Authors: Michael Erard
I’d started out looking for what the human limits might be in practice, not in theory. The hypothetical immortal with a
million lifetimes to learn everything adds about as much understanding to the phenomenon as the native speaker of one language does—it tells us that exceptional language learning takes place within the very real constraints of our
very real world. Since that’s the case, we should look to real hyperpolyglots and the results of their natural experiment.
Because working memory capacity is finite,
one could predict that there should be a limit to how many languages someone can keep active. Lomb Kató described active languages as the ones that “lived” inside of her; Claire Kramsch described them as languages one “resonate[d]” with. Indeed, if you want to understand the upper limits of language
control
rather than language
learning
or
memory,
you should look to the hyperpolyglots, too. Lomb
said she only had five languages “living” inside her; Cox told me he could switch back and forth only in seven. Gunnemark reported being fluent in six.
Presumably, they could have controlled more languages if they needed them, given that they claimed to have “surge” languages as well. These seem to range between five and nine, though hyperpolyglots are able to manage more for short periods of
time. When Helen Abadzi worked as an interpreter at the Athens Olympics, she said she worked in ten languages simultaneously, but she carried a PDA loaded with dictionaries. There was also the polyglot contest she’d participated in—to win that, you’d have to keep many languages powered up for at least a day or two (but not longer).
Such a limit has been proposed before. Psychologist and Russian
hyperpolyglot hunter Dimitri Spivak deemed it “the rule of 7.” For his book
Kak stat’ poliglotom
(or “How One Becomes a Polyglot,” which is only available in Russian), Spivak interviewed polyglots across Russia and asked how many languages they felt they really knew. Though his rule is disputed, no one has offered counterevidence. Spivak adds that it doesn’t matter if the languages are spoken
or written: “The brain tends to treat each set of homogeneous units as a simple set,” he said in an email. “There’s no substantial difference between storing or recalling from long-term memory seven languages, or seven systems of writing.”
The question is, Why is there a limit at all? One scientific model of these working memory limits suggests that items in memory begin to compete with each
other, endangering the mind’s ability to keep any one item in clear view. Scientists don’t really know why there’s a limit; it doesn’t appear to confer any evolutionary advantage. However, it bolsters the conclusion by linguist Peter Skehan that talented language learners (like C.J. and Christopher) are “memory-driven learners.” They can put a lot of things into
memory and retain them. They can
also retrieve them efficiently without mixing them up. It doesn’t explain how Mezzofanti was able to maneuver so sprightly among his languages, though. Perhaps there are undiscovered individuals out there with more powerful working memories.
“I don’t know many women who collect stamps or coins,” Alexander said to me on one of my visits. He wanted to know if I had ever considered polyglottery
as a kind of collecting behavior, perhaps an obsessive one. Maybe it would explain why so many hyperpolyglots were men.
Only one famous hyperpolyglot that I’d read about, George Henry Borrow (1803–1881), who had studied forty-two languages, seemed to fit the profile of someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a psychiatric illness that affects about 1 to 3 percent of adults. Borrow had
to touch a series of mundane objects in the correct sequence; otherwise, he feared, something would happen to his mother.
Other hyperpolyglots had a touch of this, too. Alexander keeps records—overdetailed ones, some might say—and became visibly agitated if he hadn’t put in time on his languages. There was also Elihu Burritt’s rigid accounting of studying and blacksmithing, and Christopher, and
Krebs. Certainly there were care and focus, but none of them was crippled by a compulsion.
I also didn’t meet a hyperpolyglot who resembled a chronic hoarder, who collect such huge masses of worthless items (newspapers, food, scrap metal, car parts, matchbooks) that it interferes with their daily lives and their families. They do take pride in the grammars and dictionaries they amass. Yet stacks
of books, as a mere fact, point to bibliophilia, not hyperpolyglottery. The hoarders I read about in the research literature can’t turn away from their junk long enough to have a normal life.
Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing. In addition to my survey of hyperpolyglots, I had one set up for monolinguals, too. By chance,
perhaps, this one was answered mostly by women, more than 30 percent of whom said they’d studied three languages or more, though the survey asked for people who spoke only one. It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she “speaks” or “knows” a language if she studied it at some
point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it.
The Geschwind-Galaburda
hypothesis interested me the most: the idea that because male hormones in the fetus affect the developing brain, the effects of asymmetrical development of brain hemispheres would be seen mostly in males. Females also have male hormones, but they have fewer and would be less affected.
Male brains. Hormones. This brought me directly to the doorstep of the very thing I’d avoided all along.
Does
the hyperpolyglot neural tribe overlap with the autistic population? Like many good questions, it has its traps. After all, there have been some high-profile autistic savants who’ve performed impressive language feats. Daniel Tammet, a writer and educator with high-functioning autism, once was challenged to learn Icelandic in two weeks and then went on Icelandic television to speak it. Intriguingly,
Karl Zilles had mentioned that Emil Krebs seemed like someone with Asperger’s. Yet I didn’t want to get caught up in people’s medical histories, making diagnoses I wasn’t qualified to make. Nor did I want to follow the fashion of seeing autism in every eccentric’s biography.
I thought I’d be able to recognize someone with autism or Asperger’s syndrome fairly easily—someone who seems very socially
awkward, with flat affect, who demands routine and fears deviations, and who might be able to perform brilliantly in some area, such as mental calculations. Admittedly, I had gotten this notion from the movie
Rain Man
. The autistic character that Dustin Hoffman plays, Raymond Babbitt, was in fact based on a real-life savant named Kim Peek, but no hyperpolyglot I spoke to resembled either Peek
or Hoffman’s portrayal of him.
Yet they could be called “neuroatypical.” And part of their neuroatypicality might come from something shared with autism, particularly high-functioning autists. British psychologist and autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen has argued that autism represents the extreme form of a cognitive style that is adept at, and given to, “systemizing.” When someone systemizes, she
(or, more likely, he) is watching inputs and outputs to a system, relating the two, and observing how they vary.
Baron-Cohen defines systemizing as an attribute of the “male brain,” which more biological males have (he acknowledges that biological females can also have male brains). Hence Baron-Cohen’s “extreme male brain” theory of autism.
Perhaps a tendency to systemize would help explain why
scientists score higher than nonscientists on a test that measures autistic traits. It might also explain why mathematicians, physical scientists, computer scientists, and engineers score higher than doctors, veterinarians, and biologists. Baron-Cohen has also found that autism occurs more frequently in the offspring of physics, mathematics, and engineering students than it does of those of literature
students.
Baron-Cohen had also done some relevant work on the obsessional interests of children with autism, autism spectrum disorders, and Asperger’s syndrome. He hypothesized that systemizers would find mechanical systems more interesting than social systems. Or as he put it, they would be more readily interested in “folk physics”—a commonsense knowledge about how objects and systems behave
in the world—than in “folk psychology.” In a survey of children with Tourette’s, autism, or Asperger’s, the autistic children were more often obsessed with machines, vehicles, physical systems, computers, astronomy, building, spinning objects, and lights than with beliefs, crafts, food, or sports. They were also more obsessed with folk physics than the kids with Tourette’s.
Could language count
as an obsessional interest? Baron-Cohen asked parents whether their kids engaged in “echoing, collecting words, phrases, and learning languages.” Only a quarter of the children had this as an obsessional interest, about the same number as those obsessed with sports and games. The desire to make lists or “taxonomies” was three times as large; and surprisingly, only 35 percent of these systemizing
children were interested in mathematics and numbers.
This is a small point about people with autism. But it sheds some light on the sort of brains that might be extraordinary at learning languages.
Chapter 17
O
ne of my visits to Berkeley to see Alexander Arguelles coincided with a conference on brain mapping in San Francisco. As I rode the train across the bay from Berkeley, I hoped that I might find something there to help me connect what I knew about hyperpolyglots with what others knew about brains. At the conference, I was supposed to meet up with Susanne Reiterer, an Austrian neuroscientist
pursuing the neurological basis of what she calls “phonetic language talent.” Her specialty is a gift for mimicry: people who can “do voices,” parodists, actors. A vivacious brunette in dark-rimmed glasses, she described her own phonetic talent, and how her research is an attempt to explain it.
At her university in Germany, she and her research team have been comparing good mimics and bad mimics
using psychological tests and brain imaging. Some Germans without any Hindi skills could trick native speakers of Hindi into believing they were themselves Hindi speakers. Each of these exceptional mimics had strong verbal ability, good working memory, and a sophisticated ability to discriminate between musical tones and rhythms, particularly in singing.
She told me that before the study, they
had anticipated finding a lot of people like author Joseph Conrad—someone who adopted a new
language as an adult, but despite excellent grammatical abilities always spoke with a thick accent.
“We did not find too many clear-cut Joseph Conrads!” she told me. Instead, she observed cognitive trade-offs: someone who is particularly talented in acquiring grammar and words may be a poor mimic, for
example. She also found something distinct about the successful mimics’ brains. When she did fMRIs, she found that the talented mimics had lower levels of activation in brain regions related to speech—in essence, their brains didn’t have to try very hard because they used oxygen supplies efficiently. By contrast, the mimics who couldn’t fool native speakers (and who were presumably less talented)
used oxygen less efficiently—those regions had to work harder to produce speech.
Interestingly, the good mimics’ brains were more efficient whether they were speaking German (their native language) or producing English, Tamil, or Hindi sounds. And the less talented mimics used glucose and oxygen less efficiently when producing either language. Reiterer suspects there may be a structural difference
in the neural pathways of the more talented brains that leads to an enhanced connectivity among various parts of the brain during thinking tasks. In turn, this connectivity allows the neural circuits involved in language processing to work more efficiently.
Reiterer’s work addresses one component of language aptitude, the ability to hear and produce sounds. One specific brain area that may be
involved in this is the primary auditory cortex (also known as Heschl’s gyrus). On the brain-as-globe model, it’s located right around India. Neuroscientist Narly Golestani has studied the brain structure of phoneticians—those who work with speech sounds in a variety of languages that they don’t necessarily speak—and found their primary auditory cortexes to be anatomically more complex than those
in non-phonetician brains. Specifically, their cortexes have more finger-like convolutions, or gyri, made of white matter, which give them more surface area.
Unlike other kinds of brain differences (such as the arrangement of cell bodies in Krebs’s brain), it isn’t likely that this one can arise through practice or training; at least, no one has observed the human brain
growing convolutions in
this region after birth. This may explain why some people are more likely to take a job in phonetics. And it may further explain why some people find more pleasure in listening to foreign languages than others. In a previous study, Golestani looked at the brain structures of people who learned the sounds of a foreign language more quickly than other people. The faster learners’ brains had larger
left Heschl’s gyri, due to more white matter.
Another neural signature of highly proficient language learners has been located in the left insula, which lies somewhere (to use the brain-as-globe metaphor) under the Arabian Sea. While the insula is long regarded as a mysterious zone dealing with bodily functions, the era of brain scanning has discovered a new role for it: a control center for
emotions, consciousness, and working memory. The left insula has been shown in fMRI studies to activate more strongly in bilinguals who have equal abilities in their two languages.
*
In people whose languages aren’t equal, this area shows weaker levels of activation.
The left insula plays a key role in what’s known as “subvocal rehearsal.” One example of this rehearsal is the automatic process
of having a foreign-sounding word in your head before you actually say it. Thus, more active neural circuitry in this area might engrave new sounds into the brain more quickly or durably. “The successful engagement of such neural circuitry,” writes the lead researcher, Michael Chee, “may correspond to vocabulary growth.”