Babel No More (43 page)

139
Think of executive function as how you control your mental airspace: This metaphor comes from Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, Michael Erard, Adam Simon and Lynn Davey.
Air Traffic Control for Your Brain: Using a Simplifying Model to Clarify the Science of Executive Function
, (Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute, 2010).

139
“Standing that means
ständig ständig führen stein
”: Ellen Perecman, “Spontaneous Translation and Language Mixing in a Polyglot Aphasic,”
Brain and Language,
23 (1984), 51.

140
builds up a “reserve” that people carry into older age: See, for example, Ellen Bialystok, “Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism: How Linguistic Experience Leads to Cognitive
Change,”
The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
10:3 (2007), 210–23; Ellen Bialystok et al., “Bilingualism as a Protection Against the Onset of Symptoms of Dementia,”
Neuropsychologia,
45 (2007), 459–64.

142
one works hard at tasks that one finds rewarding: Ellen Winner,
Gifted Children: Myths and Realities
(New York: Basic Books, 1996), 146.

142
“they are intrinsically
motivated to acquire skill”: Ellen Winner, “The Rage to Master: The Decisive Role of Talent in the Visual Arts,” in K. Anders Ericsson (ed.),
The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 271–301.

PART 3 REVELATION: The Brain Whispers

Chapter 10

148
as late as 1800, more than 100 languages
were spoken: Lyle Campbell,
American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 16.

148
contained half of the entire world’s linguistic diversity: Lyle Campbell, personal communication, 2010.

148
living their lives in their native tongues: See Gillian Stevens. “A Century of US Censuses and the Language Characteristics of Immigrants,”
Demography,
36:3 (1999), 391.

148
23 percent . . . reported that they couldn’t speak English at all: Ibid. 394.

148
illegal to speak any language but English: Bill Piatt,
¿Only English? Law and Language Policy in the United States
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

148
By 1960, the number had fallen to 29: J. Holmquist,
They Chose Minnesota
(St. Paul, Minnesota Historical
Society Press, 2003), 178.

148
showed up at the teacher’s desk speaking French: Mazat, W. (2000).
“Emil Krebs (1867–1930), das Sprachwunder, Dolmetscher in Peking und Tsingtau. Eine Lebensskizze.”
(Wilhelm Matzat, “Emil Krebs (1867–1930) The Language Wonder—Interpreter in Peking and Tsingtau,”)
Bulletin of the German China Association,
1, 31–47.

149
By then, he had studied: Ibid., 1

149
“I
want to learn the hardest one”: Ibid., 2

149
One day an exacting Chinese imperial official: Krebs’s relationship with the Empress Dowager is described by Matzat, 7, quoting Ferdinand Lessing, “Emil Krebs,”
Ostasiatische Rundschau
(1930).

150
“a striking example of the linguistic outward-lookingness that has pervaded the Indian Ocean world”: Benjamin Zimmer, “Linguistic Imaginations of the Indian
Ocean World: Historical Viewpoints from Western Java,” Paper presented at the International Conference on Cultural Exchange and Transformation in the Indian Ocean World, 2002.

151
“Then he was a master of them too”: Werner Otto von Hentig, “Memories of Emil Krebs,” undated typescript.

152
He had translated the phrase: “Man Who Knew 65 Languages,”
Western Argus,
15 April, 1930, 26.

152
Hentig
described having to fetch Krebs for a meeting: Hentig, “Memories.”

152
With a book in hand, he walked around and around: This portrait is compiled from Hentig’s account.

153
His Tuscan dialect was so good: Ibid., 7.

153
“this wonderful talent bites its thumb”: Ibid., 15.

153
more daily newspapers published in other languages: “Polyglot America,”
The Brisbane Courier,
Feb. 14, 1929, 12.

153
cluster of real hyperpolyglots at Ellis Island: Barry Moreno, personal communication.

154
eventually was sold to the US Library of Congress: Shuzhao Hu,
The Development of the Chinese Collection in the Library of Congress
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979), 83–84. “While the bulk of his collection was devoted to rare lexicographical aids to the study of central European languages, the Chinese
items alone numbered 236 works in 1,620 volumes. They are richest in Chinese novels, popular lyrics, histories, government documents, and early examples of
pai-hua
(vernacular) literature.”

154
“surrendering to his great ambition for language study”: Eckhard Hoffmann
has written and talked about Krebs extensively; one example is available here:
http://ueberFlieger.qoalu.com/artikel/den-kopf-voller-sprachen
.

154
The request came from Oskar Vogt: E. G. Jones, “Review of
Cécile and Oskar Vogt: The Visionaries of Modern Neuroscience,
by Igor Klatzo,”
Nature,
421 (2003), 19–20.

154
“It also appeared a brilliant idea to obtain”: Igor Klatzko,
Cécile and Oskar Vogt: The Visionaries of Modern Neuroscience (Acta Neurochirurgica Supplement 80
) (New York: Springer Wien, 2002), 30.

Chapter 11

156
languages
are controlled in other places besides “Broca’s area”: Harry W. Whitaker, “Paul Broca,” in Robert Andrew Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.),
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
(Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2001), 97–98. See also F. Dronkers, O. Plaisant, M. T. Iba-Zizen, and E. A. Cabanis, “Paul Broca’s Historic Cases: High Resolution MR Imaging of the Brains of Leborgne and Lelong,”
Brain,
130:5 (2007), 1432–41.

158
“dual stream” model: Gregory Hickok and David Poeppel, “Dorsal and Ventral Streams: A Framework for Understanding Aspects of the Functional Anatomy of Language”:
Cognition,
92:1–2 (2004), 67–99.

158
engaged mainly on the left side of the brain: See, for example, G. Vingerhoets et al., “Multilingualism: An fMRI Study,”
NeuroImage
20 (2003), 2181–96. Also Rita Franceschini
et al., “Learner Acquisition Strategies (LAS) in the Course of Life: A Language Biographic Approach,” paper presented at the Second International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Trilingualism, Fryske Akademy, Sept. 13–15, 2001.

Chapter 12

161
galvanizing work that promised many answers: Katrin Amunts, A. Schleicher, and Karl Zilles, “Outstanding Language Competence and Cytoarchitecture
in Broca’s Speech Region,”
Brain and Language,
89 (2004), 346–53.

162
exploring the “neurological substrate” of talent: Loraine Obler and Deborah Fein (eds.),
The Exceptional Brain: Neuropsychology of Talent and Special Abilities
(New York: Guilford Press, 1988).

163
aren’t held back from hearing and producing: See, for example, B. McLaughlin and N. Nayak, “Processing a New Language: Does Knowing
Other Languages Make a Difference?” in H. W. Dechert and M. Raupach (eds.),
Interlingual Processes
(Tübingen: Narr, 1989), 5–16.

164
his answer was a resolute yes: Peter Skehan,
A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), 211.

164
They “would have a high range of lexicalized exemplars”: Ibid., 250.

164
“do not seem to have unusual abilities with respect
to input or central processing”: Ibid., 233.

165
part of the memory system that remembers facts and words, and which remains robust as one ages: This paragraph draws from Michael Ullmann’s
Declarative/Procedural Model, described in “A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Second Language Acquisition: The Declarative/Procedural Model,” in Cristina Sanz (ed.),
Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition: Methods, Theory, and Practice
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006), 141–78. His account contains many intriguing possibilities for understanding individual variations that might explain very high levels of language abilities, including gender differences and seasonal/hormonal effects, as well as chemical interventions for enhancing procedural and declarative memories.

165
they just have declarative memories with a lot of capacity: One possibility might be that language accumulators choose certain languages to compensate for relative limitations of procedural memory. That is, they would opt for inflected languages over isolating languages, the notion being that inflections encode grammatical relationships in the words themselves that would otherwise rely on
procedural memory. Of the 172 language repertoires I collected in my online survey, only 20 contained Mandarin. Moreover, only 5 had more than one Chinese language or other Southeast Asian language. Typical repertoires were ones like “Portuguese, English, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish” or “Hungarian, Serbian, German, English, Italian, Esperanto.” People were clearly choosing
languages whose words are combined of many smaller parts. (This doesn’t seem to explain Emil Krebs, however, whose mental resources weren’t exhausted by Chinese.) Surely this bias toward a certain type of language has partly to do with the fact that the survey circulated on English-language forums and blogs.

165
asymmetry could create clusters of talents and deficits: Norman Geschwind and A.
M. Galaburda, “Cerebral Lateralisation: Biological Mechanisms, Associations, and Pathology: I,”
Archives of Neurology,
42 (1985), 428–59; “Cerebral Lateralisation: Biological Mechanisms, Associations, and Pathology: II,”
Archives of Neurology,
42 (1985), 521–52; “Cerebral Lateralisation: Biological Mechanisms, Associations, and Pathology: III,”
Archives of Neurology,
42 (1985), 634–54.

167
left-handers
often reported having speech problems: K. M. Cornish, “The Geschwind and Galaburda Theory of Cerebral Lateralisation: An Empirical Evaluation of Its Assumptions,”
Current Psychology,
15:1 (1996), 68–76.

167
people with autism have higher rates of non-right-handedness: See Senole Dane and Nese Balci, “Handedness, Eyedness and Nasal Cycle in Children with Autism,”
International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience,
Vol. 25, No. 4 (2007), 223–26. Also, P. R. Escalante-Mead, N. J. Minshew, and J. A. Sweeney, “Abnormal brain lateralization in high-functioning autism,”
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders,
Vol. 3, No. 5, (2003), 539–543.

168
more males than females who perform both very high and very low: G. M. Grimshaw, G. Sitarenios, and J. K. Finegan, “Mental Rotation at 7 Years: Relations
with Prenatal Testosterone Levels and Spatial Play Experiences,”
Brain and Cognition
29 (1995), 85–100.

Chapter 13

173
the tool that Amunts used on Krebs’s brain slices: This project, called the Human Brain Mapping Initiative, constructs maps of the probability that any given point of a brain belongs to a certain named region. Such a mapping avoids
one of the pitfalls of traditional brain anatomy,
in which individual brains vary so much in size (ranging in weight from 1,000 grams to 1,700 grams) and in structure that the brain areas (such as Broca’s) don’t line up.

173
Amunts found that in Krebs’s brain: See Katrin Amunts, A. Schleicher, and Karl Zilles, “Outstanding Language Competence and Cytoarchitecture in Broca’s Speech Region,”
Brain and Language,
89 (2004), 346–53.