How do some people think/speak inside their head while others can’t?
In: Biology
To those curious about the neuroscience of language and how the brain develops it (or doesn’t), I would highly recommend Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct. Here are a couple of fascinating tidbits from the first few chapters that I’ve read, as best I can recall them (most on-topic point at the end):
– Language is a preprogrammed and organic thing, down to general grammatical requirements or standards. Languages have common features because much of how it can work is hard coded into our brain’s development as we grow up. Smaller variations are arbitrary or conventional.
– The English Language isn’t particularly optimal or even normal in some ways – many languages have second person plurals, for instance, like “you’s” in black English vernacular.
– Black English Vernacular (BEV) is considered an entirely valid dialect by linguists and has its own distinct rules and constructions. What sounds like “bad” English to a stuffy Brit like me is, in fact, just another language, functionally superior to mine in some ways. Once you realise this, the entire concept of enforcing a “correct” version of a language goes out the window, and the world of language becomes a daunting kaleidoscope of endless variation and evolution.
– Kids do not need to be drilled in language to learn it. Some cultures don’t talk to their kids at all, and those kids automatically spring into language use at the same stages as ours. It’s an organic, programmed routine and doesn’t require any intervention beyond simply surrounding your kid with the sounds of language once they start to acquire it, so they have something to absorb like a sponge. They’ll do the rest themselves. Pinker compares to those same cultures having a bizarre convention of trying to “teach” kids to sit upright with supports made of sand, where we simply wait for them to do it on their own. They daren’t risk not doing it, just as we daren’t risk not “teaching” our infants words, even though it is entirely pointless.
– The hardware in our brains that makes language work is involuntary and will latch onto whatever is available. “Second generation” sign language users, deaf children taught sign by parents who learned it as a second language out of necessity, quickly and automatically develop it to a far greater degree and embellish it with grammatical features and sophistications their parents didn’t use. They do this without instruction or prompting, building a full language from the pidgin framework their parents taught them. The same thing happens with pidgin languages generally. A pidgin is a sort of make-do shorthand that dislocated people develop to function without a common language, but in every case, their children take the pidgin (which typically has very limited vocab, grammar and scope) and evolve it into a fully fledged language within one generation. This is how BEV originated – the post-slavery pidgin of dislocated people stuck without a common language, grown into its own language by their children and grandchildren, hence it sounding mostly like the English they were surrounded by and forced to acquire, but with its own original grammar, vocab and constructions.
– Language does not shape or precede thought. Pinker devotes a large chunk of a chapter to debunking the popular myth that our language confines and structures our thinking: eskimos have [large number] of words for snow, and so on (that particular one is such a widely debunked myth that it’s worth googling and reading about on its own). It’s backwards nonsense. Thought precedes language: as he points out, how else could we have the universal experience of sometimes struggling to find the right word for something? The thought must exist first. Language is a utilitarian function that comes afterwards, and is somewhat optional. My own note on this: internal verbalising is a habit, but it can break. When I’ve spent a long time alone, absorbed by physical work, it gradually shuts down and I begin thinking nonverbally. The work thought process is the same sort of stuff – “this must go here, those will be over there, this is in the way, that doesn’t look right” – but there is no monologue attached to it in words. The exact content of that thought is impossible to describe afterwards because, well, it’s nonverbal. When in company or working with others, I revert to verbal thinking, and I do find it “unlocks” certain kinds of mental abstraction and makes certain kinds of work easier. Nonverbal thinking is better at certain other kinds of work. Once you get used to the switch, it’s quite useful to be able to flip back and forth: gardening and DIY are more relaxed and natural without a monologue, while essay writing like this is definitively impossible without one.
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