materials for building dense brain connections.

  If the same thing happened in humans, Geschwind and Galaburda suggested, that asymmetry could create clusters of talents and deficits. Their theory might explain why children with left-hemisphere-related disabilities (such as dyslexia or stuttering) tended to have higher-than-normal abilities in right-hemisphere abilities, such as putting together puzzles. And it may explain why left-handedness (or ambidexterity), homosexuality, autoimmune disorders (such as asthma or allergies), learning disorders, and talents in music, art, and mathematics all seem to happen together, if not in the same individuals, then in families.

  C.J. fit the profile. He was an identical twin, though his brother had no apparent special abilities; neither was strongly right-handed (C.J. was left-handed and his brother was ambidextrous); C.J. had hives and allergies; he was homosexual; and he got lost easily.

  Doesn’t it disprove the theory that C.J.’s brother had no language abilities and wasn’t gay? No, said Loraine. “Just because you have a lot of left-handers with no talents, that doesn’t hurt the explanation, because these cluster in families,” she said.

  You’re not looking for a specific gene for deficits or talents; you’re looking for genes that affect how hormones work. According to Geschwind and Galaburda’s theory, fetal genes drive the production of testosterone and determine vulnerability to hormonal spikes. Neither genes nor hormones determine each other or any particular outcome. Rather, they take a zigzag course: the right inputs at the right moment under the right conditions might produce a certain brain asymmetry that would lead to behaviors that, culturally speaking, would be interpreted as talents or deficits. Whether the hyperpolyglot learned languages very quickly, could use a lot of them, or both, his or her talent was the result of intersecting lines of circumstances.

  As any good expedition begins with a meal, Loraine and I considered hyperpolyglots over sushi. Tomorrow we’d be visiting the brain institute, and we had much to discuss.

  Even if one doesn’t agree that hormonal disarray creates a cluster of traits, the clustering is still of interest. Loraine wanted to know if any of the people I’d met manifest attributes of the Geschwind-Galaburda cluster. I told her that most of the hyperpolyglots seemed to be men, and a number were gay and left-handed. Alexander couldn’t drive. He’d taught himself to write with his left hand, and his father was an identical twin. I also told her about a translator I’d met at the European Commission in Brussels, forty-three-year-old Graham Cansdale, British by birth, who came from a “resolutely monolingual family” (as he put it), yet had studied, or dabbled with, a total of twenty-two languages (including Guarani, the indigenous language of Paraguay, and Vietnamese, which stumped him); he uses fourteen of them professionally (French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Danish, Greek, Czech, Slovak, Arabic, Turkish, Finnish). When I met him he was studying Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish in his spare time.

  “People think it must be lots of hard work,” he told me. “In my case I couldn’t agree. I don’t spend a vast amount of time doing this. It comes so easily. If it is hard work, it doesn’t feel like hard work. Actually, I just remember it because I do. It just goes in. I’m not forcing things in my head.”

  Graham was unable to learn how to drive and had an excellent memory for language-related things but not for, say, history facts. And he was gay, married to a Slovakian man. He wasn’t a word accumulator but a system builder; he was content with the geekish thrill of being able to decipher the verbs on the small print of a menu or to read the street signs that he encountered on his extensive global travels.

  This was an anecdotal sample, but the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis helps make sense of it. As a theory of both biology and society, one that accounts for individuals as well as families, Geschwind-Galaburda explains a lot, and has the virtue of not claiming that people with traits A and B are bound to become a Y. It doesn’t indulge a crude determinism but instead tries to map a set of possible influences. Another virtue is that it treats handedness, immune disease, talent, and even sexuality as falling along a spectrum.

  Yet its assets—and, indeed, its power—also make it difficult to establish. To dig into it, you’d have to know genetics, cognitive science, epidemiology, and endocrinology, all in great detail. You’d also have to gather a big sample, many families, and ask them the right questions. Attempts to confirm some of the correlations have had mixed success. One study, for instance, found no connection between left-handedness and higher spatial or mathematical abilities, though researchers did find that left-handers often reported having speech problems. Various studies have shown that people with autism have higher rates of non-right-handedness. Yet another study found, as the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis would predict, that there are more males than females who perform both very high and very low on mental rotation tasks, though, outside of Loraine’s work with C.J., no one had ever linked verbal abilities in a foreign language with any of the Geschwind-Galaburda traits.

  We discussed how I might capture similar information about clusters of traits from as many people as possible, and I eventually designed an online survey that collected information from nearly four hundred people from around the world from January 2009 to January 2010. People who
claimed to know six or more languages were directed to the survey via English-language linguistics blogs and language learning websites like http://how-to-learn-any-language.com. There they gave their consent to answering questions about their background, their language learning, and their cognitive styles.*

  The results, which were analyzed by an academic statistician familiar with this type of data, give support to some parts of the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis. For instance, people who reported knowing six or more languages and who said that learning foreign languages was easier for them were more likely to report homosexual behaviors, preferences, and/or orientations than would be predicted. This finding was statistically significant.

  This same group also was more likely either to have immune diseases themselves or to have family members who did. However, neither of the other traits (handedness and twinning) had any meaningful relationship with either number of languages or ease of learning.† Despite an anecdotal connection between homosexuality and verbal abilities, no connection between language talent and homosexuality had ever been shown in research before. Again, this isn’t saying that people who speak a lot of languages or learn them easily are necessarily gay; it’s that there are more gays—and people with immune diseases, for that matter—among talented language learners than you’d otherwise predict. Testing this with numbers allows us to move beyond anecdotes and to suggest why these patterns exist.

 

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