I love words. I like even the squiggles I can’t make sense of. I love how they sound. They make me happy and sad. And the internet is a medium that’s made for words, so it’s no wonder you and I spend time here.
Now with more consonants!
(Creative Commons image by Darwin Bell)
It’s a conceit of mine that language makes me the person that I am. Few among us would argue otherwise. But what if this is true in more than just a poetic sense? Take this episode of RadioLab, where Jad and Robert explore the nature of language.
Words (RadioLab on August 9, 2010)
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. We speak to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, and we hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke. Plus: a group of children invent an entirely new language in Nicaragua in the 1970s.
They raise a chicken-and-egg problem posed in two questions:
- Is language a natural manifestation of our humanity? or
- Is our humanity determined by our embrace of language?
And though it may seem academic, it holds a lot of importance to neurologists, linguists, and behavioral psychologists.
Without words
One of the most striking observations from this episode was Jill Bolte’s account of what it was like to suffer a stroke. This wasn’t just any stroke. Her whole motor system and speech center was compromise. In the following TED lecture, she conveys what this did to her.
Each of us is two minds connected into one. What we are is the sum of that connection. It’s strange and quite moving.
I try to imagine the bliss that Jill felt – the strange cosmic connectedness born of lacking the words. Then I add her account to my own musings at the nature of being.
I feel a strong sense of overwhelming, profound elation – more than I ever experienced in my faith-filled past. The young-me who imagined one-third of God was a terrestrial, human, death-defying carpenter seems infantile by comparison. I’m an atheist now, but I swear I have more powerful spiritual awareness than I ever had before.
Reassurance
I spend a lot of time saying to myself, “Yup, I’m me.” If I removed that, would I too live in a world that’s fuzzy around the edges? I suspect I trade a big chunk of my happiness in order to communicate with others. Language is a rabbit-hole; you can’t get back out again.
The nature of being unravels a bit as I wonder how this awareness came to be. It’s a conflicting, rapid-fire tension and release. The thoughts swirl around again. I feel as though I don’t know myself, but then I think “I am me” and it gets easier.
It’s all so hard to put into words.
