Where thought is born and how language can inhibit brain development

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Several years ago, scientists from MIT (USA) discovered that Broca's zone in the human brain actually consists of two sections. One is responsible for speech, the other is activated when solving tasks that require serious mental effort. This contradicts the hypothesis that there is no thinking without language. RIA Novosti understands how deaf people think and whether primates can be considered intelligent creatures.

Language rewrote memories

In the late 1970s, Susan Schaller came to Los Angeles to work as an English teacher at a college for the deaf. There she met a young man named Ildefonso, who, to her surprise, did not know sign language by the age of 27.

Ildefonso, deaf from birth, grew up in Mexico in a family where everyone could hear everything. I did not learn sign language for the deaf, but simply copied the actions of relatives and people around them. Moreover, he did not suspect that the world around him was full of sounds. I thought all people were like him.

Schaller gradually taught him sign language, reading in English, and counting. A few years later, she decided to write a book (published in 1991 under the title "Man without Words") and again met Ildefonso. He invited her to his friends, who were deaf from birth, who, as he once did not know sign language, and who invented their own way of communicating with the help of intense facial expressions, complex pantomime.

Two years later, Schaller again interviewed Ildefonso and asked him about those deaf friends. He replied that he no longer meets with them, because it is hard for him, he now cannot think like them. And he is not even able to remember how he communicated with them before. Having learned the language, Ildefonso began to think differently.

The age at which thoughts arise

In the 1970s, the first school for the deaf was opened in Nicaragua. Gathered fifty children from ordinary families. Nobody knew the universal sign language - everyone had their own way of communicating. Gradually, the students invented their own sign language, and the next generation improved it. Thus was born the Nicaraguan Sign Language, which is still used today.

According to En Sengas of Columbia University, who studied schools for the deaf in Nicaragua, this is a rare case that helps to understand that children do not just learn language, but invent it when interacting with other people and the world around them. Moreover, the language is constantly being modified. The main changes to it are made by children aged ten years and under.

Elizabeth Spelke from Harvard has shown that from the age of six, children begin to combine different concepts in their heads to solve everyday problems that arise in front of them. At this age, the child has already mastered the language and uses it for spatial navigation. For example, he will figure out that to the desired house you need to go to the left along the green fence. Two concepts are used here at once - "to the left" and "green".

Rats in a similar situation achieve success only in half of the cases, that is, the result is purely random. These animals are perfectly oriented in space, they know where left and right are. Distinguish colors. But they are not able to navigate by the combination of direction and color. They have no corresponding system in their brains. And this system is a language.

Charles Fernichoff from the University of Durham (UK), who performed experiments on rats, takes a rather radical point of view. He believes that thinking without language is impossible. Proof of this - we always think in phrases, this is called inner speech. In this sense, the scientist believes, small children who still cannot speak do not think.

What words are not needed for

On the other hand, much in consciousness is expressed not by words and sounds, but by pictures, images. This is evidenced by the experience of stroke survivors. This is how Bolty Taylor, a neurologist from the USA, described it in the book "My Stroke Was A Science To Me".

She got out of bed in the morning with pain behind her left eye. I tried to do exercises on the simulator, but my hands did not obey. I went to the shower and lost my balance. Then her right arm was paralyzed and her inner speech completely disappeared. Already in the hospital, she forgot how to talk, her memory also disappeared. She did not know what her name was, how old she was. There was complete silence in my brain.

Gradually, Taylor learned to communicate. When asked who the president of the country was, she represented the image of a male leader. Only after eight years of rehabilitation did she return to speech.

The fact that inner speech is not critical for thinking is also evidenced by the works of Evelina Fedorenko from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She and colleagues are studying people with global aphasia, in which the brain centers responsible for speech and language are affected. These patients do not distinguish between words, do not understand speech, cannot form understandable words and phrases, add and subtract, solve logical problems.

Areas of the brain responsible for the formation of various aspects of language. MIT researchers investigated high-level language: the ability to form meaningful statements and understand the meaning of other people's statements.

It is believed that language is a means of communication between not only people, but also different cognitive systems of the brain of one person, for example, those responsible for orientation in space or arithmetic. An illustrative example is the Pirahan tribe from the Amazon wilds. Their language doesn't have numbers, and they make mistakes when solving some simple problems - for example, picking up as many sticks as balls.

Fedorenko's group using fMRI has shown that patients who have suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of the brain have big problems with language and arithmetic. However, in patients with aphasia, the ability to arithmetic remains. Moreover, they cope with complex logical cause-and-effect problems, some continue to play chess, which actually requires special attention, working memory, planning, deduction.

A person is distinguished from other animals by language, as well as the ability to understand another, to guess what is on his mind. Fedorenko's data convinces us that if an adult has this ability, then he does not need language to express his own thoughts.

Another unique human quality is the ability to perceive and compose music. This is very similar to the ability for language: sounds, rhythm, intonation are also involved, there are rules for their use. It turns out that aphasic patients understand music. The Soviet composer Vissarion Shebalin, after two strokes of the left hemisphere, could not speak, understand speech, but continued to compose music, and at a level comparable to what he had before the disease.

Based on data from neurosciences, the study's authors conclude that language and thinking are not the same thing. People who have suffered a stroke, patients with aphasia, having lost their language, have a wide range of mental capabilities, which are based on neural systems that are more basic than the language system. Although initially, back in childhood, these systems developed with the help of language.