Authors: Michael Erard
This switching mechanism is what enables interpreters to move between languages so rapidly. It also helps bilinguals insert words or phrases from one language into utterances of another, or code-switch. Fluent speakers can switch within sentences, flipping between languages without violating the grammar of either one, a process that requires some powerful neural hardware.
Switching between tasks—or
languages—is the central job of something called
executive function
. This is a group of cognitive skills that give a person the ability to manage and focus on a task. Think of executive function as how you control your mental airspace—how many planes you have in the air, how many are landing, how much room you have in your airport. Working memory, as Helen described it, is an important component
of executive function.
Scientists know that mental airspace control is located in the prefrontal cortex, but they know very little about where language switching takes place. An area called the posterior parietal cortex was once nominated to be a “language talent” area of the brain, and it was believed that this area had something to do with switching. Someone with damage to this area would sound
like a patient known as HB, an eighty-year-old man observed by the neurologist Ellen Perecman. After a car accident caused bleeding in his brain, the recovering HB rattled on, fluently, about nothing. Most strikingly, he mixed up German (his mother tongue), French (a second language), and English (which he learned as an immigrant to the United States). The doctor asked him why he was in the hospital,
to which he replied, “
Eine sprache
to
andern
[to change a language], you speak a language that comes to you.” Many of his utterances were polyglot salads, such as “
Vorständig
thickheaded” and “Standing that means
ständig ständig führen stein
.”
The idea of a “language talent” area didn’t work out. So whether switching is controlled in some other specific place or more broadly, a healthy multilingual
person can switch between languages voluntarily. Doing so for the purposes of translation, as in a courtroom, is a skill to be learned and honed. But if someone could have a superior facility for switching, would that person behave like a Mezzofanti? Could they,
for instance, switch among more languages, which would mean having more of them active at once?
A bilingual person is, in essence, a
linguistic multitasker. As a result, he has more powerful executive function skills. Children who speak two languages test higher on executive function skills than do their peers with one language. Presumably, it’s because their brains are constantly juggling languages, selecting one and inhibiting the other. On simple tests, bilingual and monolingual adults perform at the same level, yet lifelong
bilinguals always do better when their executive function is truly challenged. Scientists also speculate that a lifetime of living with two languages may protect people from the effects of cognitive aging—the constant exercise working memory, focus, and inhibition builds up a “reserve” that people carry into older age. One doesn’t have to be a Mezzofanti to see such benefits, either.
In Bologna
I’d ruminated on the case of Mezzofanti, a man who had escaped some elemental linguistic curse by taking advantage of his unique circumstances and, most likely, drawing on something hardwired in his brain which wasn’t just memory. Mezzofanti was a myth, Erik Gunnemark hissed. I didn’t agree—sure, the size of his repertoire may have been inflated, but who really knew? Science had relegated him to
a dusty cabinet of curiosities; no one had looked as seriously at him as I confidently thought I could, bring proficiency tests, institutional scales, and other metrics for judging language proficiency. The tests, I found, didn’t suit the evidence. And the cobwebby evidence was incomplete. The only solution was to interrogate a live person.
Thinking I would meet a pop culture polyglot, I found
instead Alexander, a man who practices the polyglottish lifestyle that he preaches. Alexander doesn’t pursue oral communication, though he could say a lot of things in his languages. Once, to humor me, he logged on to Skype with a fellow language aficionado and had a conversation that switched from English to Russian to Korean to Arabic. Mostly, he reads. He criticizes the modern language-learning
paradigm of shopping, migration, and tourism that artist Rainer Ganahl identifies as characteristic of our era. Instead, he longs to learn languages for the reasons
that drove monks and philologists centuries ago, a semimystical desire to touch the origins of literary texts. It dates, he said, from adolescence. He read many authors in translation, but “felt even then that I was not doing them
justice,” he told me. “For I seem to have an ingrained dictum that if something is worth reading, then it is worth reading as the author wrote it.”
I, too, desired an encounter with some harder proof of his proficiency than a library of books, but he declined to have his proficiency or his aptitude tested. No scientific test can capture his experiences, he said. I brought it up a few times, then
dropped it. I figured I could find someone else to test.
Alexander and Helen are both very good at managing the filters their native language makes them hurdle when they are learning new sounds and words; it was harder for me to tell how well they could deal with the word orders of new languages, which had also stumped Christopher. Believing that language learning isn’t easy and takes work, they
commit themselves to using their time efficiently. With a balance of motivation and aptitude, they know how they learn and how languages tend to work. That demonstration of expertise—something they’d undoubtedly achieved after lots of hard work—might, in some people’s thinking, make some organic advantage unnecessary. After all, there were tragic turns in their lives that languages assuaged. In
addition to Alexander and Helen, Ken Hale had suffered the extended illness of a sibling and the turning away of parental attention. Even Elihu Burritt, the Yankee polyglot, appeared to take up languages partly to compete with his deeply loved older brother, partly to grieve when his brother succumbed to fever in Texas.
Yet I couldn’t escape the sense that Alexander and Helen and all the others
were somehow beyond expertise. Experts who hadn’t sought expertise. They
loved
languages, not as a writer or poet loves a turn of phrase, a way of making meter or rhyme; they loved them as objects—or, rather, they loved the encounters, both occasional and sustained, with those objects. Does the expert surgeon love the scalpel and the tissues it parts? Does the expert programmer love the code?
There was also the way they persisted, despite social isolation and economic hardship (more so in Alexander’s case). True, they seemed
sustained by pride. What else? It wasn’t money or achievement they were after. Burritt had described his achievements to an admirer as the result of a “plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap—particle by particle, thought by
thought, fact by fact.” Why would Burritt have submitted to anthood if he didn’t find some pleasure in it? By “pleasure,” I mean the thrill their neurological systems get when they put sentences together, parse sounds, choose words. I mentioned this to someone, who laughed and asked, isn’t all pleasure neurological? Sure, I replied. Anyone who learns another language or two has to appreciate this
at some level. And the hyperpolyglots, they
really
seek it out. I think the usual way to make sense of this is to say, of course they enjoy it, they’re good at it. But this seemed backward to me. Why not acknowledge an inherent pleasure that initiates the journey to success?
I found one answer in the work of Ellen Winner, a psychologist at Boston College, who works with exceptionally artistic
children. She identified one of their attributes as a “rage to master.” This is, she says, the drive to immerse one’s self in a particular area because one enjoys both the cognitive problems it poses and the experience of solving them. In Winner’s formulation, one doesn’t develop expertise because one works hard; one works hard at tasks that one finds rewarding, causing expertise to emerge, over
time.
As Winner argues, precocity and talent have an innate, biological component. Even if you can’t locate them precisely in the brain—after all, only a few of the really complex cognitive processes can be located this way—that doesn’t mean these differences don’t exist. Artistically talented children learn more rapidly than others; they make their own discoveries, without much help from adults;
and they do things that ordinary artists their own age don’t do. For example, their drawings are more realistic and reproduce volume and relative size more accurately than those of their normal peers, even if all of them have had the same amount of explicit instruction. Most important, as Winner puts it, is that “they are intrinsically motivated to acquire skill in the domain (because of the
ease with which learning occurs).”
Does the structure of the hyperpolyglot brain give its owner a boost?
Do these people use neural circuits more efficiently, or create more of these circuits than other people? Maybe their sleep consolidates their long-term memories more effectively. Maybe their bodies produce more neurotransmitters, or are more sensitive to them. Contemporary knowledge about
the brain offered any number of possibilities. Alexander and Helen had hyperpolyglot brains worth looking at, but they were still using them. Perhaps a brain preserved in a jar would provide suitable answers.
And the good news was, I had just found one.
Part 3
REVELATION:
The Brain Whispers
Chapter 10
I
n May of 1917, Emil Krebs, a German diplomat and hyperpolyglot, arrived in San Francisco with his wife, Amande, and her two daughters. Known to be a cranky, unpleasant person, he ranted about the storm clouds of war that greeted them. For the last two months, they’d been on a Dutch steamer escaping from China, where he’d been posted. Eastbound on the steamer, they heard via radio that
the United States had declared war on Germany. He might have feared that when they landed, they would become prisoners of war, but a diplomatic deal was arranged: the family could journey to the East Coast to catch a ship to Europe, but they would have to travel in a sealed train car across the United States. No visitors, no exits, not even windows, for an entire week. Which was fine—bookish Krebs
had his whole library with him and probably would have paid little attention to the rugged landscape unrolling before his eyes.
He was a man with many languages traveling across a country that was on its own journey to having only English. The United States was in the middle of a transformation from a proud, mostly tolerant polyglot land to a xenophobic, English-speaking one—a change that found
its final hastening in the very conflict between the United States and the government of Kaiser William II that Krebs represented.
Had Krebs toured San Francisco, where several generations of Chinese
speakers lived, he could have conversed in the many languages from China, his specialty. Krebs didn’t know any indigenous American languages, which once numbered in the many dozens in California,
making it for a time one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. Linguists now figure that as late as 1800, more than 100 languages were spoken in the area that would become the state. In fact, when Europeans arrived in the Americas, the northern and southern continents contained half of the entire world’s linguistic diversity, an estimated 1,800 languages in all.
As the train
crossed the Midwest, it went through towns and cities full of Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, Pennsylvania Dutch, Polish, Italians, Greeks, living their lives in their native tongues, publishing newspapers, educating their children, going to church—and eventually learning English. In 1910, there were 13 million white immigrants over the age of ten in the United States. Most spoke English, German, Italian,
Yiddish, Polish, or Swedish as a mother tongue; and 23 percent of the population reported that they couldn’t speak English at all. (The number wouldn’t be this high again until 1990, when 26 percent reported not speaking English well or at all.) Native Americans had been forcibly educated in English since the 1870s and even earlier, but the sounds of proud immigrant cultures were just now being
silenced.
In the throes of anti-German mania after the declaration of war, American patriots outlawed the teaching of the German language, regulated German newspapers, and burned German books. In South Dakota and Iowa, the governors proclaimed that it was illegal to speak any language but English over the telephone or in public places. Children took oaths of loyalty to English. In 1910, 433 German-language
newspapers were published every week; by 1960, the number had fallen to 29.
Had Krebs known about disappearing languages in the country he was crossing, as a language lover, he might have mourned their loss. Like Mezzofanti, he was a carpenter’s child, and similarly, his passion for languages launched itself. Somewhere he found an old French newspaper, and two weeks after a teacher gave him a
French dictionary, he showed up at the teacher’s desk speaking French. No parent as a model. No
multilingual community. He simply bent toward foreign languages as a sunflower leans to find the sun.
By the end of high school, he is said to have spoken twelve of them. After law school, he went to the Foreign Office school for interpreters in Berlin and was asked which language he wanted to study.
By then, he had studied Latin, Greek, French, and Hebrew in school, and Modern Greek, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Arabic, and Turkish on his own. I want to learn all of them, he replied.
You can’t learn them all, he was told.
“Okay,” Krebs reportedly said. “I want to learn the hardest one.”
That was Mandarin Chinese. He began Chinese courses in 1887 and took (and passed) his
first exam in 1890. In 1893, he became a diplomatic translator for the growing German presence in the Chinese cities of Tsingtao and Beijing, and took two further exams in 1894 and 1895, receiving the rating of “good.” By 1901, he’d risen to the rank of chief interpreter. There his language abilities brought him literally to the seat of Chinese imperial power.