Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person’s immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew the gum as you are studying; for some reason you can’t merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one’s recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum (on the brain-as-globe it sits under eastern Europe), where attention is controlled.
I collected other manipulations that some people mentioned off-handedly. For instance, oxytocin, the so-called love hormone. Children learn best in environments in which they’re ideally bonded with caregivers, which means that a lot of oxytocin reception is going on. Maybe, someone said, you could sniff oxytocin before a language class to boost memory function.
Also, dopamine. This is a neurotransmitter that signals pleasure in the brain, but it also has important connections to cognitive functions. It’s even been suggested that declining dopamine levels—a symptom of age—are partly responsible for shutting down brain plasticity in language learning. Manipulating these dopamine levels as you learn might allow you to better retain new words.
Manipulating hippocampal activity also makes language learning easier. One way to stimulate the hippocampus is to take amphetamines. In one experiment, use of d-amphetamine and levodopa (a precursor to the production of dopamine, and used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease) accelerated vocabulary learning by 20 percent in healthy subjects. The converse has also been shown: if you suppress hippocampal activity with certain drugs, you can retard associative learning.
Then there are interventions so bold they can only be done on animals. Injections of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or, BDNF), which plays a crucial role in helping to shape long-term memories, may improve the ability of rats to navigate mazes. Because physical exercise increases BDNF secretions, at least in rats, this may help explain why exertion improves memory (though it has also been suggested that the memory boost comes from adrenaline).
While it’s interesting to speculate about potential neuroenhancers for language learning, the conclusions remain elusive. Caterina Breitenstein, the German neuroscientist who tested d-amphetamine and levodopa, said that the substances in her studies produced rather subtle effects. And not all of the subjects responded to the substances. Presumably, users would want pharmaceutical enhancers to work reliably to be worth any potential side effects.
But could you design a hyperpolyglot in vitro? John Schumann, UCLA applied linguist, equivocated.
“I suppose at some time in the future, it might be possible to enhance the chemical milieu in the womb of a mother as the child is developing,” he replied, “and direct a large number of neurons to the left hemisphere language areas.” There was one problem: you might not produce a hyperpolyglot. The brain is a leaky thing, not a precise machine at all, he noted. You couldn’t be sure what you were setting into motion. A bad science fiction plot, for sure.
“If you enhanced aspects of Wernicke’s area, you might produce a good signer, or a guy with particularly acute hearing. Broca’s is a motor area, a pattern-learning area. The guy could turn into somebody who could count cards at a casino.” Then he said something that chilled me. “I’m not sure how this could be enhanced,” he said, “without creating a potential monster.” And we ignore the tissues of causality at our peril.
Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they’re more “open to new experiences” than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that’s bound up in our native language, a “language ego,” which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.
Such permeability was reflected in answers I received through my online survey. Wrote one person (a native English-speaking male who lives in Taiwan and says he speaks twenty languages), “You have to be a good observer and you have to be able to act and mimic the way others talk, not just accent but body language and intonation and pitch. Most language learners feel embarrassed with this ‘acting’ and so are blocked from the start from achieving much. Just start by doing this and you’ll really go far in your language pursuits. Because it’s the adoption of a new identity for yourself.”
He added, “I am the epitome of adaptation. Most people who encounter me cannot guess where I’m from because my whole body and actions adopt the culture that I’m in.” Someone else wrote, “The good language learner has the ability to accept the role of a child when it comes to speaking/writing a new language. Of being naïve, foolish, stumbling, and inarticulate but also curious, open-minded, and full of energy.”
It struck me that the archetypal hyperpolyglot could be a kind of Peter Pan. As long as you’re a neophyte in a given language, you never have to present an adult self in it. You’ll never be judged for not knowing what an adult would do. Maybe, like Peter Pan himself, you’re avoiding reality. And, getting a bit psychoanalytic here, you’re revisiting your infant experiences at the maternal lips and ears, that time when the boundaries between yourself and others was more fluid.
But the neural tribe theory suggests that psychological traits—such as ego boundaries and neuroses—don’t define the hyperpolyglot, given that cognitive abilities and styles play a bigger role in successful outcomes. It’s true that, for some hyperpolyglots, such as Alexander and Ken Hale, delving into language was a response to an emotional trauma. That may be where an identity as a language learner saved them. Yet the question remains: Why did they turn to language? It’s useful, I think, to look at some properties of language in order to see how attractive it could be to people who fit Baron-Cohen’s definition of systemizers.
To the mind of a systemizer, language’s capacity to be ordered is immediately apparent, and lends itself to myriad combinations that can never be fully explored. Some of the order you can impose: you could decide to list all the words you know according to the sounds they start with, the number of syllables in them, when you learned them, how often they’re used, what they mean, or which ones in different languages mean the same thing. You can also tally up words, pages, minutes, hours, idioms, errors, parts of speech: How many nouns do you know? How many verbs? And if you get bored with that, you can alphabetize your dictionaries, grammars, and phrase books, or organize them by language family, genre, or publisher.
You can also observe patterns, attempt to “crack the code” and derive rules, make predictions, and look for exceptions. Learning a language involves technical systems of repeating written or spoken words and sentences. These may be borrowed and adopted (by a language-learning tool, such as Assimil, Pimsleur, or Rosetta Stone) or invented (as in the cases of Lomb Káto and Alexander). They can test the way their brain performs, given its inputs, and how well it links to the tongue and hands. Language is also a natural system: you can watch children acquire it, much as you can reflect on your own acquisition and your inevitable loss. It’s a social system, linked to cultures, nations, and regions.
Not to be underestimated is the way that the informational richness of language arises out of a finite set of basic units. While the average number of consonants in a language is about twenty-two, and the average number of vowels is five or six,* the possible combinations of these are vast. According to language typologists, there are seven basic ways of arranging subjects, verbs, and objects in sentences (the great majority put the subject first),† and there are only six kinds of words for no.‡ (Other ways, if they existed, probably went extinct.)
Let’s say that not only are you a systemizer, but also that you’re shy. The subtleties o
f social interaction challenge and maybe frustrate you. One response is simple: avoid people. The other response is to undertake language in a way that makes it the physics of people, tracking the inputs and outputs of sociability and relationships. If you lack a strong ability to empathize with other people, you might use your feel for language’s systemic qualities as a crutch. As a result, over a lifetime, your explorations make you intimate with languages rather than with the people who speak them. Yet the dominant paradigm of language learning of your age stresses communication, so you spend time communicating. You haven’t abandoned empathizing; you’re simulating an empathizer’s tools.
A few other cognitive abilities accompany your systemizing. One is memory, perhaps a powerful declarative memory and a durable phonological loop. You also have muscular executive function skills. But neither of these really hooks up to your systemizing tendencies. What does, however, is that you’re able to manipulate the plasticity of your brain. For adults, plasticity must be regulated with various “brakes,” such as regulating new cell growth and manipulating the electrical patterns between neurons.
Scientists are now homing in on ways to biochemically provoke critical periods and their “exuberant plasticity.” (Currently, it’s the vision system that’s best studied; experts presume the same mechanisms also apply to language.) These manipulations are biochemical, and can come from outside or inside the body. Those from the body itself we can find ways to stimulate. As Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester, wrote in a 2010 article, “It would be ideal to endogenously recapitulate brain states conducive to plasticity in a noninvasive but targeted manner.” In other words, it would be good if you could trigger mental states that are beneficial to learning without doing anything too drastic to the body. Which might produce a monster.
One such noninvasive method—immersive activities—can trigger better learning. In the visual realm, this is done through video games, especially action video games. At a biochemical level, such intense activity over long periods of time involves neurotransmitters, especially the dopamine that signals that a certain behavior is enjoyable. “Gaming is also associated with ‘flow,’ or the sense that one is able to meet the challenges of one’s environment with appropriate skills,” Bavelier wrote. This flow triggers biochemical factors that encourage plasticity. This notion of flow is “characterized by a deep sense of enjoyment which goes beyond satisfying a need, and rather occurs when a person achieves something unexpected that has a sense of novelty.” The promise of this line of inquiry, says Bavelier, is that they are no longer isolating external or internal factors, but attempting to see how the two sets interact.
In the realm of language, no one knows what optimal organization of cells in the brain should give one the greatest language learning capacity. But we can recognize that hyperpolyglots undoubtedly have an ability to flow with language material. Otherwise, they wouldn’t persist in repetitious activities that bore most other people.
The two questions I’m most often asked about hyperpolyglots are why and how they pursue languages the way they do. I held off answering both questions for some time, worried that I didn’t know enough or that I’d get swamped in biographical particulars and lose a chance at the big picture. I imagined the Italian librarian Franco Pasti punching me in the shoulder, saying, “It was a case study. A case study.”
I was right to be apprehensive, because humans seem to be hardwired to prefer reductive explanations. There is no core to the hyperpolyglot phenomenon. By investigating and explaining the origins of hyperpolyglottism, I discovered that the brain, culture, and individual biography interact with each other to produce someone like Mezzofanti or Graham Cansdale. A person’s type of personality doesn’t predict whether or not they’ll be good at learning languages (though, contrary to the conventional wisdom, introverts are consistently more successful than extroverts).
Cultural background does play a role by incubating cognitive assets and giving talents resources on which to grow. Historical and economic forces also make up an important part of the story, not only by determining which languages one learns and what one does with them, but by calling forth and channeling the neurological traits that serve learning, speaking, and using a lot of languages. Such forces also shape who happens to have access to what opportunities for school, travel, and even literacy. Recall how European wars provided Mezzofanti with sick soldiers in polyglot hospitals, and how European colonialism gave young Cameroonian men the need to learn more languages.
Clearly, the brain is an important part of the story, and hyperpolyglots seem to have unusual neurological origins. Maybe this looks like a nostalgic return to the era when people believed in elite brains, but it’s not. The new neuroscience is locating the neural signatures of high performance, figuring out how to manipulate the plasticity of specific brain systems, and trying to understand the genetic factors that impact cognitive abilities as well as disabilities.
I’m describing a neural tribe that existed before but has been made more visible by cultural trends. The polyglot ambition has intensified at the same time that technology has enabled its fulfillment. I’ve tried to describe how foreign-language learning has taken different forms throughout history—and how, in some cultures, people’s brains were occupied with very different sorts of cognitive feats. I’ve also tried to account for the way certain abilities have been recognized as talents or impairments depending on their context. And I’ve tried to explain why people in multilingual societies tend to learn far fewer languages than exist in their surroundings.
Hyperpolyglots are made when the linguistic world order gets into certain brains and when certain brains are projected into any given linguistic world order. Hyperpolyglots can’t help but be linguistic outsiders, because they’re multilinguals who learn more languages than they need to participate in their immediate community but far fewer than they need to participate in an imagined global community. To the degree that they’re already educated elites, they’re people for whom the exercise of neuroplasticity is elective, not required. English is spoken so commonly throughout the world that if one is already a mother-tongue English speaker, pursuing other languages is something of a luxury, in global terms.
When you look at brain plasticity in the context of the global economy, the questions “Why do they do it?” and “How do they do it?” take on a deeper meaning.
Why do they do it? In order to improve their neuroplasticity.
How do they do it? By improving their neuroplasticity.
They’re not ashamed that they’ll never sound like native speakers. Rather, they fear being only native speakers. They don’t care that there’s no polyglot community—being outside of a speech community is exactly the point.
What about the rest of us? We resign ourselves to stiff brains. We remain happy as linguistic insiders, staying safely where we feel we belong.
Part 5
ARRIVAL:
The Hyperpolyglot of Flanders
Chapter 18
As far as I can tell, the neural tribe of hyperpolyglots has been gathered only twice, both times in Belgium. Through a bit of luck, I found the name of the man who had brought them together.
His name was Eugeen Hermans, and I met him in the town square of Leuven, a university town near Brussels, where we sat outside at a café. Bald and handsomely craggy, he was born in 1943 and is retired now, with fond memories of his career as the principal of a language school in Hasselt, where Flemish businessmen came to find more outlets for their goods and housewives came to broaden their minds. In 1986, he told me, he attended a party with a US consul fluent in seven languages. He can’t be the only man in the world apart from the Belgians and perhaps the Norwegians and the Dutch who speaks a lot of foreign languages, Hermans thought. Why don’t I try to discover if there are other people like him? Let’s start with Flanders and see.
After finding a bank to cosponsor the contest, Hermans held a press conference to call for con
testants who had oral skills in at least seven languages. He set some thorough, if not ingenious, rules: none could be dialects; all had to be ones that a government would vouch for. No dead languages allowed. None could be artificial languages (Esperanto was out). Even with these restrictions, Hermans had to telephone-screen all the people who wanted to participate in order to pare down the entries to twenty-six contestants who were to be tested in a pool of forty-seven languages. The judges could award up to twenty points in each language, and could also dock points for ignorance. A Dutch speaker might try to fake his way through Afrikaans, a related dialect (though a national language, so it qualified), but if he couldn’t speak it to the judge’s satisfaction, he lost points. Overall, the point scheme gave several routes to a win. One could accrue many points in relatively few languages. Or one could accrue fewer points per language over a larger number of them.
Hermans knew he’d achieved something special, bringing members of the tribe together in this way. “You had people meeting each other who were in their environment seen as a kind of rarity, who suddenly found themselves with kindred spirits, with people who were more or less alike, interested in the same thing, having the same skills,” he said. “They all had the greatest respect for each other.”
I asked him if he knew what sort of person the winner might be.
He said he had seen so many students at his school who spoke five, six languages, and he assumed the winner would be one of them. He was surprised, he said, by the person who won.
Among the polyglots, myth is the uncanny double of science. To help me navigate their qualities, I turned, every once in a while, to a book by a French zoologist named Bernard Heuvelmans, On the Track of Unknown Animals, where he argued that undiscovered big mammals could still be discovered—if zoologists were willing to listen to folktales.
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