Words

Summary

Radiolab – “Words” (August 9, 2010)

Podcast: Radiolab by WNYC Studios
Hosts: Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich
Main Guests: Susan Schaller, Charles Fernyhough, Elizabeth Spelke, Anne Senghas, James Shapiro, Jill Bolte Taylor

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Overview

The episode “Words” explores the profound impact of language on thought, selfhood, and human experience. Through a tapestry of stories—personal, scientific, and linguistic—the show dissects how words shape our minds, our sense of self, how we relate to others, and even the very texture of reality itself. From the moving account of a man discovering language in adulthood, to the inventive combinatorics of Shakespeare, to the scientific puzzles of cognition without words, the episode asks: What do words do for us? Can we think, remember, or even exist as selves without them?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Story of Ildefonso: Life Before (and After) Words

(00:25–09:12, 52:19–56:27)

• Susan Schaller recounts meeting Ildefonso, a 27-year-old man who had been deaf from birth, but never learned a spoken or sign language.
• At first, Ildefonso simply imitates whatever is signed to him, a phenomenon Schaller calls "visual echolalia."
• Schaller realizes: “This man doesn’t have language.” (04:18)
• The breakthrough: after weeks of trying, Ildefonso suddenly grasps that everything has a name. This moment is life-changing:
  • “He slaps his hands on the table: ‘Oh, everything has a name!’ ... And then he started crying. ...It changes our thinking, it changes our ideas of...something about the symbol ‘table’ that makes the table look different.” (07:55–08:55)
• Schaller describes his “falling in love” with words, meticulously compiling new ones each day.
• Years later, Ildefonso describes his pre-language life as a “dark time” and admits he cannot even remember or replicate how he once thought:
  • “He said he can’t even think the way he used to think. … ‘I think differently now.’” (55:33–56:27)
• Meeting other languageless deaf adults, Schaller observes their intricate, mimetic communication—slower, more detailed, but lacking the efficiency and abstraction of language.

2. Words as Bridges: Linking Separate Islands in the Mind

(10:45–21:54)

• Jad Abumrad and Charles Fernyhough introduce a cognitive psychology experiment:
  • Rats, and surprisingly, young children, cannot connect “left of” (spatial) with “the blue wall” (color) in a room navigation task. (13:14–15:46)
  • Around age six, once children begin using compound spatial phrases (“left of the blue wall”), they succeed, suggesting language connects previously isolated mental domains.
  • Elizabeth Spelke: “What that phrase does is link these concepts together.” (16:36)
  • Without language (“inner speech” silenced by a shadowing task), adults regress to rat-like error patterns.
• Charles Fernyhough: “I don’t think very young children do think… not in the way I want to call thinking… it’s a stream of inner speech.” (20:13–20:56)
• Elizabeth Spelke argues thought can also be non-verbal—music, for example—but language dramatically expands the kinds of thoughts possible (“combinatorial system”).

3. Shakespeare and the Infinity of Combinatorial Language

(22:22–27:46)

• James Shapiro describes Shakespeare as a “chemist” of words, inventing new terms by smashing language elements together:
  • Words like “unreal,” “uncomfortable,” “eyeball,” and countless idioms (“truth will out,” “crack of doom,” “dead as a doornail”) are his inventions.
  • “He’s taking words that ordinarily are not stuck together…to achieve a kind of atomic power.” (23:31–24:45)
• The combinatorial power of language opens up infinite ways to express and conceptualize reality.

4. Life Without Words: Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Silence

(29:39–39:11)

• Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, recounts her experience suffering a left-hemisphere stroke:
  • The “mute button” in her brain goes off—she loses all language, memories, and sense of self-story.
  • In the absence of words: “I had found a peace inside myself that I had not known before. ...I had pure silence inside my mind.” (33:02–33:20)
  • She experiences the world only in the present, sensually and directly, “just experiencing the sun and the shining.”
  • She loses boundaries between her self and the world: “I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world.” (34:29)
  • Recovery brings words back, but also the “brain chatter” that marks our individual existence (“I am an individual... separate from you,” 34:46–35:06).
  • Taylor argues that language constructs the self: “All a person is... is a story... that language was gone. I got to essentially become an infant again.” (35:38–38:07)

5. Witnessing Language Being Born: Nicaraguan Sign Language

(40:08–51:52)

• Anne Senghas describes the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language in the late 1970s:
  • Deaf children with only rudimentary home signs come together for the first time at a new school and spontaneously create a new, shared language over several years.
  • Generational comparison reveals an unexpected finding: children exposed earlier to richer sign language develop greater abilities to think about thoughts—Theory of Mind.
    • Older signers, with fewer mental-state words, struggle with tasks requiring reasoning about others’ beliefs; younger signers with richer vocabulary succeed easily.
    • “The more of these ‘think’ words you’ve got, the more you can think.” (49:03–49:26)
  • When the older signers learn more “mental verbs” from the younger generation, their ability to reason about minds improves—vocabulary enables cognitive insight. (50:30–51:28)

6. The Limits and Costs of Language

(38:11–39:11, 55:33–56:27)

• Jill Bolte Taylor notes the tension: words are necessary for communication and selfhood—but sometimes, wordless “sense experience” brings a different kind of richness.
  • Robert Krulwich: “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.”
  • Jill Bolte Taylor: “If I had to choose… that would be a really, really, really tough decision.” (38:32–39:11)
• Susan Schaller: After acquiring language, Ildefonso can no longer communicate or even think in the mimetic way he did before. The gain is immense, but something ineffable may be lost.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Naming Insight:
  • “Oh, everything has a name!” – Ildefonso (07:55)
• On Language Changing Perception:
  • “There’s something about the symbol ‘table’ that makes the table look different.” – Susan Schaller (08:55)
• On Inner Speech & Thinking:
  • “If you reflect on your own experience…most 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.” – Charles Fernyhough (20:56)
• On Language as a Combinatorial System:
  • “Language also seems to me to serve as a mechanism of communication between different systems within a single mind.” – Elizabeth Spelke (17:46)
• On Losing (and Re-gaining) Self:
  • “All a person is…all that is in the end, is a story. A story you tell yourself.” – Paul Broks (35:31)
• On Language’s Price:
  • “He said he can’t even think the way he used to think…‘I think differently now.’” – Ildefonso via Susan Schaller (56:27)
• On the Power (and Limit) of Words:
  • “There are certain words... 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.” – Jad Abumrad (49:50)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Susan Schaller’s first encounter with sign language (00:31–02:12)
• Discovery: Ildefonso has no language (03:39–04:18)
• Ildefonso’s realization: ‘Everything has a name’ (07:52–08:55)
• Language and spatial cognition experiments (10:46–16:39)
• Elizabeth Spelke: language links “islands” in the brain (17:46)
• Shadowing task—the silencing of inner speech (18:47–19:51)
• Jill Bolte Taylor’s “wordless” stroke experience (29:39–35:06)
• Birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language (40:08–44:43)
• Language’s impact on Theory of Mind (44:43–51:28)
• Ildefonso’s changed cognition after language (55:33–56:27)

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Conclusion

Radiolab’s "Words" is a captivating and multi-faceted exploration of language’s power. It demonstrates, through story and science, that words don’t merely label our world—they give shape to thought, emotion, and selfhood itself. Language can be a bridge between minds and between domains within one mind, enabling new concepts and understandings. Yet, as the episode artfully notes, there is more to human experience than words; in silence or in “pre-verbal” mindspaces, a different kind of connection to reality persists.

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For more: Visit radiolab.org or check out the extra film created by Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante about words.
Recommended reading: Susan Schaller’s A Man Without Words, Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight.

Transcript

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh, wait, you're listening.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab Radio Lab from wny.

[Susan Schaller]

See?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Anne Senghas]

And npr.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay, let us begin.

[Susan Schaller]

Hello. Hello.

[Robert Krulwich]

With an unusual encounter which comes from this lady here.

[Susan Schaller]

I'm Susan Schaller. And where do you want me to start?

[Robert Krulwich]

Her story starts. Well, actually, it starts kind of abruptly.

[Susan Schaller]

I was indeed riding a bicycle to high school, and bam. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

School, which sucked for her.

[Susan Schaller]

At 17, I was very much a nerd and I was bored out of my mind.

[Robert Krulwich]

So imagine Susan sitting there in the hospital, who one day, one of her.

[Susan Schaller]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second. Why would you go? If your brain was working slowly, why wouldn't you go swimming?

[Susan Schaller]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so one day she was at.

[Robert Krulwich]

This college, just kind of wandering down a random hallway.

[Susan Schaller]

And I opened the first door on the left. That was the accident that changed my whole life. Just picking that door.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Susan Schaller]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

This class was actually one of the first classes to teach sign at a regular hearing university ever.

[Susan Schaller]

I had also walked into history, but didn't know it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Fast forward five years. Susan now is fluent in sign. She moves to Los Angeles. It's the late 1970s, and I was.

[Susan Schaller]

Snatched and put into interpreter training programs because at that time there were very, very few interpret. And I found myself in a classroom.

[Robert Krulwich]

In a community college in something called.

[Susan Schaller]

A reading skills class.

[Robert Krulwich]

So she walks into the class, sees kids all over the classroom making big excited gestures, one to the other.

[Susan Schaller]

And at the door, I saw this man holding himself kind of off by himself, making his own straight jacket.

[Robert Krulwich]

She went over to the instructor and she pointed at the guy and she said, who's that guy over there? And the 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

What did this guy look like?

[Susan Schaller]

He was a beautiful. Well, now I know. I don't know if I would have had that in my head at the time, but beautiful looking, Mayan, high cheekbones and black hair, black eyes.

[Robert Krulwich]

And something about his eyes, he was, caught her attention.

[Susan Schaller]

He was studying mouths. And I walked up to him and said, hello, my name is Susan.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Susan Schaller]

Hello, my name is Susan.

[Robert Krulwich]

Susan, like, shakes her head, says, no, no, I'm Susan.

[Jad Abumrad]

And he responds, no, no, I'm Susan.

[Robert Krulwich]

Everything you said, he tried to say.

[Susan Schaller]

Exactly. I call it visual echolalia. And I remember thinking, why is he doing this?

[Jad Abumrad]

I mean, Susan, did he look like he had some kind of disability or can you.

[Susan Schaller]

He was, 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?

[Robert Krulwich]

He was just missing something.

[Susan Schaller]

To copy me meant that he didn't really know what I was doing.

[Robert Krulwich]

And that's when it occurred to her.

[Susan Schaller]

This man doesn't have language.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, how old was this guy?

[Susan Schaller]

He was 27 years old.

[Jad Abumrad]

And in all that time, no one had taught him sign language or anything.

[Susan Schaller]

Well, he didn't know he was deaf. He was born deaf. He didn't know there was sound.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Susan Schaller]

27 years, no idea that there was sound. He could see the mouth moving, could see people responding. He thought we figured all this stuff out visually, and he thought I must be stupid.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so here's the question for our owl. This is Radiolab. I'm Chad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

Words. What do words do for us?

[Robert Krulwich]

Are they necessary?

[Jad Abumrad]

Can you live without them?

[Robert Krulwich]

Can you think without them?

[Jad Abumrad]

Can you dream without them? Can you.

[Robert Krulwich]

Not enough.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can you swim without them?

[Susan Schaller]

No, that's not.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Ildefonso.

[Robert Krulwich]

There they are, sitting in the classroom. She's right there with him, of course.

[Susan Schaller]

She'S wondering, what have you been doing for 27 years?

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Susan Schaller]

But the sign for book looks like opening up a book. So he thought I was ordering him to open a book.

[Robert Krulwich]

So he grabs the book and he.

[Susan Schaller]

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, I couldn't have a conversation with him. And it was the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait a second. How long did this go on for?

[Susan Schaller]

Well, weeks. It was weeks. Oftentimes when we said goodbye or just left, 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

But after a couple of weeks of.

[Susan Schaller]

Him constantly miming, copying 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And then she says she would hold up to this empty chair a picture of a cat.

[Susan Schaller]

And I was 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 signed the sign for cat.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then she would hop to the other seat, the invisible student's seat, pretend to get it.

[Susan Schaller]

Oh, oh, I know, it's my facial expression. Oh, I get it.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you're playing all the parts. You're both the teacher and the invisible student.

[Susan Schaller]

That's right, that's right. Doing all these crazy things. And he just watched me.

[Jad Abumrad]

He stopped copying her, which was good.

[Susan Schaller]

But I do this over and over and over for days and days and days.

[Robert Krulwich]

And she says he just didn't get it.

[Susan Schaller]

He looked bored a lot of times.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Susan Schaller]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

His eyes grew wider, she says, and then wider.

[Susan Schaller]

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 Dora. 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 of it is no longer the thing a table that we eat on. But 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.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Paper.

[Susan Schaller]

Eagle.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Clock.

[Jad Abumrad]

Green.

[Susan Schaller]

I kept copying words for him.

[Jad Abumrad]

Cats. Alligator.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Cat.

[Susan Schaller]

Cardinal. Gave him the sign for door.

[Jad Abumrad]

Door.

[Susan Schaller]

Then I would door write D O O R. Serpent.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

See that?

[Anne Senghas]

Strawberries.

[Susan Schaller]

Folded this paper. Paper as if it was treasure. Treasure. And he would pull it out every day. And he would.

[Jad Abumrad]

Lion.

[Susan Schaller]

Carefully unfold it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Tiger.

[Susan Schaller]

And he would add to it orange juice.

[Jad Abumrad]

Apple.

[Susan Schaller]

Blue jay.

[Jad Abumrad]

Thinking.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Leaf.

[Jad Abumrad]

Horse, leaf. Idea.

[Susan Schaller]

Add to it lamb, Loo.

[Jad Abumrad]

Table.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Bird. Wall.

[Jad Abumrad]

Dove.

[Susan Schaller]

Name. Add to it Pig.

[Jad Abumrad]

Left, front, right. Cows.

[Susan Schaller]

Left of the blue octopus.

[Jad Abumrad]

Symbol. Treasure.

[James Shapiro]

Eggs.

[Jad Abumrad]

Little potter.

[Susan Schaller]

What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols? Symbols.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Be saying something deeper though. That like when you get things, the word for table. That suddenly the table, like this table right here looks different. Like it 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.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Good. Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

So I want to tell you about this experiment.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Fantastic.

[Jad Abumrad]

That I learned about from a fellow I talked to sometimes. Charles.

[Charles Fernyhough]

I'm Charles Fernyhough. I'm a psychologist at Durham University in the uk.

[Robert Krulwich]

Ferny Ho.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

I never want to be with you in the library.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Charles Fernyhough]

You're put into this room which is colored completely white. The walls are white, the ceiling's white. The floors.

[Robert Krulwich]

So it's all white.

[Jad Abumrad]

All white.

[Charles Fernyhough]

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, are we in.

[Jad Abumrad]

A rectangle is what you're describing?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah. It's a rectangular room.

[Jad Abumrad]

Are you with me so far?

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm with you so far.

[Jad Abumrad]

Okay, just to give you a sense of the baseline conditions here, imagine you are a rat in this room. Okay.

[Charles Fernyhough]

And somebody comes along and hides an object in one corner of the room.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[Charles Fernyhough]

It can be anything. I mean, for rats, you'd use food.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like a biscuit or something. Yeah, they hide a biscuit in one of the four corners.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

In one corner, you see it.

[Robert Krulwich]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

But before you can get to it, they pick you up by your tail, spin you around a bunch of times.

[Charles Fernyhough]

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 and find the biscuit.

[Jad Abumrad]

So if you do this with a rat, what will happen is it'll say, all right, let me go find the biscuit.

[Charles Fernyhough]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Direction because it's a rectangle.

[Charles Fernyhough]

So they get it right about 50% of the time.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because corners of rectangles are. Two of them are identical.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, so should we get on with this? Because I'm well aware of rectangles.

[Jad Abumrad]

I just needed to get that out of the way because the cool part is coming up.

[Robert Krulwich]

I hope so.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, or rather three white walls.

[Robert Krulwich]

One of them is blue.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, make it to the left.

[Jad Abumrad]

You now have the blue wall as a navigational clue.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yes, that makes sense. You know, we would all be able to do that. That's not gonna be difficult for us.

[Robert Krulwich]

All right, we got to the good part yet?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Yeah, it's coming.

[Jad Abumrad]

It's coming.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Turns out, though, the rats. He says they're still scoring 50. 50.

[Jad Abumrad]

What?

[Charles Fernyhough]

It's as if they can't take any notice of the blue wall.

[Jad Abumrad]

Even with the blue wall, they're only finding the biscuit 50% of the time.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wait a second. Can a rat see color?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah, rats can do color.

[Jad Abumrad]

They do color pretty well.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Okay.

[Jad Abumrad]

They also do left, right just fine.

[Charles Fernyhough]

But what they can't do is connect those two bits of information together.

[Jad Abumrad]

In other words, they can only. Well they can do left. That they can do. They can do blue. Do blue, but it's. They're both separate. They can't do left of blue.

[Charles Fernyhough]

These different kinds of knowledge can't talk to each other.

[Robert Krulwich]

How does anyone know that? I mean what rats have been interviewed for this survey?

[Jad Abumrad]

What? They infer this based on studying the rats.

[Robert Krulwich]

So the rat doesn't have what? Doesn't have the neurons, doesn't have the what isn't.

[Jad Abumrad]

He doesn't have the rat, can't do it. That's just, that's all that you need to know. And I'm gonna make it weird right now. Neither can some humans.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

I spent the first 10 or 15 years of my scientific life studying creatures who don't talk yet.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's Elizabeth Spelke, she's a psychologist at Harvard, quite famous for her work with.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Kai, as you can hear babies. And I was interested in their abilities in relation to abilities of other animals.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Come on, get up, we're gonna go.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Into the monkey room.

[Jad Abumrad]

So she began the baby development lab which is filled with toys and on any given day, five or six really tiny kids.

[Susan Schaller]

She's six months, who's this?

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm a big kid. Yeah, toddlers too. How old are you?

[Susan Schaller]

Three and a half.

[Anne Senghas]

Three and a half.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Big time.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Just like the rats.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Just like the rats.

[Robert Krulwich]

Really?

[Jad Abumrad]

Just like the rats are almost just like the rats.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

And we find that those children start performing like adults around 6 years of age.

[Robert Krulwich]

Now I'm interested.

[Jad Abumrad]

Good.

[Robert Krulwich]

Something happens at the ripe old age of Six.

[Jad Abumrad]

It is shockingly late, right?

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Several people have suggested that one candidate for a process that's doing this is language.

[Robert Krulwich]

What do you mean is the language kids are talking? Certainly at 3, 4, 5, and 6, they're talking like a. Like a. You know, they're too much.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And somewhere around the age of six, they start to use phrases like left.

[Susan Schaller]

Of the blue wall.

[Jad Abumrad]

And those aren't just words that come out of the child's mouth. Liz thinks that inside the child's brain.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

What that phrase does is link these concepts together.

[Jad Abumrad]

Clink. And at that moment, left of the blue wall, the child leaves the rats behind.

[Susan Schaller]

Whoa.

[Robert Krulwich]

That was that. She doesn't think that kids have that.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, let me put it to you a different way. 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. 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, third objects, like wall. These things are there from the beginning, but they're separate. Then you get the words 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, sh. She says, that creates that internal connection.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

There you go.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

So the words are like an after, After.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, after, after fact, after effect.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, that's a good. That's. No, no. The experimenters actually accounted for that.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Well, what the experimenters did next is that they thought, okay, if language is Adding this extra element. Let's try and knock it out.

[Jad Abumrad]

How would you do that? Would you, like, shoot something into their brain that kills the language part or something?

[Charles Fernyhough]

It's a much simpler way of doing it and a much more humane thing that you can do.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

What we did is put adults in.

[Jad Abumrad]

The room, and then she says she gave them an ipod.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

They've got headphones on.

[Jad Abumrad]

Playing through those headphones. Is someone talking?

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Yep.

[Jad Abumrad]

And their job while they're in the room is to just repeat what the.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Person is saying, continuously listening to speech and repeating it the whole time they were in there.

[Charles Fernyhough]

It's actually a really hard thing to do. If you've ever tried shadowing somebody speaking.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can we try it? You go and I'll shadow you.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Okay, Jal, I'm going to start speaking now.

[Jad Abumrad]

And now I want to say it back to you exactly as I. Oh, my God. Starting to hurt my head. That's really hard, actually.

[Charles Fernyhough]

It is hard. Yeah. And what that does is it knocks out your capacity to use language for.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Yourself, basically battering the words out of the adult's head.

[Robert Krulwich]

Why are they doing this again?

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, they want to see, like, if you blast the words out of somebody's.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Head, what would happen?

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

And we actually got very dramatic results.

[Charles Fernyhough]

They went right back to being like the rats.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Charles Fernyhough]

Well, I don't think it's very much at all.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you mean?

[Charles Fernyhough]

I'm gonna put it in a different way. And this involves making quite a controversial statement. I don't think very young children do think.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, think period. Was there a period at the end of that sentence?

[Charles Fernyhough]

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.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

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. Yes.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

But there's something that we get access to when we gain a full natural angle that we can use not only to communicate with other people, but with ourselves.

[Susan Schaller]

Test testing. Test, test, test, test.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

Language is fundamentally a combinatorial system.

[Robert Krulwich]

As we head up the steps. What is this? This is a Columbia University.

[Jad Abumrad]

See, we'd gotten interested in the last thing that Liz Belke said about language being a combinatorial thing.

[Elizabeth Spelke]

System, Right?

[Jad Abumrad]

And that led us to Columbia.

[Robert Krulwich]

Here's the deal. You have words now. You have words in combination now. Now you can play with the combinations.

[Jad Abumrad]

And that as you'll hear.

[James Shapiro]

Just us three, then, Right?

[Robert Krulwich]

It's just us three.

[James Shapiro]

Good.

[Jad Abumrad]

Opens up a kind of infinity.

[James Shapiro]

Head to foot now, is he. Total gules, hardly tricked with blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, baked in and pasted with the parching streets that lended tyrannous and damned light to their vile murders. This is Shakespeare. When I sat in middle school and they gave her Shakespeare, roasted in wrath and fire and thus or sized with coagulate gore. I was completely confused, and I felt stupid.

[Jad Abumrad]

Can you just introduce yourself?

[James Shapiro]

This is James Shapiro.

[Robert Krulwich]

He is a Shakespeare scholar, obviously, at.

[James Shapiro]

Columbia University, where I've taught for 25 years.

[Robert Krulwich]

And one reason he says that Shakespeare can be confusing is that often. And Shakespeare behaved not so much like a writer, but more like a.

[James Shapiro]

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

[Robert Krulwich]

Sometimes these word experiments, they didn't go so well.

[James Shapiro]

There's the prince's orgulus. Orgulus has not stuck. That goes in the.

[Jad Abumrad]

What does it mean?

[James Shapiro]

You got me. I mean, I should know. I told you.

[Robert Krulwich]

But look what he did just by adding a little prefix, Un.

[James Shapiro]

There's so many words that we're now familiar with. Unnerved. You know, we all know what that means, but nobody had heard. Unnerved, unaware, uncomfortable.

[Robert Krulwich]

He made up uncomfortable.

[James Shapiro]

He was the first to use that.

[Robert Krulwich]

Word on a stage, right?

[James Shapiro]

Unearthly, unhand, undress, Unless uneducated, ungoverned, unmitigated, unpublished, Something that's near and dear to me. Unpublished, unsolicited, unswayed, unclogged, unappeased, unchanging, unreal.

[Robert Krulwich]

He made up unreal.

[James Shapiro]

He's the first to use it in print or on stage.

[Jad Abumrad]

Would an audience at that time have understood what the un prefix meant? Not real.

[James Shapiro]

I think it takes you a split second unreal to kind of put that on, on the real.

[Robert Krulwich]

But then suddenly you've got this new concept that there's something real but not.

[James Shapiro]

He's taking words that ordinarily are not stuck together. Things like madcap Ladybird shoving them together, Eye drops to achieve a kind of atomic power. Eyesore. Eyeball.

[Jad Abumrad]

He did eyeball.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Yes.

[Robert Krulwich]

It's hard to understand how someone could think of that. It seems like it's always been there.

[James Shapiro]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Truth will out.

[James Shapiro]

What's done is done. I could go on and on.

[Robert Krulwich]

He wants you to go on and on.

[James Shapiro]

Crack of doom. My favorite. Dead as a doornail. A dish fit for the gods. Dog will have his day. Faint hearted father. Fool's paradise forever and a day foregone conclusion. The game is afoot. 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

Oh.

[James Shapiro]

Laugh your stuff into stitches. Love is blind. What the dickens. All's well then ends well. Something wicked this way comes and a sorry sight.

[Robert Krulwich]

Wow, that's a champion.

[Jad Abumrad]

That's pretty fantastic.

[James Shapiro]

How did he create phrases that stick in the mind that make it seem as if they always existed?

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

How you're taking out a book.

[James Shapiro]

Thinking of a passage here that is.

[Jad Abumrad]

Maybe the biggest book I've ever seen.

[James Shapiro]

Nonsense.

[Jad Abumrad]

It was at least 3,000 pages.

[James Shapiro]

Shakespeare doesn't write a lot about process, but there are one or two places where he does. In a poem called Lucrece, in which a woman is raped. Lucrece is raped and she has to write a letter to her husband explaining what happened to her. And she's struggling to. 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 o' er 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 a press of 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?

[Jad Abumrad]

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 out of my way. And it's just like this throng of.

[James Shapiro]

Images of sounds, conceits, thoughts, ideas, and they are providing the pressure that's needed to produce.

[Jad Abumrad]

Words. You know what?

[Robert Krulwich]

What?

[Jad Abumrad]

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 gonna 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

And thanks to James Shapiro, professor at Columbia University, whose newest book is Contested Will, who wrote Shakespeare.

[Jad Abumrad]

Also thanks to our kids, Luisa Krasnow, Stella Storey, and Isaiah Harrison. And also thanks to. To the moms that brought them in, Therese Tripoli, Carrie Donahue, and Patricia Starek.

[Susan Schaller]

Hello, this is Susan Schaller. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Charles Fernyhough.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by npr.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hey, I'm Jad Abumran.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Robert Kryllowich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. This hour. Words, Power of words.

[Robert Krulwich]

So once words enter your head, once they tickle in there, and we just explained how that happens, sort of. Then they. You know, they're always there.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like, what if they're not? What would happen if that. 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?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, this got us thinking about a very famous talk at one of the TED Conferences.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

I grew up to study the brain.

[Robert Krulwich]

A talk given by a neuroanatomist named Jill Bolte. Is it Bolte or Bolt?

[Jad Abumrad]

Bolte.

[Robert Krulwich]

Bolte Taylor.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Robert Krulwich]

And all you really need to know is that one morning In December of 1996, Dr. Taylor woke up and she had. She had A headache.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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 looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, whoa, I'm a weird looking thing. So I get off the machine and I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower. And now 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And it was the shutdown that really caught our attention.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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. Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, hey, I'm having a stroke, we gotta 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

That is Jill Bolte Taylor herself.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Hi, Robert.

[Jad Abumrad]

We actually got her into a studio.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Hello, Jad.

[Jad Abumrad]

Hello. Because we wanted to ask her some questions about that moment when her inner voices went away.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Did you know your name?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Did you know your address?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

No.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you know about your summer from 1983?

[James Shapiro]

No.

[Jad Abumrad]

Did you know, like, my mom Is.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

I didn't know any of that.

[Jad Abumrad]

None of it.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

I didn't know any of that.

[Robert Krulwich]

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, out of her nose. She's lost her career. She's lost her language.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

I lost all my memories.

[Robert Krulwich]

And yet, she says, sitting there in that suddenly wordless space, I had found.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

A peace inside of myself that I had not known before. I had pure silence inside of my mind. Pure silence.

[Jad Abumrad]

Pure silence.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Is this the absence of reflection of any kind? Is it just sensual intake and period?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

That is exactly what it was. It was all of the present moment.

[Jad Abumrad]

Did you have thoughts?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Did you have a deadhead period, by any chance?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

You know, I missed that by a few years, but I get a lot of that.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Oh, yeah. I lost all definition of myself in relationship to everything in the external world.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean, like, you couldn't figure out where you ended?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Mm.

[Robert Krulwich]

How much of that was about language? A little part. A lot.

[Charles Fernyhough]

I mean.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Oh, 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. This is.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Brocks. Remember him? Neuropsychologist.

[Robert Krulwich]

If you were to ask me about.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

I did not have that portion of my language center that tells a story. Curious little Jill me, Jill Bolte Taylor, climbing the Harvard ladder through language. Loves dissection, cutting up things. That language was gone. I got to essentially become an infant again.

[Robert Krulwich]

I mean, this is the problem here.

[Jad Abumrad]

What do you mean?

[Robert Krulwich]

When you drop out of the I ness 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

But I mean, it's not like she stayed there.

[Robert Krulwich]

That's true.

[Jad Abumrad]

We wouldn't be talking 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.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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, President. And then I would get a picture in my mind of a president as a leader.

[Jad Abumrad]

Was it a picture of a specific guy?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

It was actually. It still flashes into my mind. It's a picture of a silhouette of.

[Robert Krulwich]

A male, a presidential profile.

[Jad Abumrad]

Like maybe the idea of a president, basically. So that was her president.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

So now she's got this map, she's got this silhouette of a guy. And she said after hours, president, United States.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

President, United States. And it's like, oh my God.

[Jad Abumrad]

She still couldn't somehow bring them together.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

Yeah, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Now as Jill starts to get better.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

This is after eight years of hard work and recovery.

[Robert Krulwich]

Finally the words start to trickle back.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when they did, she says that silence that she loved so much got pushed out.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

That was one of the sacrifices for me. That was one of the sacrifices.

[Jad Abumrad]

Well, well.

[Robert Krulwich]

We'Re doing a language show here. You're the anti queen of our language show. You're like saying, who needs.

[Charles Fernyhough]

What the hell?

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

But is it fair to say this is a. 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.

[Jill Bolte Taylor]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Joe Balte Taylor is the author of what's it called?

[Robert Krulwich]

The book, My Stroke of Insight.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

I'm Louis Henderson calling from Christchurch, New Zealand. Radiolab 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 [e-mail].

[Jad Abumrad]

I'm Jad Abumrad.

[Robert Krulwich]

Robert Krulwich.

[Jad Abumrad]

This is Radiolab. 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Born deaf or born deaf. Born deaf.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

There was no deaf school in Nicaragua then.

[Jad Abumrad]

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 Ildefonso, the guy we met at the beginning of this show. Except in Nicaragua in the 70s, there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of these Ildefonsos. Really? Yeah. But then everything changes.

[Anne Senghas]

In the late 70s, Hope Somoza, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

But the school would include deaf people. And that, says psychology professor Anne Senghas, was a first, because now, instead of deaf kids scattered about, they Were together in the same room.

[Anne Senghas]

There were 50 deaf kids in that first entering class, preschool to sixth grade, the late 70s.

[Jad Abumrad]

For most of them, this was the first time they'd ever met another deaf person before.

[Anne Senghas]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, that must have been.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Anne Senghas]

It's not like the teachers were using sign in the classroom. Everything in the classroom was Spanish, which.

[Jad Abumrad]

None of them knew.

[Anne Senghas]

Copying it into their notebooks. A lot of it was going right over their heads.

[Jad Abumrad]

So at the beginning, things were completely confusing.

[Anne Senghas]

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 doing.

[Jad Abumrad]

No one knows how it happened. Like, maybe one of the kids who was very charismatic, he invented a sign for, say, balloon, then told it to.

[Anne Senghas]

Another kid who was very, you know.

[Jad Abumrad]

Socially active, and that second kid then spread the sign. However it worked, over time, the signs that these 50 kids used started to.

[Anne Senghas]

Converge into a common system.

[Jad Abumrad]

And when you step back from it all, what that means.

[Anne Senghas]

They created a language.

[Susan Schaller]

They.

[James Shapiro]

It's.

[Anne Senghas]

They didn't just take it from somewhere else. They couldn't take it from somewhere else. They created their own.

[Jad Abumrad]

But how unusual is that?

[Anne Senghas]

Like, this has happened with languages all over the world, but not while people were watching.

[Jad Abumrad]

And so you're saying this is the first time we've been able to watch a language being born?

[Anne Senghas]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. And for the last 20 years, that is what Ann has been doing. She's been going to Nicaragua to that school and watching.

[Anne Senghas]

So. Oh, you want to describe that? So I may have gotten a recording of this, but when you arrive at.

[Susan Schaller]

The school.

[Anne Senghas]

The buses come around, the kids are all screaming and leaning out the windows and signing to each other. 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Ann 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 Chew. Judy Kegle, studying basic linguist type stuff, right.

[Anne Senghas]

Trying to figure out how the verbs work and whether they have agreement with their grammatical objects.

[Jad Abumrad]

And along the way, her and a collaborator, Jetty Pyers, stumbled into something really surprising about the power of certain words. So to set it up, when she got there the first time in 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.

[Anne Senghas]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

In terms of how they sign.

[Anne Senghas]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

So she showed deaf kids of different generations this cartoon and asked them pretty simply to describe what they saw. Just describe it in sign, describe the whole story. The differences were striking, first of all.

[Anne Senghas]

So I'll just show you an example of each.

[Jad Abumrad]

So you're opening up a movie here.

[Anne Senghas]

So this is the first cohort Signer talking about.

[Jad Abumrad]

She got out her laptop and show 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.

[Anne Senghas]

A lot of full body movements. She's talking about someone who's moving in a crazy way.

[James Shapiro]

She.

[Anne Senghas]

She's going to be moving in a crazy way.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then she showed me a young kid who was about eight, the backwards cat.

[Anne Senghas]

So here's Sylvester and now he talks about the manner when he described the.

[Jad Abumrad]

Man jumping and then falling, it was all in the wrist.

[Anne Senghas]

All the movement is now in the hand. And it's very stylish. You know, they're trimming these signs down.

[Jad Abumrad]

But more to the point, there was one thing she noticed that was really unexpected, had nothing to do with movement.

[Anne Senghas]

Couldn't help noticing that they, the people, different people in the community talked about different things. In this story, the older signers tended to describe all the events in this.

[Jad Abumrad]

Story, and only the events.

[Anne Senghas]

And the younger kids, they would talk.

[Jad Abumrad]

About the guy's feelings that this guy.

[Anne Senghas]

Was trying to fly, wanted to fly, but failed.

[Jad Abumrad]

The kids, she says, just seemed to be better at thinking about thinking like other people's thinking. So Ann and Jenny decided, let's take all the different generations of deaf kids.

[Anne Senghas]

40 year olds, 30 year olds, 20 year olds, 10 year olds, let me.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Anne Senghas]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

And maybe before he goes, he looks at the little brother and says, hey, don't touch my train. Don't touch it.

[Anne Senghas]

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 gonna go to find his train? Is he gonna look under the bed or is he gonna look in the toy box?

[Robert Krulwich]

Well, he's gonna look under the bed.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yep.

[Robert Krulwich]

Because as far as he knows, that's where he left it.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah.

[Anne Senghas]

He didn't see it move.

[Jad Abumrad]

And if you ask kids over the age of five, most of them would say, he's gonna 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.

[Anne Senghas]

Would say, oh, look in the toy box.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really?

[Anne Senghas]

They would pick the wrong one. These are 35 year olds.

[Jad Abumrad]

35 year olds would get this wrong.

[Anne Senghas]

They would fail this task.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, seven out of eight, she says.

[Anne Senghas]

And then all of the younger signers that we worked with passed.

[Jad Abumrad]

At this point, she's just confused, like, why would this be? Why can't the older people pass this simple test? You know, that involves thinking about someone else's thinking, what's going on here? And then it occurred to her it 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.

[Anne Senghas]

For thinking things like, I know something and I know that you don't know it.

[Jad Abumrad]

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?

[Anne Senghas]

10 or 12.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wow. So from 30 years, we go from just a couple to.

[Anne Senghas]

We went from, like, knowing and not knowing.

[Jad Abumrad]

Right? To 12.

[Anne Senghas]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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, but maybe you don't want to go there all the way?

[Anne Senghas]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

But you are saying, though, that the verb think is somehow implicated in my ability to think about your thinking.

[Anne Senghas]

Right. Thinking about thinking, understanding how other people understand. That's something that having language makes you better at.

[Jad Abumrad]

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's really hard to talk about thoughts without the word thoughts. Or what is time without the 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.

[Anne Senghas]

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.

[Jad Abumrad]

You mean the older signers? Yeah, they were passing.

[Anne Senghas]

Suddenly some of them were passing. Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

What happened?

[Anne Senghas]

What happened in the past two years? Yeah, those younger kids grew up and started hanging out at the Deaf Association.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait, what?

[Anne Senghas]

So what had happened in the mean?

[Jad Abumrad]

So here's the strange twist to the whole thing. The Deaf association is this place where the older signers would hang out.

[Anne Senghas]

Yeah.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Anne Senghas]

Their new mental verbs, you know, all.

[Jad Abumrad]

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.

[Anne Senghas]

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 tests. That's super interesting story. It's really cool.

[Jad Abumrad]

Anne Senghas is an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College in New York.

[Robert Krulwich]

The thing, of course you want, you wonder, is once you gotten this new facility in you, there's a lot of literature about this. My Fair lady is about this.

[Jad Abumrad]

My Fair lady is about this.

[Robert Krulwich]

Yeah, it's about a woman who learns proper English and she can no longer be a flower girl in Covent Garden. She's now a lady.

[Jad Abumrad]

Yeah, I guess it is kind of like this.

[Robert Krulwich]

You want, like. Remember our program began with the story of Ildefonso, right?

[Jad Abumrad]

Which we heard from Susan Schaller. Ildefonso was the guy who for 27 years, had no language at all.

[Robert Krulwich]

So you kind of wonder, I mean.

[Susan Schaller]

I can tell you that, like, what.

[Robert Krulwich]

Happened to Ildefonso once you. He got language, right.

[Jad Abumrad]

And after that first breakthrough where Ilfonso realized things have names, Susan ended up leaving for a few years.

[Susan Schaller]

Let's see, it was about four years, I think four or five.

[Jad Abumrad]

Then she decided to write a book about him.

[Susan Schaller]

And so I. I went and found him again, and he had language, and I could ask him all kinds of questions.

[Jad Abumrad]

Were you able then to sit down with him and ask him about his life and to really get the sort of his biography?

[Susan Schaller]

Somewhat. Somewhat. One area that everyone wants to know about is what was it like to be languageless? You know, what was going on in his head? And I asked and I asked and I asked. And he starts telling me that was the dark time in his life, learning language. It's 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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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.

[Susan Schaller]

Was deaf and languageless.

[Jad Abumrad]

Really.

[Susan Schaller]

So I was shocked and because I was so amazed, going, I. I can't believe you have a languageless brother. That's when. When Ildefonso said, well, let. Let me introduce you to some of my friends.

[Robert Krulwich]

So they get in the car and they drive for a while.

[Susan Schaller]

We stop at this apartment, we walk into this small, little room, and there were these six Mexican men doing this mime routine.

[Jad Abumrad]

Wait. All these guys were like Ildefonso used to be.

[Susan Schaller]

They had no language. They were all born deaf, and they didn't know they were deaf.

[Jad Abumrad]

And what. What were they doing?

[Susan Schaller]

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 charging, and then he'd be the. The matador. And then he'd be somebody in the crowd watching. And then he would add a detail.

[Robert Krulwich]

For example, a hat. And then they'd swap. So then another guy would get up to take over the story, and they'd start miming. They'd reenact the matador, describe the hat. But now the second storyteller would add.

[Susan Schaller]

A new detail, like another person with a pair of glasses or something.

[Robert Krulwich]

So each one would stand up, take the bullfight, the same bullfight, to a different point, and add a detail.

[Susan Schaller]

Exactly. Exactly.

[Robert Krulwich]

Oh, my God.

[Susan Schaller]

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.

[Robert Krulwich]

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 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.

[Susan Schaller]

Well, I'll give you Ildefonso'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 languageless, 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.

[Jad Abumrad]

Susan Schaller is author of the book A Man without words. Go to Radiolab.org for more info, and if you go there, or if you're subscribed to 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.

[Susan Schaller]

Message seven.

[Anne Senghas]

Hi, this is Anne Sangha, just back from Nicaragua, just in time to read in the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Pat Walters. Our staff includes Ellen Horn, Soren Wheeler.

[Susan Schaller]

Miller, Brenna Farrell, Lulu Miller, Tim Howard and Lynn Levity, with help from Sharon Shaddock, Raymond Kungakar, Nicole Corey and Sam Rowden.

[James Shapiro]

Special thanks to Posey Gruner.

[Charles Fernyhough]

Bye Bye.

[Susan Schaller]

End.