On Radiolab: Words

These people are amazing. How do they always come up with just the kinds of things I want to hear?

They had a section that I think relates to theory of mind (the same kind of test they use to demonstrate theory of mind in kids, actually) which is really interesting in that it extends the relationship of language to theory of mind and development.

Basically, they had a whole bunch of deaf kids in Columbia (CHECK ON THAT) who never learned language and then one day got sent to a brand-new special-needs type school. With 50 deaf kids together, they began to develop their own set of gestures in order to communicate. Years go by, and some of the early students have graduated while new crops of younger kids have arrived, with more and more sophisticated and complex ways of communicating. They decide to do a test, and show both groups of students a cartoon in which a little boy and his older brother are playing with a train. The older brother goes to get a snack and puts the train under the bed, telling his little brother not to touch it. The little brother, of course, hides the train in the toybox. They ask the groups - when the older brother comes back, where will he look for the train? Any child over the age of 5 will say "under the bed" because that's where he would think it was. But children below age 5 think that because they know the train is in the toybox, somehow the older brother does too. And amazingly, the older deaf students (keep in mind, these people are in their late 20's or 30's) say the same thing "He'll look in the toybox." The researchers posit that this has something to do with their lack of language to describe inner mental states-- that the younger kids, who have like 12 different words for thinking, are more poised to consider the inner thoughts of the brother than the student's whose vocabulary limits them to less invisible things. So they are essentially saying that they think the language ITSELF allows for development of "theory of mind" and without it, that kind of understanding does not develop. !! That's kind of amazing!

[ random quote about this phenomena from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112524209:
"Dogs and babies both make the same famous mistake (babies at 10 mo.) involving trusting a human about the location of a toy when they have seen it moved somewhere else." ]

"everything has a name" - the guy who, until 27, had no concept of language, because he was deaf, . . . and this woman taught him sign language by modeling teaching and learning behavior through pretending to teach to an invisible student, and then pretending to BE the invislbe studnet. (SO much like the way they taught Alex!) and finally, she said it was as though he had just landed on earth, and he looked around the room, and clearly understood, and pointed at things so she would tell him their name (sign) . . . and then he started to cry. "OH! Everything has a name!" she said.

second thing is the story of the rats -- "left of the blue wall" story, where the rats, placed in an all-white rectangular room, shown food in a corner, then picked up and spun around, food hidden under the ground in one corner (digging?) and then left to figure out where the food is (right 50% of the time) . .. paint one wall blue, still only right 50% of them tiem. they can see color, so what's going on? babies up until the age of 6 !! behave the same way. one idea is that it is language - specifically spatial language -- that allows for the connection between "left" and "blue wall" to create "left OF the blue wall" and allow them to behave as any adult would -- to find the buried treat. so this owman says that though language is olften talked aobut in terms of how it allows us to communicate to other beings, it also might be an extremely powerful way of communicating WITHIN OUR OWN SYSTEM -- communicating to ourselves. AHH.

then they talk about knocking out language (by making peole repeat back things over and over and over again listening to an ipod, and doing the same experiment) and when you repeat back things that someone else is saying, you can't use that language for yourself, and so they return to the 50% accuracy again.

what if you tried to renenact these things, made people dispell their use of language, to know how much it creates who we are?

OK. so there are these cartoons shown to the deaf commuinity in Venezueal? DANG. the one of this man trying to fly and then failing - and how they all describe his flying different (the early-learners -- old student) use a LOT of movement to describe what happens while the younger speakers motion is all in the wrist - they use the ideas like "he wants to fly, but he fails" or "he is trying to fly", etc.

CAN I USE TRANSCRIPTS FROM THOSE TO SHOW DIFFERENCES in how language creats different kinds of thinking? on my bird drawings perhaps? :) or can i do something with these cartoons, make movies, desciibe them, etc. ?? hmm.