I know we weren’t supposed to upload here, but I took all this time to write it out and I know I won’t be able to say all of it in class, and it would be nice to at least have the possibility of it being seen. This is over 1800 words, I didn’t edit this, and I got progressively less sure of what I was thinking by the end, so I’m sure this is awful to read. I hope it has something worth seeing, at least. Anyway, here’s a track from Bobby McFerrin’s “Beyond Words”, a vocal album in which Bobby chooses to never use any words. I figured it fit.

Preface: There was another NPR report from the “NPR Ed” education-related section that I think is relevant to bring up and reference throughout talking about this Radiolab episode. It’s titled “From Mozart to Mr. Rogers: Literacy, Music and The Brain,” and it deals with language development at infancy and how it portends to further language mastery.

In it, the reporters speak to Professor Sharon Raimi, a Virginia Tech child development expert. She argues that not only do babies have a natural “wiring” toward language, but they also are “hardwired to love it.” The variation in tones, along with the sensual pleasure of making noise and looking at people speaking and making gestures “is fun… it’s as good a game as a child can find,” as she puts it. Neurologist Nina Kraus adds that the very act of listening to sounds creates brainwaves that physically mirror the soundwaves of the actual noise; that is, we essentially mirror sounds we hear in a way that is measurable with brain scanning technology.

Thus, the exaggerated cadence of “baby talk” that adults use teaches babies the pitch, rhythm, and timbre of speech, which works with their neurological structures to construct and recognize language, and critically, to separate signal from noise – pre-literate toddlers whose brainwaves show clear recognition of syllables amid overwhelming chatter and noise have a stronger linguistic ability and higher chance for literacy than those who can’t.

Moreover, Kraus says, if a child is not exposed to face-to-face language early and regularly, there is a lack of stimulation in those centers that causes the input-hungry brain to create its own stimulation: “neural noise,” which she equates almost to hearing radio static. It muffles syllables and words and makes them less distinguishable from noise internal and external, which is an immense detriment in their later ability to understand language effectively as teenagers and adults.

Radiolab Part 1 – Susan Schaller and Ildefonso: I think the NPR Ed article could give some context to better understand what is happening here. Ildefonso was capable to recognize that language existed, insofar that he knew there were regular patterns that people used to communicate. But, without any personal linguistic stimulation as a child – perhaps growing up deaf with family who didn’t know how to communicate with him – he may have lived in a world of utter noise. There was little means of distinguishing meaningful information from background, as almost everything was a single sheet of stimuli that clearly overwhelmed him. I say “almost,” because he did have that fundamental recognition of language’s existence, as he could tell when Susan was engaging in repeatable patterns, which ultimately lead to his full recognition of the linguistic world.

Part 2 – Charles Fernyhough and the Rats, Elizabeth Spelke and the Kids: This seems to show that intelligence is sort of like a web that is able to connect and unify multiple individual ideas, with language being the “material” that the web is made out of (as well as the ideas). Because these connections are mediated by language – the example given is that the kids applied prepositions to understand location relative to a colored wall – this gives some justification to the argument mentioned repeatedly in the class that “people with more words lead richer lives.” Not only are there more ideas available to those with large amounts of language, but those ideas can be more densely and meaningfully connected through said language, making understanding clearer and connections more diverse and creative. The distinction between “signal” and “noise” becomes shaded and multifaceted, constructing a more shaded and multifaceted world.

Part 3 – James Shapiro and Shakespeare: What makes this part interesting is that half of it seems to support the implications in Part 2, but the other half seems to suggest a contrary. The first half of Shakespeare constructing words and phrases is of the same vein as Part 2’s language-web of creativity: by having a deep linguistic knowledge, he was able to construct new, meaningful connections between concepts that were still intuitive enough that they could be easily traced by those listening. But connections alone don’t necessarily get easily translated – many can relate to having teachers that are clearly very smart, but can’t convey their ideas coherently to students. Perhaps there’s something to think about in terms of empathy and intelligence – not only knowing how to make connections, but knowing what connections are most easily understood by others. The part that seems contrary is the discussion of “Lucrese’s Rape.” Here, rather than words being dropped onto the world, it seems the world (at least, the internal world) is overwhelming the words; Lucrese’s emotions and desire to clearly express what she means are so powerful and numerous that she is at a loss at how to write them. While Shapiro may be using this to just to explain why Shakespeare created new words and phrases, there is an interesting suggestion that the outside world is not just imperiously divided, defined, and even sensed through language, but that there is a give and take between sensory stimuli and the words we use to separate them.

Part 4 – Jill Bolte Taylor and the Joyful Silence: Ildefonso is what happens when the noise overwhelms the signal. Jill Taylor is perhaps what happens when the very machine that recognizes noise and signal is destroyed. Rather than a defective or ill-equipped linguistic wiring, like Ildefonso’s deafness and lack of words, Jill had no wiring at all. She was unable to even understand the conception of language, let alone have that concept lead to a perceptual imbalance. The sheer joy she felt at having no thoughts between her and raw sensation is curious. Did she feel joy knowing what it was once like to have words and then to have them no longer, given that she was drifting in and out of “La La Land?” Would she have felt the same joy of sunshine on her face if she wasn’t in a safe environment like a hospital? (That is, if she was left lying in the rain in the middle of a forest, would she be so blissful in the moment?) She compared it to being an infant, but she at least recognized she once had language before she lost it, and babies certainly aren’t constantly joyful. Are babies truly joyous present-living, or can this joy only come when one has and then loses language? Does this vindicate Zen Buddhist ideals of “enlightenment” through nullifying logic and being wholly present? I have a friend who is addicted to opioids, and he says that the experiences she had without language were extremely similar to the experiences he has on heroin – an atemporal, nonspatial bliss of near oneness and presence where language is muted. The only difference is that the “inner voice” that Jill describes still exists, but is brought down to near muteness. Perhaps there is an asymptotic relationship between “turning down” both the signal and the noise of language and the point of pure thoughtlessness – one can constantly get nearer to the point, but never actually reach it in that manner.

Part 5 – Ann Senghas and the Deaf Nicaraguans: Why was Ildefonso unable to construct his own system of rudimentary signs in the same way that these children could to communicate with their non-deaf family and friends? Could they have been more engaged by their family growing up even though they still couldn’t understand anyone? The children who watched the cartoon had more psychological words than the older former students, and the show suggests that these words allow the children to be more concerned with emotions and motivations of the character. But why did the children feel the need to make these words in the first place, and why did it not occur to the older generation? Is it simply a matter of practicality – there needs to be words to talk about the material before words can describe the mental? Or could the children have been more exposed to these psychological ideas and thus have a desire to construct language for them? The toy train comic strip test is actually a retelling of the “Sally-Anne test” developed in 1985 to test “theory of mind” in autistic children – that is, to see if the children can recognize that others have their own minds that are separate from theirs. The 35 year olds got this question wrong at a higher rate (87.5%) than actual autistic children when the test was given in 1985 (80%). It is obviously absurd to suggest that those 35 year olds are autistic, but perhaps there is a meaningful connection between lack of language, autism, and the inability to recognize subjectivities relative to one’s own. Remember that Jill without language was unable to separate herself from anything else around her. I don’t have anything I can connect here, but there’s something buzzing…

Part 6 — Susan Schaller and Ildefonso, Redux: It is curious both that Ildefonso describes languagelessness as being a darkness and being evidently so traumatized by it that he refuses to even attempt describing it. The program seems to show three highly different perspectives on being without language: the terror of Ildefonso, the bliss of Jill, and the pragmatism of the Nicaraguan children. The fact that all three react dramatically different to what seem to be the same or similar ideas raises a possible suggestion that the Lucrese poem also hints at: Could it be that, even though language plays an immense role in shaping the world and ourselves, there is some kind of self that exists outside of language that gives an emotional resonance to that world that language creates? That is, language (or lack thereof) builds a logical world and creates a logical self within it, but something else determines the feelings that are interwoven within that world and self.

Final Thoughts: The “richness of life” that comes from language is not only from the amount of words we can use and the density of connections we can make between those words. I would say that an equally important side is that a large vocabulary gives a better context to know what we don’t have words for. The analogy that comes to mind is a jigsaw puzzle with no knowledge of what the final picture will be. At the beginning, there is a complete lack of context for where one should start putting pieces (short, of course, of starting with the corners). There is an immense number of unknown variables with little clear idea of how they relate. But as the puzzle gets filled, the pieces that are placed not only begin to show the picture, but they begin to make logical sense of the other pieces. As a hole gets surrounded, it becomes clear what piece is needed precisely by what shape the hole makes. Similarly, having a high literacy not only makes one’s worldview clearer and more distinct, but it reduces the number of “unknown unknown” variables (the things we have never even heard of), and gives greater context to the “known unknowns” (the things we know that we don’t know). To say that “P is not Q, not X, and not Y” may not tell us exactly what P is, but it certainly gives us a better clue than not knowing P at all.