Authors: Michael Erard
Not to be underestimated is the way that the informational richness of language arises out of a finite set of basic units. While the average number of consonants in a language is about twenty-two, and the average number of vowels is five or six,
*
the possible combinations of these are vast. According to language typologists, there are seven basic ways of arranging subjects,
verbs, and objects in sentences (the great majority put the subject first),
†
and there are only six kinds of words for
no
.
‡
(Other ways, if they existed, probably went extinct.)
Let’s say that not only are you a systemizer, but also that you’re shy. The subtleties of social interaction challenge and maybe frustrate you. One response is simple: avoid people. The other response is to undertake
language in a way that makes it the physics of people, tracking the inputs and outputs of sociability and relationships. If you lack a strong ability to empathize with other people, you might use your feel for language’s systemic qualities as a crutch. As a result, over a lifetime, your explorations make you intimate with languages rather than with the people who speak them. Yet the dominant paradigm
of language learning of your age stresses communication, so you spend time communicating. You haven’t abandoned empathizing; you’re simulating an empathizer’s tools.
A few other cognitive abilities accompany your systemizing. One is memory, perhaps a powerful declarative memory and a durable phonological loop. You also have muscular executive function skills. But neither of these really hooks
up to your systemizing tendencies. What
does, however, is that you’re able to manipulate the plasticity of your brain. For adults, plasticity must be regulated with various “brakes,” such as regulating new cell growth and manipulating the electrical patterns between neurons.
Scientists are now homing in on ways to biochemically provoke critical periods and their “exuberant plasticity.” (Currently,
it’s the vision system that’s best studied; experts presume the same mechanisms also apply to language.) These manipulations are biochemical, and can come from outside or inside the body. Those from the body itself we can find ways to stimulate. As Daphne Bavelier, a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester, wrote in a 2010 article, “It would be ideal to endogenously recapitulate brain
states conducive to plasticity in a noninvasive but targeted manner.” In other words, it would be good if you could trigger mental states that are beneficial to learning without doing anything too drastic to the body. Which might produce a monster.
One such noninvasive method—immersive activities—can trigger better learning. In the visual realm, this is done through video games, especially action
video games. At a biochemical level, such intense activity over long periods of time involves neurotransmitters, especially the dopamine that signals that a certain behavior is enjoyable. “Gaming is also associated with ‘flow,’ or the sense that one is able to meet the challenges of one’s environment with appropriate skills,” Bavelier wrote. This flow triggers biochemical factors that encourage
plasticity. This notion of flow is “characterized by a deep sense of enjoyment which goes beyond satisfying a need, and rather occurs when a person achieves something unexpected that has a sense of novelty.” The promise of this line of inquiry, says Bavelier, is that they are no longer isolating external or internal factors, but attempting to see how the two sets interact.
In the realm of language,
no one knows what optimal organization of cells in the brain should give one the greatest language learning capacity. But we can recognize that hyperpolyglots undoubtedly have an ability to flow with language material. Otherwise, they wouldn’t persist in repetitious activities that bore most other people.
The two questions I’m most often asked about hyperpolyglots are why and how they pursue
languages the way they do. I held off answering both questions for some time, worried that I didn’t know enough or that I’d get swamped in biographical particulars and lose a chance at the big picture. I imagined the Italian librarian Franco Pasti punching me in the shoulder, saying, “It was a case study.
A case study
.”
I was right to be apprehensive, because humans seem to be hardwired to prefer
reductive explanations. There is no core to the hyperpolyglot phenomenon. By investigating and explaining the origins of hyperpolyglottism, I discovered that the brain, culture, and individual biography interact with each other to produce someone like Mezzofanti or Graham Cansdale. A person’s type of personality doesn’t predict whether or not they’ll be good at learning languages (though, contrary
to the conventional wisdom, introverts are consistently more successful than extroverts).
Cultural background does play a role by incubating cognitive assets and giving talents resources on which to grow. Historical and economic forces also make up an important part of the story, not only by determining which languages one learns and what one does with them, but by calling forth and channeling
the neurological traits that serve learning, speaking, and using a lot of languages. Such forces also shape who happens to have access to what opportunities for school, travel, and even literacy. Recall how European wars provided Mezzofanti with sick soldiers in polyglot hospitals, and how European colonialism gave young Cameroonian men the need to learn more languages.
Clearly, the brain is
an important part of the story, and hyperpolyglots seem to have unusual neurological origins. Maybe this looks like a nostalgic return to the era when people believed in elite brains, but it’s not. The new neuroscience is locating the neural signatures of high performance, figuring out how to manipulate the plasticity of specific brain systems, and trying to understand the genetic factors that impact
cognitive abilities as well as disabilities.
I’m describing a neural tribe that existed before but has been made more visible by cultural trends. The polyglot ambition has intensified at the same time that technology has enabled its fulfillment. I’ve tried to describe how foreign-language learning has taken different forms
throughout history—and how, in some cultures, people’s brains were occupied
with very different sorts of cognitive feats. I’ve also tried to account for the way certain abilities have been recognized as talents or impairments depending on their context. And I’ve tried to explain why people in multilingual societies tend to learn far fewer languages than exist in their surroundings.
Hyperpolyglots are made when the linguistic world order gets into certain brains and when
certain brains are projected into any given linguistic world order. Hyperpolyglots can’t help but be linguistic outsiders, because they’re multilinguals who learn more languages than they need to participate in their immediate community but far fewer than they need to participate in an imagined global community. To the degree that they’re already educated elites, they’re people for whom the exercise
of neuroplasticity is
elective,
not required. English is spoken so commonly throughout the world that if one is already a mother-tongue English speaker, pursuing other languages is something of a luxury, in global terms.
When you look at brain plasticity in the context of the global economy, the questions “Why do they do it?” and “How do they do it?” take on a deeper meaning.
Why do they do
it?
In order to improve their neuroplasticity.
How do they do it?
By improving their neuroplasticity.
They’re not ashamed that they’ll never sound like native speakers. Rather, they fear being
only
native speakers. They don’t care that there’s no polyglot community—being outside of a speech community is exactly the point.
What about the rest of us? We resign ourselves to stiff brains. We remain
happy as linguistic insiders, staying safely where we feel we belong.
Part 5
ARRIVAL:
The Hyperpolyglot of Flanders
Chapter 18
A
s far as I can tell, the neural tribe of hyperpolyglots has been gathered only twice, both times in Belgium. Through a bit of luck, I found the name of the man who had brought them together.
His name was Eugeen Hermans, and I met him in the town square of Leuven, a university town near Brussels, where we sat outside at a café. Bald and handsomely craggy, he was born in 1943 and is
retired now, with fond memories of his career as the principal of a language school in Hasselt, where Flemish businessmen came to find more outlets for their goods and housewives came to broaden their minds. In 1986, he told me, he attended a party with a US consul fluent in seven languages. He can’t be the only man in the world apart from the Belgians and perhaps the Norwegians and the Dutch who
speaks a lot of foreign languages, Hermans thought. Why don’t I try to discover if there are other people like him? Let’s start with Flanders and see.
After finding a bank to cosponsor the contest, Hermans held a press conference to call for contestants who had oral skills in at least seven languages. He set some thorough, if not ingenious, rules: none could be dialects; all had to be ones that
a government would vouch for. No dead languages allowed. None could be artificial languages (Esperanto was out). Even with these restrictions, Hermans had to telephone-screen all
the people who wanted to participate in order to pare down the entries to twenty-six contestants who were to be tested in a pool of forty-seven languages. The judges could award up to twenty points in each language, and
could also dock points for ignorance. A Dutch speaker might try to fake his way through Afrikaans, a related dialect (though a national language, so it qualified), but if he couldn’t speak it to the judge’s satisfaction, he lost points. Overall, the point scheme gave several routes to a win. One could accrue many points in relatively few languages. Or one could accrue fewer points per language
over a larger number of them.
Hermans knew he’d achieved something special, bringing members of the tribe together in this way. “You had people meeting each other who were in their environment seen as a kind of rarity, who suddenly found themselves with kindred spirits, with people who were more or less alike, interested in the same thing, having the same skills,” he said. “They all had the greatest
respect for each other.”
I asked him if he knew what sort of person the winner might be.
He said he had seen so many students at his school who spoke five, six languages, and he assumed the winner would be one of them. He was surprised, he said, by the person who won.
Among the polyglots, myth is the uncanny double of science. To help me navigate their qualities, I turned, every once in a while,
to a book by a French zoologist named Bernard Heuvelmans,
On the Track of Unknown Animals,
where he argued that undiscovered big mammals could still be discovered—if zoologists were willing to listen to folktales.
Consider the okapi, a four-legged animal native to Central Africa. Depending on how familiar you are with African mammals, the okapi looks like either a tan zebra with an unusually
long neck or a giraffe with an unusually short one. They’re staple exotics in modern zoos. But what the zoo’s information plaques won’t tell you is that Western naturalists of the nineteenth century once denied that the okapi could be real. They believed that African tribesman had concocted them or had simply seen a mutant zebra. Once zoologists touched okapi skins and then witnessed actual animals
with their own eyes, the creatures were accepted as a new species. Heuvelmans discussed other cases, the brown bear
of Kamchatka, the mountain gorilla, the Komodo dragon, the bonobo, and the coelacanth, all creatures whose existences were long doubted by scientists but attested to by local people. He had unrelenting faith in scientific progress, but he had a somewhat cynical view of scientists
themselves, who (in his opinion) lacked his sense that lost worlds might still exist. To find those creatures, you had to be willing to listen to the locals. Though a scientist himself, Heuvelmans was comfortable living with mythologies. I had to learn the same.
I set out to write
Babel No More
along the lines of a book about, say, some fabled creature like the Loch Ness monster. Such a book
would acknowledge the tangle of myth, history, and science behind the monster by investigating old reports of monster sightings, reports which, for any number of reasons, crumble under inspection. Off the author goes to Loch Ness itself, where cameras and sonar are unpacked, crews are assembled, locals interviewed. The author goes out in a boat, crisscrosses the waters, hoping for that crucial face-to-face
encounter with the beast. The author does learn what it’s like to be on the water, which he rather enjoys, and he likes the culture of Nessie searchers, with their self-serious testing of myth and folklore. From this experience the author develops a list of questions and a set of conclusions about more ordinary forms of biological diversity. He returns from his wanderings enlightened, engaged.
But not with the creature in a cage.
Proceeding along those same lines, I came to feel that Heuvelmans was a kindred spirit. However, my project differs from the standard cryptozoological account in this main respect: I made a real discovery, and that discovery was not a single species but an entire tribe.
Recall that I wanted a modern figure, someone with oral skills (not just a reader or translator)
whose abilities had been not merely reported by observers or claimed by the speaker but evaluated by a range of educated observers. I wanted evidence, the results to the natural experiment of hyperpolyglottery, and the answer to the question, What is the upper limit of the ability to learn and speak languages?
Johan Vandewalle, possibly a twenty-first-century Emil Krebs, had been in and out of
the media since 1987, but he proved elusive. He didn’t return my emails begging him for an interview, and when I took the direct route and phoned him, the man who answered pointed to his
website, which is in Dutch. The German newspapers at the time of the contest had portrayed him as a solitary young man, a trained engineer obsessed with languages. I wanted to gently prod that image and get his
perspective on the Flanders contest. I finally got in touch through his wife, and we arranged a meeting in the small city of Aalst, near Brussels, where he lives.