Authors: Michael Erard
Hence, Alexander’s success with his shadowing technique. Shadowing involves
trying to pronounce the sounds of a foreign language (usually from a recording) at the same instant that one hears them. I’ve tried it and can say that the effect is intense, and very different from the “listen and repeat” format. Shadowing may exploit a mental routine for storing information called the “phonological loop,” which is the part of working memory devoted to speech sounds. Someone’s
ability to automatically remember and accurately repeat nonsense words is a good predictor of foreign-language ability. The converse is also true: people with a disrupted or damaged phonological loop can’t learn new foreign
words. If you shadow, you’re relying on the loop; shadow a lot, and you can build the loop’s strength.
Of the other components of aptitude—the ability to analyze grammar and
the ability to learn new words—word learning has been more thoroughly studied, because more is known about where these abilities are located in the brain. Here, too, there are distinct neural signatures of higher performance. A team from Germany observed that people better at acquiring new words had more sustained activity in one part of the brain, the hippocampus (which is heavily involved in
long-term memory). The authors speculated that brains vary in how they respond to the tasks of learning languages because there may be differences in the hippocampus, how the hippocampus attaches to the white matter, or what they called “genetic differences in neurotransmitter functions.”
In reality, no one would say that language talents reside solely in one area of the brain. Susanne Reiterer
says that a talent for mimicry isn’t a “splinter skill”—her high performers had higher levels of performance in other language abilities, which suggests they’re tied together and involve many parts of the brain. The roles of the phonological loop and working memory suggest that higher-level cognitive skills play a huge role both in learning a sole extra language very well and in learning many languages.
And since the biological basis of these skills is hereditary, whole families might belong to the hyperpolyglot neural tribe.
The idea of a genetic component to hyperpolyglottism is supported by evidence that cognitive capacities, such as working memory, executive function, and memory, as well as structural capacities such as plasticity, are hereditary. Back in 2004, when Dick Hudson sent news
about N. and his family to the LINGUIST List, one of the respondents was Richard Sproat, a linguist now at the Oregon Health and Science University, who was intrigued by the possibility that language talent itself might be a heritable trait. Since the 1990s, scientists have linked language deficits to a genetic component, as in the case of the KE family, whose inability to produce certain grammatical
expressions led to the location of a gene called FOXP2 in the mid-1990s, and a specific mutation of that gene in 2001.
But when it comes to an exceptional language talent, rather than a
deficit, it is difficult to get families to sign up for a genetic study, perhaps because they don’t need to be cured of anything. Sproat exchanged a few emails with N., but then the replies stopped. When I contacted
N. myself, he said he had discussed the issue with his family and did not want to be interviewed.
Before N. stopped writing, however, he did offer Sproat a few more details about his globe-trotting polyglot grandfather. “When we arrived in Thailand, I was sure he did not know any of the language,” N. said. But after two weeks his grandfather was arguing with market vendors in Thai. In the late
1960s, N. spent eighteen months in Thailand with the US military, where he learned some of the language. When he later tried conversing with his grandfather in Thai, N. said, “he was able to communicate on a higher level than I knew.”
N.’s disappearance is frustrating because in his original message, he mentioned another member of his family: a seven-year-old granddaughter. “She can count in
three languages up to one hundred and she is able to pick out words spoken in other languages in public and tell you what they mean,” he wrote. N. and his hyperpolyglot family may have retreated from public view for now. But they, and others like them, could provide more fascinating insights into the language abilities we all have.
If the language superlearner’s brain has a kind of optimal design,
could someone gain advantage by mimicking that design? The US military is particularly interested in neuroenhancements that target language learning. I came across a report that mused on the impact such enhancements would have on military forces and called for more research into improving a variety of cognitive abilities in adults, including learning multiple languages.
At the conference where
I met Susanne Reiterer, I was surprised to learn about a technology called transcranial direct current stimulation (or, tDCS), which could be deployed widely tomorrow. Using a small device that’s simple enough to make at home (you need only a 9-volt battery, electrodes, and resistors), you can deliver very small amounts of electricity to areas of your brain through your skull. Depending on how you
set the current, you can either stimulate or suppress how strongly
neurons fire. If the electrode is attached to the positive part of the battery, the neurons are stimulated; if attached to the negative part, the neurons’ firing is suppressed. Electrical charges could help adults manage their brain plasticity by removing some of the brakes that curtail plasticity in adulthood.
In some initial
studies to test the safety of this device, people who received currents from the positive part of the battery could recall new nonsense words 20 percent better than people who got sham currents or who received currents from the negative part of the battery. After a week, the positive effect had disappeared. In another study, people’s abilities to generate words that started with a particular letter
increased by 20 percent as well. Direct current has also been shown to increase people’s visual memory by 110 percent.
Before you rush out to buy batteries and electrodes, you ought to know that the electrodes deliver electricity to the brain haphazardly. Biomedical engineers have tracked where this electricity flows in the skull, and it goes all over, flowing through eyesockets and pooling under
the frontal lobe. A cranium full of sustained electrical charge could have a range of unpredictable effects.
Still, 20 percent increases are substantial, especially if they come after only a twenty-minute exposure to the device. Would anyone try it? I asked Helen Abadzi (who had an appetite for technologies that assisted her language learning) if she’d try tDCS. She replied that she’d worry about
safety risks, especially since the improvements aren’t huge. If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum.
Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a person’s immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew the gum as you are studying; for some reason you can’t merely move
your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases one’s recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum (on the brain-as-globe it sits under eastern Europe), where attention
is controlled.
I collected other manipulations that some people mentioned off-handedly.
For instance, oxytocin, the so-called love hormone. Children learn best in environments in which they’re ideally bonded with caregivers, which means that a lot of oxytocin reception is going on. Maybe, someone said, you could sniff oxytocin before a language class to boost memory function.
Also, dopamine.
This is a neurotransmitter that signals pleasure in the brain, but it also has important connections to cognitive functions. It’s even been suggested that declining dopamine levels—a symptom of age—are partly responsible for shutting down brain plasticity in language learning. Manipulating these dopamine levels as you learn might allow you to better retain new words.
Manipulating hippocampal
activity also makes language learning easier. One way to stimulate the hippocampus is to take amphetamines. In one experiment, use of d-amphetamine and levodopa (a precursor to the production of dopamine, and used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease) accelerated vocabulary learning by 20 percent in healthy subjects. The converse has also been shown: if you suppress hippocampal activity with certain
drugs, you can retard associative learning.
Then there are interventions so bold they can only be done on animals. Injections of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (or, BDNF), which plays a crucial role in helping to shape long-term memories, may improve the ability of rats to navigate mazes. Because physical exercise increases BDNF secretions, at least in rats, this may help
explain why exertion improves memory (though it has also been suggested that the memory boost comes from adrenaline).
While it’s interesting to speculate about potential neuroenhancers for language learning, the conclusions remain elusive. Caterina Breitenstein, the German neuroscientist who tested d-amphetamine and levodopa, said that the substances in her studies produced rather subtle effects.
And not all of the subjects responded to the substances. Presumably, users would want pharmaceutical enhancers to work reliably to be worth any potential side effects.
But could you design a hyperpolyglot in vitro? John Schumann, UCLA applied linguist, equivocated.
“I suppose at some time in the future, it might be possible to enhance the chemical milieu in the womb of a mother as the child
is developing,”
he replied, “and direct a large number of neurons to the left hemisphere language areas.” There was one problem: you might not produce a hyperpolyglot. The brain is a leaky thing, not a precise machine at all, he noted. You couldn’t be sure what you were setting into motion. A bad science fiction plot, for sure.
“If you enhanced aspects of Wernicke’s area, you might produce a
good signer, or a guy with particularly acute hearing. Broca’s is a motor area, a pattern-learning area. The guy could turn into somebody who could count cards at a casino.” Then he said something that chilled me. “I’m not sure how this could be enhanced,” he said, “without creating a potential monster.” And we ignore the tissues of causality at our peril.
Some studies of successful language
learners have suggested that they’re more “open to new experiences” than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that’s bound up in our native language, a “language ego,” which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound
not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.
Such permeability was reflected in answers I received through my online survey. Wrote one person (a native English-speaking male who lives in Taiwan and says he speaks twenty languages), “You have to be a good observer and you have to be able to act and mimic the way others talk, not just accent but body language and
intonation and pitch. Most language learners feel embarrassed with this ‘acting’ and so are blocked from the start from achieving much. Just start by doing this and you’ll really go far in your language pursuits. Because it’s the adoption of a new identity for yourself.”
He added, “I am the epitome of adaptation. Most people who encounter me cannot guess where I’m from because my whole body and
actions adopt the culture that I’m in.” Someone else wrote, “The good language learner has the ability to accept the role of a child when it comes to speaking/writing a new language. Of being naïve, foolish, stumbling, and inarticulate but also curious, open-minded, and full of energy.”
It struck me that the archetypal hyperpolyglot could be a kind of Peter Pan. As long as you’re a neophyte in
a given language, you never have to present an adult self in it. You’ll never be judged for not knowing what an adult would do. Maybe, like Peter Pan himself, you’re avoiding reality. And, getting a bit psychoanalytic here, you’re revisiting your infant experiences at the maternal lips and ears, that time when the boundaries between yourself and others was more fluid.
But the neural tribe theory
suggests that psychological traits—such as ego boundaries and neuroses—don’t define the hyperpolyglot, given that cognitive abilities and styles play a bigger role in successful outcomes. It’s true that, for some hyperpolyglots, such as Alexander and Ken Hale, delving into language was a response to an emotional trauma. That may be where an identity as a language learner saved them. Yet the question
remains: Why did they turn to language? It’s useful, I think, to look at some properties of language in order to see how attractive it could be to people who fit Baron-Cohen’s definition of systemizers.
To the mind of a systemizer, language’s capacity to be ordered is immediately apparent, and lends itself to myriad combinations that can never be fully explored. Some of the order you can impose:
you could decide to list all the words you know according to the sounds they start with, the number of syllables in them, when you learned them, how often they’re used, what they mean, or which ones in different languages mean the same thing. You can also tally up words, pages, minutes, hours, idioms, errors, parts of speech: How many nouns do you know? How many verbs? And if you get bored with
that, you can alphabetize your dictionaries, grammars, and phrase books, or organize them by language family, genre, or publisher.
You can also observe patterns, attempt to “crack the code” and derive rules, make predictions, and look for exceptions. Learning a language involves technical systems of repeating written or spoken words and sentences. These may be borrowed and adopted (by a language-learning
tool, such as Assimil, Pimsleur, or Rosetta Stone) or invented (as in the cases of Lomb Káto and Alexander). They can test the way their brain performs, given its inputs, and how well it links to the tongue and hands. Language is also a natural system: you can watch children acquire it,
much as you can reflect on your own acquisition and your inevitable loss. It’s a social system, linked to cultures,
nations, and regions.