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

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?

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.

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)

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)

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.

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.