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Inside the Narrative System: Learning a Language



Language is a brain function that we can clearly identify with the Narrative system. Consciousness is one hallmark of the Narrative system, and we often experience conscious thought in our native language, perhaps even if we use a different form of speech in our daily lives. Many people report knowing that they "truly" had learned a foreign language when they suddenly found themselves thinking in it, for instance during a long trip to another country. Another typical Narrative characteristic is an inability to multitask. Many people find that they can write while listening to music but not to talk radio, because the receptive and expressive language functions interfere with one another. Language also has the characteristic abstractness of the Narrative system, allowing for categories within categories like "animal -> mammal -> dog -> miniature poodle." Based on all of these characteristics, we would expect language to be based in the higher cortical areas of the brain, and indeed this is so. People with damage to Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe of the cortex cannot understand either written or spoken language; people with damage to Broca's area in the same part of the brain can understand language but not produce it. For most but not all people, these two language areas are specifically in the left hemisphere of the cortex; language is one of the few clear examples of hemispheric specialization.

The Narrative mind is particularly good at processing symbols and logical relationships between concepts. The quintessential Narrative function is mathematics: Symbols are used to represent discrete quantities, logical propositions explain the relationships between these quantities, and mental functions transform one of them into another. If language is Narrative, then it seems all linguistic information could be reduced essentially to math. Indeed, some people have tried to explain language this way by reducing sentences to propositional statements via symbolic logic, and have hypothesized that we could fully understand consciousness as an innate "language of the mind." If such an explanation of language is true, then it should also be possible to exactly translate from one language into another without any potential loss of meaning. All languages, as artifacts of the Narrative mind, ought to be simply different symbols used to represent the same underlying reality.

If you have ever tried to learn a second language, you will recognize immediately that what I'm saying isn't so. Some languages have little words so useful that we borrow them for others, like the French chez which takes four words to say in English ("at the home of"), or the Polynesian amok. Sometimes words have nuances that aren't quite captured in other languages, like the Spanish simpatico or guapo -- "nice" and "good-looking" aren't really sufficient as synonyms. Or sometimes words in other languages simply seem more elegant, like the single word bergsteiger in German for the English "mountain climber." (How I love German's delightful compound words). Grammar also differs substantially in some cases: "I love chocolate" in English, becomes a mi me gusta chocolate in Spanish -- "chocolate is pleasing to me" -- a sentence that not only makes chocolate the subject and me the object, but also uses the verb gustar, to taste, rather than amar, to love. In French je pense qu'il est malade (I think he is sick), but j'espere qu'il ne soit malade (I hope he is not sick), with the subjunctive case used to indicate that hope is not certainty, a philosophical attitude that seems very French indeed. And in any language, idioms cannot be understood as precise statements of truth -- "four days" in the Hopi language just means "a very long time," similar to "forty days and forty nights" in the Hebrew of the Old Testament.

Despite the clear Narrative nature of language, it seems there are also elements of language that do not fit the precise idea of word-symbols that each represent some discrete reference point in the real world. People who learn another language often come to believe that by understanding its words and grammar they can emulate the way another group of people actually thinks. This is the Whorfian hypothesis, the idea that people's thinking follows a pattern set down by the structure of their language. This idea is controversial: Linguist Benjamin Whorf is the source of the often-cited idea that native people of the Arctic have a hundred different words for snow, but in fact he just made that example up. Yet some contemporary research provides support for the theory, e.g., showing that Russian speakers have longer reaction times in judging the "blueness" of a target stimulus, because their language splits blue into several discrete color words (синий and голубой, or "sapphire" versus "azure," with yet a third word for "cerulean," and no overarching word that captures all of these). More relevant to real life, perhaps, is the finding that the arbitrary gender of a noun (in languages where nouns have gender) leads people to select different adjectives in describing it: For instance, Germans describe a key (for them a masculine noun) as "hard", "heavy", or "useful," while Spanish speakers describe the same object (feminine in their language) as "elegant," "little," or "lovely." 

These subtle aspects of language are perhaps no surprise to you. When learning another language, we almost always need to learn something about the culture of the people who speak that language, because language and culture are so intimately connected. And a great deal of poetry is effective precisely because a word or phrase has broader significance than just the concrete thing it is meant to signify -- rain for sadness, rivers for time, mountains for divine presence. Are these elements of language then "Intuitive" aspects? They seem to convey some deep inner or poetic truth that is "beyond language," a wisdom that is outside the ordinary, symbolic-logic meaning of the words. Do languages connect, in other words, to the emotional and nonlinear structures of the Intuitive system? 

Appealing as this argument might seem, I argue that the emotional or perceptual aspects of language are actually flaws in the Narrative system rather than deep Intuitive understandings. Language is based almost exclusively in the cortex, and as described above it has the characteristics of consciousness and limited focus that are so typical of the Narrative system overall. The "worldview" or "poetry" aspects of language simply point out a blind spot in the Narrative system -- that the specific words we use to describe things blind us to other ways of seeing or describing them. Narratives, we must remember, are not truth. In a previous post I talked about a developmental process in which concepts are built up from other concepts using a principle of similarity, and how in this process they can sometimes acquire surplus meanings. That's what I would argue is going on here, where an entire culture rather than an individual has a particular understanding that is based in perception rather than in fact. This can have important social consequences, as when "feminine" acquires connotations of "weaker" or "dark" acquires connotations of "evil," and thus results in non-conscious biases or discrimination against whole groups of people. Because language is so fundamental to our human experience, it can be very hard to understand that these "extra" connotations of words are a cultural artifact rather than an essential truth.

Language is to humans as water is to fish: It surrounds us so completely that we have almost no (conscious) experience without it. Learning another language is therefore useful for more than just communication purposes. It gives us insight into other ways of seeing, but also makes the familiar strange. Crucially, it reminds us that our way of describing the world is not the only way possible, it is simply one possible Narrative view with its own set of consequences for our experience.

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