The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (9 page)

The cognitive psychologists Terry Au, Yohtaro Takano, and Lisa Liu were not exactly enchanted by these tales of the concreteness of the Oriental mind. Each one identified serious flaws in Bloom’s experiments. One problem was that his stories were written in stilted Chinese. Another was that some of the science stories turned out, upon careful rereading, to be genuinely ambiguous. Chinese college students tend to have more science training than American students, and thus they were
better
at detecting the ambiguities that Bloom himself missed. When these flaws were fixed, the differences vanished.

People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, or to talk to each other about the nature of thinking, we have to use—what else, words! It is no wonder that many commentators have trouble even conceiving of thought without words—or is it that they just don’t have the language to talk about it?

As a cognitive scientist I can afford to be smug about common sense being true (thought is different from language) and linguistic determinism being a conventional absurdity. For two sets of tools now make it easier to think clearly about the whole problem. One is a body of experimental studies that break the word barrier and assess many kinds of nonverbal thought. The other is a theory of how thinking might work that formulates the questions in a satisfyingly precise way.

We have already seen an example of thinking without language: Mr. Ford, the fully intelligent aphasic discussed in Chapter 2. (One could, however, argue that his thinking abilities had been constructed before his stroke on the scaffolding of the language he then possessed.) We have also met deaf children who lack a language and soon invent one. Even more pertinent are the deaf adults occasionally discovered who lack any form of language whatsoever—no sign language, no writing, no lip reading, no speech. In her recent book
A Man Without Words
, Susan Schaller tells the story of Ildefonso, a twenty-seven-year-old illegal immigrant from a small Mexican village whom she met while working as a sign language interpreter in Los Angeles. Ildefonso’s animated eyes conveyed an unmistakable intelligence and curiosity, and Schaller became his volunteer teacher and companion. He soon showed her that he had a full grasp of number: he learned to do addition on paper in three minutes and had little trouble understanding the base-ten logic behind two-digit numbers. In an epiphany reminiscent of the story of Helen Keller, Ildefonso grasped the principle of naming when Schaller tried to teach him the sign for “cat.” A dam burst, and he demanded to be shown the sign for all the objects he was familiar with. Soon he was able to convey to Schaller parts of his life story: how as a child he had begged his desperately poor parents to send him to school, the kinds of crops he had picked in different states, his evasions of immigration authorities. He led Schaller to other languageless adults in forgotten corners of society. Despite their isolation from the verbal world, they displayed many abstract forms of thinking, like rebuilding broken locks, handling money, playing card games, and entertaining each other with long pantomimed narratives.

Our knowledge of the mental life of Ildefonso and other languageless adults must remain impressionistic for ethical reasons: when they surface, the first priority is to teach them language, not to study how they manage without it. But there are other languageless beings who have been studied experimentally, and volumes have been written about how they reason about space, time, objects, number, rate, causality, and categories. Let me recount three ingenious examples. One involves babies, who cannot think in words because they have not yet learned any. One involves monkeys, who cannot think in words because they are incapable of learning them. The third involves human adults, who, whether or not they think in words, claim their best thinking is done without them.

The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has recently shown that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic. She used a technique common in infant perception research. Show a baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and looks away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference, he or she will regain interest. The methodology has shown that babies as young as five days old are sensitive to number. In one experiment, an experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object with an opaque screen. When the screen is removed, if the same object is present, the babies look for a little while, then gets bored again. But if, through invisible subterfuge, two or three objects have ended up there, the surprised babies stare longer.

In Wynn’s experiment, the babies were shown a rubber Mickey Mouse doll on a stage until their little eyes wandered. Then a screen came up, and a prancing hand visibly reached out from behind a curtain and placed a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When the screen was removed, if there were two Mickey Mouses visible (something the babies had never actually seen), the babies looked for only a few moments. But if there was only one doll, the babies were captivated—even though this was exactly the scene that had bored them before the screen was put in place. Wynn also tested a second group of babies, and this time, after the screen came up to obscure a
pair
of dolls, a hand visibly reached behind the screen and removed one of them. If the screen fell to reveal a single Mickey, the babies looked briefly; if it revealed the old scene with two, the babies had more trouble tearing themselves away. The babies must have been keeping track of how many dolls were behind the screen, updating their counts as dolls were added or subtracted. If the number inexplicably departed from what they expected, they scrutinized the scene, as if searching for some explanation.

Vervet monkeys live in stable groups of adult males and females and their offspring. The primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have noticed that extended families form alliances like the Montagues and Capulets. In a typical interaction they observed in Kenya, one juvenile monkey wrestled another to the ground screaming. Twenty minutes later the victim’s sister approached the perpetrator’s sister and without provocation bit her on the tail. For the retaliator to have identified the proper target, she would have had to solve the following analogy problem: A (victim) is to B (myself) as C (perpetrator) is to X, using the correct relationship “sister of” (or perhaps merely “relative of”; there were not enough vervets in the park for Cheney and Seyfarth to tell).

But do monkeys really know how their groupmates are related to each other, and, more impressively, do they realize that different pairs of individuals like brothers and sisters can be related in the same way? Cheney and Seyfarth hid a loudspeaker behind a bush and played tapes of a two-year-old monkey screaming. The females in the area reacted by looking at the mother of the infant who had been recorded—showing that they not only recognized the infant by its scream but recalled who its mother was. Similar abilities have been shown in the longtailed macaques that Verena Dasser coaxed into a laboratory adjoining a large outdoor enclosure. Three slides were projected: a mother at the center, one of her offspring on one side, and an unrelated juvenile of the same age and sex on the other. Each screen had a button under it. After the monkey had been trained to press a button under the offspring slide, it was tested on pictures of other mothers in the group, each one flanked by a picture of that mother’s offspring and a picture of another juvenile. More than ninety percent of the time the monkey picked the offspring. In another test, the monkey was shown two slides, each showing a pair of monkeys, and was trained to press a button beneath the slide showing a particular mother and her juvenile daughter. When presented with slides of new monkeys in the group, the subject monkey always picked the mother-and-offspring pair, whether the offspring was male, female, infant, juvenile, or adult. Moreover, the monkeys appeared to be relying not only on physical resemblance between a given pair of monkeys, or on the sheer number of hours they had previously spent together, as the basis for recognizing they were kin, but on something more subtle in the history of their interaction. Cheney and Seyfarth, who work hard at keeping track of who is related to whom in what way in the groups of animals they study, note that monkeys would make excellent primatologists.

Many creative people insist that in their most inspired moments they think not in words but in mental images. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that visual images of scenes and words once appeared involuntarily before him in a dreamlike state (perhaps opiuminduced). He managed to copy the first forty lines onto paper, resulting in the poem we know as “Kubla Khan,” before a knock on the door shattered the images and obliterated forever what would have been the rest of the poem. Many contemporary novelists, like Joan Didion, report that their acts of creation begin not with any notion of a character or a plot but with vivid mental pictures that dictate their choice of words. The modern sculptor James Surls plans his projects lying on a couch listening to music; he manipulates the sculptures in his mind’s eye, he says, putting an arm on, taking an arm off, watching the images roll and tumble.

Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal. Michael Faraday, the originator of our modern conception of electric and magnetic fields, had no training in mathematics but arrived at his insights by visualizing lines of force as narrow tubes curving through space. James Clerk Maxwell formalized the concepts of electromagnetic fields in a set of mathematical equations and is considered the prime example of an abstract theoretician, but he set down the equations only after mentally playing with elaborate imaginary models of sheets and fluids. Nikola Tesla’s idea for the electrical motor and generator, Friedrich Kekulé’s discovery of the benzene ring that kicked off modern organic chemistry, Ernest Lawrence’s conception of the cyclotron, James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the DNA double helix—all came to them in images. The most famous self-described visual thinker is Albert Einstein, who arrived at some of his insights by imagining himself riding a beam of light and looking back at a clock, or dropping a coin while standing in a plummeting elevator. He wrote:

Another creative scientist, the cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, had his own moment of sudden visual inspiration, and it led to a classic laboratory demonstration of mental imagery in mere mortals. Early one morning, suspended between sleep and awakening in a state of lucid consciousness, Shepard experienced “a spontaneous kinetic image of three-dimensional structures majestically turning in space.” Within moments and before fully awakening, Shepard had a clear idea for the design of an experiment. A simple variant of his idea was later carried out with his then-student Lynn Cooper. Cooper and Shepard flashed thousands of slides, each showing a single letter of the alphabet, to their long-suffering student volunteers. Sometimes the letter was upright, but sometimes it was tilted or mirror-reversed or both. As an example, here are the sixteen versions of the letter
F
:

The subjects were asked to press one button if the letter was normal (that is, like one of the letters in the top row of the diagram), another if it was a mirror image (like one of the letters in the bottom row). To do the task, the subjects had to compare the letter in the slide against some memory record of what the normal version of the letter looks like right-side up. Obviously, the right-side-up slide (0 degrees) is the quickest, because it matches the letter in memory exactly, but for the other orientations, some mental transformation to the upright is necessary first. Many subjects reported that they, like the famous sculptors and scientists, “mentally rotated” an image of the letter to the upright. By looking at the reaction times, Shepard and Cooper showed that this introspection was accurate. The upright letters were fastest, followed by the 45 degree letters, the 90 degree letters, and the 135 degree letters, with the 180 degree (upside-down) letters the slowest. In other words, the farther the subjects had to mentally rotate the letter, the longer they took. From the data, Cooper and Shepard estimated that letters revolve in the mind at a rate of 56
RPM
.