The Unlanguaged Mind: A World Built With Words

you go back and check it out. We talked about, you know, what exactly a feral child is, the differences between wild children and abused children throughout history, but how they show similar you know, cognitive difficulties, and then we gave examples of both you know, mythical stories of ferald children, but then also documented cases of feral children throughout history, leading us into this section where we're going to talk about the brain, language, child development, how it all works,

and why feral children have been so important to a lot of intellectuals throughout history. Yeah, I think it's really important to it to realize what's at stake with language and uh in any lapse in the ability to acquire language. Um, because of course it's as we've discussed already, it's more than a means of communicating ideas to one another. It's it's an operating system for the brain, a key aspect of what makes us human. Uh. And we can better

glimpse some of the wonders this involves. But and we can better go in some of the wonders that are involved in this by looking at the subtle differences among the languages, differences that impact the way that we process the passage of time, the nature of reality. Absolutely. Uh. If you're a regular Radio Lab listener, and I know a number of our listeners also listen to that show, then you've probably heard why Isn't the Sky blue? Uh?

An episode in which linguist Guy Deuscher discusses the case for a gray sky world, you know, asking that question, do we only come to see the sky as blue? And of course blue is a quite rare color in the natural world, and we see very few examples of a really truly blue organisms. So do we see the sky is blue only because we use our language to

describe it as such? Or is it truly blue? And he makes a compelling case that it's not really blue, it's more of a gray, and just by using the words to describe it, thus we see it does we change it. Yeah, Well, I was talking to you a little bit about this before we recorded the podcast. I grew up overseas, and when I was a teenager, I

learned Mandarin. I've since forgotten a huge chunk of it. Um, but my experience as a kid growing up knowing English and then also learning Mandarin side by side was that it very much. There's a very different thought process that goes on with Mandarin thinking compared to English thinking. And

I think that this is a perfect example. I don't know that necessarily that that that, um, those who speak Mandarin see the sky any differently than we do, but I'm sure that there are certain cultural aspects that go along with that difference in language, that difference in understanding. Yeah, there's a compelling argument to be made. I think that the language isn't just about communicating, but it's also it's about how we use the brain. It's how we Again,

it comes back to that that software hardware analogy. That language is the way in which we use our brains to think. Yeah and yeah, especially like you hear, often people who are learning a second language sort of describe feel that they are fluent in the language itself. Once they've started thinking in that language, right, once they've been exposed to it enough and immersed in it that they're

thinking thoughts in that language. M one one easy area to look at here again just to really, you know, bring up, bring home what's at stake with language and languge acquisition and how important it is. UM. Language is different wildly in the way that they encode time, and this has an effect on the manner in which we process and think about the passage of time, and really on the very nature of history, be it larger history

or personal history. UM. In two thousand thirteen, Yale Universities M Keith chin He presented an hypothesis that languages UH that grammatically associate the future and the present tend to foster future oriented behavior and UH. I found this to be a rather rather rather interesting theory UH and involves what linguists call future time reference or f TR. And

it turns out there's quite a lot of variety. Yeah, I know from my experience studying communications in school that there is a lot of attention paid to how we understand time and different cultures, regardless of language, even UM in in defining how those cultures exist together and apart and how cross cultural communication works. So you may be speaking the same language, we could all be speaking English, but we'd have a different understanding of what near means

or future means, past means. Like European tongues alone tend to have a range from a tendency to rarely distinguish present and future time, such as Finnish apparently too languages like French which have uh separate and obligatory future forms of verbs. So you have weak FDR again future time reference and strong FTR languages. And according to Chin, weak FTR speakers may perceive future events as less distance less

distant um. The example that he ends up using is that if a German speaker tells you that it's going to rain tomorrow, essentially he or she is saying tomorrow it is raining, as opposed to just in English, where we say tomorrow it will rain. So in a sense, the future is already happening to the German language speaker. Yeah, and in effect you're again you get cross cultural communication confusion from this, right, like like what is the definition

of raining? Or when? Linguistic distinctions may also lead to more precise beliefs UH and studies have found that languages with more precise basic color terms caused the speaker to hold more precise color beliefs. So languages tend to process anywhere from from two to eleven basic colors. UM. Black, white, and red are pretty much a given, but several languages refer to yellow, green, and blue with one basic color term. Uh. In many languages lack a basic word for purple, pink, orange,

or gray. I wonder how much that has to do with different types of color blindness throughout cultures. I know that we did an episode on color blindness and how it works for brain Stuff video show here at how Stuff works, and there's different types of color blindness. I learned from that. You know, you can have I think it's like red, green, color blind this, and then there's other distinctions. So I wonder if that has something to

do with it. It might there. Um, I don't believe this is actually the same Radio Lab episode referred to earlier. They talked about the Odyssey, about some of the colors that are lacking from descriptions in Homer's the Odyssey, meaning

some to theorize that that interesting. Um, Now with the blue example we were talking, I mean the color example we were talking about earlier when in linguistics, Um, the take home here seems to be that it means that language influences our ability to comprehend the world around us, to organize it, and to define us. And one curious example here is that in Russian there's a strong distinction between light blue, which is glow boy, I believe, in

dark blue, which is sin in sinny. I'm saying that wrong, but sinny, I believe. And Russian speakers therefore tend to perform better in tests distinguishing different shades of blue. So the language is more specific, and therefore they're understanding the ability to to see it is more specific as well.

I wonder if you can then see a difference in uh, the aesthetics or possibly like graphic design of those different cultures based on like, you know, like, for instance, if blues or so important in Russia, I wonder if you tend to see a lot more mixtures of different shades or hues of blue. Uh, it's like that, Um, oh God,

what is it? What is it? Alaskan Inuit that they have different words right, Um, when you go to like home depot or whatever to buy the paints for your home, there's like, you know, twenty different types of white basically or off white or egg shell or whatever. They they have all kinds of bizarre names that they come up with for them having done graphic design before. I mean, I used to reference the Pantone color booklet all the time. There's like a five hundred different colors in there alone.

It definitely makes me want to pay more to the next time I'm looking at any kind of Russian visual media, be it a movie or art, to see if if they're more blue, is they're more blue or maybe I won't even be able to appreciate it as well as a Russian language speaker based on my ability to distinguish the blue. Yeah, absolutely, So okay, let's use that as a basis. Then to step back for a second and

bring this back to feral children. Okay, So consider like that we're using this example of that Russian has so many distinctions between blues that we as English speakers may not even be able to comprehend them. Right, That's a simple, small thing that is probably small enough that we could get past it an intercultural communication. If you're a feral child, however, and you haven't learned any language, and you haven't been able to comprehend any of these things. You have no

comprehension of blue at all, what blue is, what color is? Even? Right? Then, imagine how difficult it is to process cognitively the world around you. Like you said before, language how we organize and define the world around us. Our culture is how we understand the world in a way. The world is so complex and there's so much coming at us at all times, right sensory wise, that we need that we need to be able to define that and put it into boxes or else we go crazy. Yeah, I mean,

we'll come back to this one in a minute. But just imagine perceiving the world around you and not knowing there are names for things, like not knowing the names of anything. You know. It's at times we kind of is language bearing individuals. We kind of like to experiment with that. We kind of like to occasionally like steer out in the forest and not categorize everything. And there could be something refreshing in that. But imagine, and it's so difficult to do it. Imagine just not knowing the

names of anything you're looking at. I would even go a step further. I I would hypothesize that it's possible that some feral children possibly don't know the difference between themselves and the external world. Imagine that. Yeah, because language enables us to play with all these different concepts, and any of them are crucial concepts to knowing what we are on a very basic existential level. Yeah. H Now another example that comes up, and perhaps you can speak

to this one a little bit. Since um, we've given your background with the Mandarin, but the concept of time in Chinese languages, not not only Mandarin, but other other dialects as well. I understand, um and their use of their or their their the lack of tents, right. Yeah, I remember that that was a difficult part in learning Mandarin when I because I came to it when I was probably fourteen years old. Um. And I think like the optimal time for learning a new language is something

like before your ten or something like that. Um, but yeah, I do remember this. It's it's significantly different. Yeah. And I've seen some linguists argue that it may contribute to the importance of ancestors and kept Chinese culture because it it on on on one level, it means that your ancestors are still in the present because of the tents that is used to refer to them again in the same way that for the German it's already raining even

though it's raining tomorrow. For the Chinese language speaker, the the ancestor is not dead. The ancestor is still alive in the past. Yeah, that's interesting. I never considered that. I guess when I was living overseas and speaking Chinese, I wasn't. I wasn't interacting with religious culture all that much, especially in terms of like how they regarded their ancestors. It was more like, you know, I was at the level where they were teaching us, like here's how to

buy things in a star or something like that. But um, yeah, I think that that has some plausibility to it. Now here's another aspect of language that that I tend not to think think about all that much either of But it was explored in a piece for Ian magazine titled The Sun Does Not Rise by Andrew Crummy, and the pointed out that we have a lot of magical notions about how the world works, uh, and they're essentially fossilized within our own language. Explained further. Yes, So, um, I'll

just read a quote from this article. But because I believe this, uh, this strives at home the principle of eternal folly offers a somewhat different picture. In place of history scene is a progression of steps on a ladder. We could instead imagine something more stratified, rather like the escarpments of the Wield of Kent that Charles Darwin wrote about so eloquently. We envisage a cliff face exposed by erosion.

Our own age is the topmost layer, but presented to us are the remains of every preceding age, and we are at liberty to pluck out buried fossils if we choose so that it mainly brings up two keys amples. Here, we still say that the sun rises, though of course it doesn't rise. The earth rotates. But we're well, we're

linguistically shackled to this outdated model of solar mechanics. Likewise, do you still might someone say talk about how they cast their gaze over something or or some various uh you know, turn of phrase that means the same thing, when in fact we know that rays enter our eyes. There's not like this magic laser beam that shoots of cyclops wise and bounces off the thing we're looking to add and then come comes back. Yeah, that's interesting. I'd take this a step further. I wonder if he's slought

about this before. I saw a presentation on UM software and desktop design before, and basically the person presenting was like, why do we still pretend that our computers are desks. You've got folders and trash cans and and there's even pencils and note pads and all of that, right, Like, we're acting like it's a desk. They're all metaphors. And we're so far along now that and so used to digital technology that shouldn't we be using something else other

than these tangible metaphors. Yeah. I think that's a great example, and it does drive down to the fact that, you know, the language we used to describe something, even even though our our understanding of that thing has updated significantly, we're still describing it in an all outdated way, and in a sense, we're processing in it in that way too.

So even if you say the sun rises, like you still kind of you kind of have this this dual belief system in play, where on one level it is literally rising, and then while you still know in the back of your head that there's a more complicated orbital situation going on there. It's it's This is another perfect example of culture making the world easier to understand for the human mind. Right, Like, if you try to comprehend what's actually going on with the sun on the scale

that it's going on with, you can't do it. Our human brain just can't do it processing all those things that are happening with it and our relative we were talking earlier about, uh, your son and and uh, you know, understanding as a child the differences in space and time. Right, imagine trying to understand your human existence on this huge rock in relationship to this even huger ball of fire and how they're rotating all around in this vast space. Right,

we can't do it. So it's much easier for us to say it rises. Yeah. And I found myself in the exact situation with him, um, months and months ago and maybe a year ago. I'm standing on the beach, you know, where you can clearly see the sun come up and then later you can see it go down, and he's asking, how what's going on? How is it working? And I want to be able to explain something more nuanced to him, but I end up saying, well, you know, the sun comes up and then it goes down, and

then it goes under. Yeah, And that's like you have to have a starting point exactly. Yeah. And and then from there on out maybe you know you can you can as he acquired more language skills and syntax to be able to you know, use it to form new ideas for new words, transform his understanding than you can. And I say that thing I said earlier, Daddy was lying, U men to protect you from the crushing insignificance human life faces when we stare at the sun and understand

it the cosmic unimportant. So obviously language does does more than that. Which a couple of examples here just to show you a little more the little complicated nuances that are going on under the surface. Um, but you know everything I mean, human culture, technology, the the advance of science, like all of these things stem from language. Yeah. And at the end of the day, the language and culture also they not only define what we know, but they

define how we know what we know. And I know that's this is way too deep of a topic for us to go down into now. But like ideas of post structuralism and language and uh postmodernism combined together, you know, basically. And I think it was like the late seventies, especially in France, that these ideas were coming about. That just our very understanding of knowledge itself is dependent on language and dependent on that is constructing limits into our understanding again,

or else we'd go mad. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna look at a couple of other examples that they give us a some some more to chew on here with language, or we're gonna look at at at a very primitive language that lacks abstraction, fiction and myth um and uh in a possible view at what adult life might consist of without language. All Right, we're back. You know. I read a book a few years back, China m Elvil's novels.

I have read this bookuse a huge China miel fan, and that's a great book that I was really impressed with it. It was very very serious for the most part, but but it explored some linguistic themes. Yeah, he's a really smart science fiction fantasy writer in how he plays around with how language defines things for us. Yeah, that's a very meta book. Yeah, that one in particular dealt with interactions between humans and an alien species with severe

cognitive and linguistic limitations on its ability to lie. So it's it's kind of like that Ricky Gervais movie about the invention of lying um, except played seriously in a sci fi environment where you know, what, what does it mean when you know you're a bill reality to communicate with this other being? Uh, And it's the ability to process the world with its language, like it doesn't understand

the concept of lying. There's some other sci fi ideas that are thrown around and there about like there's one alien species that's just mentioned that it like communicates through vomiting, I think, And and there's a you know, one of the central species in the book. For humans to communicate, you have to have like two individuals that are kind of like nearly sinked so that they can seeing a chorus of their communication in a way that the alien

can understand it. But when I read it, it got me to wondering, you know, is it possible within human language that there there are any human language systems where lying doesn't exist? And as far as I can tell, the lying is pretty much everywhere in some form. But there is this interesting tongue known as Paraha, uh that the Faraha people of the Amazon speak, and it provides uh some interesting food for thought on you know, on the what what is it like to have a language

that is a little more limited. A lot of this comes from a two thousand seven New Yorker article titled the interpreter Um. We can just do a quick rundown of some of the more astounding attributes of the language. Okay, so in this definition of Paraha, one of the first things that we know is that it's based on merely eight consonants and three vowels. There's a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths, and the speakers can drop the vowels

and consonants and instead use singing, humming, and whistling. That's interesting. Yeah, that reminds there's a recent thing that came out about whistling Turkish. Yeah, there's like a version of Turkish that is whistled for long distance communication. But it's it's different enough from Turkish to wherever you're a Turkish language speaking, even a native Turkish speaker, if you're unfamiliar with whistled Turkish. You're not going to understand it. Yeah, huh, okay uh.

And this paraha also contains no numbers or a system of counting. So imagine what we were talking about earlier with regards to time. Probably impacts their culture significantly. Yeah, they used the simplest pronoun inventory known and they have a lack of any relative tenses or any individual or collective memory more than two generations past. So again, look at that. That's just alone. How not using numbers can impact you. Yeah, they have that. They can't understand anything

that they didn't actually experience, probably right. Yeah, they have no drawings or art, they lack they lack color words, and this one's interesting. They lack creation, myths and fiction, which is kind of close to the inability to lie. Mhmm. Interesting. So in the in this this particular New Yorker piece, they they draw out that you know that there's an isolated people and they within a hunter gatherer world of the here and now. So it's a it's a world

without abstraction. If they're talking about something, or if they're paying it much heed, then that thing is right in front of them to see, to smell, to taste, to touch, you know, there's there's no hey guys, they just saw five flowers. Uh, they must have been created by a god, and so they merely say, hey, check out these flowers. Here. They are right before us. There's no worrying about where they are in time and space because they are right here.

So I'm really curious. Did this piece in The New Yorker get into how the interaction with the Western world affected them or their language or their culture, Like just by being there the journalist was influencing their language. Yeah, I mean they I don't think they got into it much in that piece. Uh, but I mean they're gonna be some concepts that they just don't get as much, um like uh, Like here's an example. They mentioned that for the Paraha people, when someone walks around have been

in the in the river. That person has not simply gone away, but they have gone of existence. So so I mean their understanding of the world, their linguistic processing of the world is so different from you know, from English speakers, that there are certain concepts are gonna be difficult to pass back and forth. They're gonna be concepts are gonna be difficult for them to assimilate. So again, like let's let's think about this in terms of the

feral children that we were talking about before. Right, Uh, this sounds completely alien to me, trying to think about living a world, living in a world where there's no fiction. I don't know that I could do that, But imagine not even not even having words to understand anything, not even having the capacity to understand where you begin and the rest of the world ends. Yeah, it's uh, it reminds me a bit too. Um. We talked about innumate

language systems a bit earlier about words for snow. I remember reading about Innuit people's that that referred to distance in terms of time, right, Yeah, like if you saw it, you can see tremendous distance in this particular area, if

I remember correctly, its long, flat areas. But it's about like to look through a telescope is to look into the future, which is kind of act that, especially because like I think this is a fairly American concept that, Yeah, we use miles to measure long distances, but for the most part, when we're talking about miles, we're talking about how far you can travel or how long you can travel in that period of time. Right, So, rather when somebody says to me, how far away is Woodstock, Georgia.

I say forty minutes. Yeah, yeah, rather that I think, I think about things like that for the most part. Yeah. Well, you know another thing that this makes me think about is animals. Right, So, like we're getting to the core of this argument about you know, feral children. What's the different between a human being and an animal. Like we said earlier, animals aren't technically learning language. Some of them understand simply use My dog understands when I say sit,

it sits right. Um, that doesn't mean that he has the capacity for language. But at the same time, my dog has an understanding of the world that is more complex than it sounds like these some of these feral

children have. Yeah, because at least the dog has had the chance to come of age in an environment, you know, like and it's I don't know if your dog, your dog gets to go outside, he does any socializes right, not only with uh, my family and other human beings, but with other dogs too, So that this is a key component here too for the feral children. Right, it's

not just about language, it's about the socialization part. Yeah, they're not getting too so they're having extremely limited socialization with any humans and then virtually no socialization with children their own age. Like, what would happen to an animal if you took it away from its its a family, put it in a room and didn't interact with it for four years. Well, you're talking about an inside cat. They go crazy and they're Unfortunately I have to interact

with my inside cat. Yeah. Yeah, she basically just tries to writ my face open. Yeah. And you know, we wonder why they're crazy the outside and we do that because we love them so much. But it's a twisted relationship we have for babies. Um. Now there's a there's another interesting case that that has been been studied that that answers some of our questions about about about what

it is like to live without language. And this comes from author Susan Shaler's work Uh, dealing with a deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language m H and uh. Again, she discusses this in her book, and I think this has been She's also made the rounds on radio shows in the past, so she was on radio labs. She may have been on this American life. So a number of you are probably familiar with this case.

But the man in question, who she referred to as ed Alfonso, was he wasn't avoid of human intelligence obviously, uh, and he developed an interesting survival tactic. The one that that proved problematic when she was trying to teach him, and that was mimicry. Like he would would see people talking, but he couldn't hear the sound. He didn't even know what sound was, so he would mimic the movements of

the mouth. So in a lot of ways, that's like when when they try to teach some animals language, like chimpanzees, even though I'm assuming these chimpanzees aren't definitely they're teaching them, but there that's how they start off by mimicking what they're what they're taught. Interesting, yeah, and so that proved problematic when she was trying to teach him sign language.

But and it was long, frustrating work, but she finally achieved a break through when she was able to teach him that things have names like that was the first big breakthrough that he learned that all these things I'm seeing in the world around me they have names, they have there's a symbolic UH system that I can refer to to say what that is? Yeah, and I'm assuming

he was of adult age by this time. Yea, yeah, so he uh, you know, he end up you know, acquiring a sign language made it a huge difference to him. But she continued to always have trouble like trying to draw out from him what it was like to live without language because he was you know, he had a lot of shame about it. He referred to it as a dark time. Uh, and now he was out of

that darkness and didn't want to dwell on it. But think about it too, we don't have the capacity in written into our language in order to be able to describe what life is like without language. So even once you've taught it to him, he's he would have difficulty explaining it. Yeah, that's the thing, like how do you use language to describe the complete absence of language? So um, this gets into all of this ultimately leads to two models that we have for for the for how language

and cognition uh deal with each other. There's the language first model and this essentially this model opposits that cognition emerges from language, and that without language, our cognitive development is severely inhibited. Um. It also posits that people's cognitive abilities are tied to its language, and this is the

window model that we were sort of talking about her. Yeah, I feel like this is the model that pretty much everything we've been talking about lines of with the thought first argument suggests that language merely expresses thought and is not a preret prerequisite. But this would require a language

of thought to underlie language itself. So this would kind of tie it with Chomsky's earlier arguments back in the seventy you have a universal language, Yeah, but this would involve their being like essentially a universal sub language that exists beneath the language, and then our acquisition of language is based on this. But again that that doesn't really line up with with the cases we've been looking at,

perhaps in terms of evidence. Yeah, this all right, Maybe I'm going down the wrong way with us, but bear with me. Language of thought, So that sounds like telepathy to me. So like if you never experience if you were part of an alien species that didn't have mouths, but you were telepathic and you could speak to one

another that way. Yeah, it makes me think of a fiction really, like how where you'll have a book where you'll have the main character thinks eloquently, but you know, talks poorly, you know, but which works within a you know, within a within literature. I'm not so sure that it works as a model for human cognition. Yeah, or didn't write exactly that in real life? Are people with limited language capacity? Do they still have complex thought processes or

vice versa? Yeah? And then what is it like to have a complex thought without language? Yeah, totally, Yeah, I think that I'm inclined to lean towards the language first models. Then Yeah, same here for now, just based on the evidence. But I think it would be intriguing. You know, Chomsky's idea is interesting, interesting enough that it lasted for four decades. Uh,

but it's just it hasn't been proven. Yeah, I would be interested to see a thought first argument with with a lot of data to back it up, like to see what what what? What data are they looking at? Clearly not not the cases that that we looked at in this episode so much, but but maybe there is a more compelling case to be made when you look at their body of evidence, and certainly in the case of feral children, the thought first argument doesn't seem to

play out right, all right, So there you have it. Well, language, Uh, it's it's power, it's importance, and some of the nuances across our our very human languages that that I think helps to to drive home just how powerful and essential language is. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, like I've said in in other episodes that we've done, you know, we're

not exactly experts on this. I did go to school for communication studies, but I was not specifically focused on language development, which many people do focus in, uh and spend their entire careers in. So I would if you're one of those people out there and you have opinions on this, or you've got something that you can share with us that we could maybe you know, add to a listener mail episode down the road, or maybe correct something that we've said here today, I'd love to hear

from you. So you can get us in contact with us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and on all of those platforms we are blow the mind. Yeah, and certainly, um, if there we'd love to cover more

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