How Learning a New Language Rewires Your Brain—Lessons from the Pirahã Tribe | Daniel Everett : 1258

What have you found about the way we structure language and the way our brains work?

I have found that memory appears to be greater in hunter gatherers who only have oral language and not written language. There are studies that show that reading Mandarin uses parts of the brain that reading Latin based scripts, alphabetic scripts, doesn't.

I've also seen studies say if you speak Mandarin and you read in Mandarin versus if you speak a Latin language, you see meaningful changes in networks across the brain.

What if every everything you thought you knew about language was wrong?

Try to prove me wrong.

For decades, linguists believed in universal grammar, a built in blueprint for how all humans speak.

Creating explanatory theories that extend so vastly, far beyond any evidence that's available.

Language and the existence of universal grammar continue to be tested and explored in the evolving field of linguistics. But one man deep in the Amazon uncovered something that changed everything. Daniel Everett, linguist, explorer, disruptor. His discoveries shattered the foundations of modern linguistics. He lived with an uncontacted Amazonian tribe for seven years, unlocking a language with no numbers, no recursion, no past tense. A language so unique it rewrote the rules of human communication. Now he's taking us beyond language to the roots of thought, culture, and human cognition itself.

I'll define communication as the transfer of information.

What makes us human? How do words shape reality? And if language isn't universal, what else is it?

Do you think it's possible that psychedelics drove the evolution of language? The drunk Ape theory. You're listening to the human upgrade with Dave Asprey.

How did language even begin in humans?

There are so many theories about language that look at it from the perspective of the development of the brain, from the development of our genetic heritage. But really for me, the threshold for language is when humans adapted the signs that all animals use. So every animal has to use certain kinds of signs to interpret the world smells and sites and things. But when humans began to create open ended symbol systems, that to me was the prerequisite for language. When we could, you know, words are kinds of symbols, gestures are symbols, these are kinds of signs that are created by convention, by cultures where they agree that we'll call that a dog and that's a symbol and we've created that and somebody comes up with another, well, what are we going to call that? And so we call that a cat. Once we got the ability to start creating symbols, language became possible for the first time. And in my research and working with different archaeologists, I believe that this ability emerged with homo erectus, about 1.5 to 2 million years ago. Wow.

That seems to be a little bit further back than some people think mankind goes. Do you ever get critics going, that can't be?

Oh yeah, there are a lot of people who say that can't be. But, and, and they have good reasons for saying that, but most of it has to do with the fact that they don't believe that erectus there, there are a couple of reasons. They don't believe that erectus was smart enough to do this and they don't believe that we have any evidence that erectus did this. But I would. I've argued against both of those counter arguments in my book How Language Began. And also an archaeologist from the University of Liver Pool who specializes on Homo erectus, in fact, he's been in the news recently because he found a 500,000 year old wooden structure constructed by Homo erectus. So they did so many things. Homo erectus was able to do so many things. And we find evidence of symbolism in their very tools, stone tools that last for 2 million years. So I feel fairly confident that Homo erectus had developed some sort of language. And there are basically three types of language they could have had, any one of which would have been fine for us. And we actually find all three in the world today spoken by different groups of people. It doesn't mean they're primitive, it just simply means that they're complicated in ways that English is not, and they're simple in ways that English is not. So they distribute complexity in different ways. But the creation of symbols is extremely complex, requires a large brain and has a lot of consequences that I think we find in the archaeological record. With Homo erectus.

I love that you're willing to go out on a. Just go out there and say it like you see it to be. I've had Graham Hancock on the show who has some other perspectives about how maybe even longer back we went. It just feels to me like we've been very conservative in our belief that primitive people did nothing and sprang out of nothing. And your study of languages supports that?

Yeah. When you look at Homo erectus and how the ocean was not a barrier for them ever, they, they. There's a lot of evidence that they built boats. In fact, there's an archaeologist in Australia, Robert Bednarik, who has used the tools that they had to construct the kinds of boats they would have needed to go to the place they went. And he has experimented with these boats and he and other linguists actually have all argued that you can't build a boat Without a basic linguistic ability, you're not going to find others building boats. It's a group project and the group needs to be able to communicate. And that communication has to go beyond signs, even stone tools of the type that Homo erectus made in the laboratory. There are many archaeological schools that have laboratory where they teach graduate students how to make stone tools and they find that simply showing them is not enough. In every case, PhD students take hundreds of hours to learn how to make these stone tools and they need verbal instruction. And so I think that if modern day Homo sapiens PhD students need verbal instruction, it's highly unlikely that Homo erectus didn't need verbal instruction.

You make a pretty convincing case. I've been studying cognitive function and cognitive structures, wrote a major book about it. And I'm familiar with the fact that different languages restructure the entire brain. What have you found about the way we structure language and the way our brains work?

Well, there are a couple of things there. One thing is that there's a lot of evidence. It's controversial. Everything's controversial when you're talking about the brain. There's a lot of evidence that speaking multiple languages is cognitively valuable and it increases our cognitive flexibility, it provides a number of cognitive benefits to us. But there is research done by a good friend of mine at MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Evelina Fedorenko, in which she has identified a language specific network in the brain that isn't in just one part of the brain, it's sort of distributed in different parts of the brain. And in fact, she put me in an FMRI scanner for about three hours testing me on the different languages I speak to one determine how well I spoke each of them. She can actually tell this from the, from the images because it shows how much effort was put into it and how well that section of the brain. So if you don't speak a language really well, that language network part of the brain doesn't light up very well because it's not in control. If you are tested on your native language, it's lit up really well. And if you speak another language really well, it lights up in a very similar fashion. And then she was able to see how much effort, cognitive effort I was putting into it based on electrical impulses and I think blood flow, I'm not sure, but that was really interesting. And she's done these experiments on dozens of languages from many different language families. And, and this part of the brain is not used for music, it's not used for mathematics, it's used for language and that's all it's used for. And she's found this in language after language. Again, it's controversial, but she's been extremely successful in defending her position. She has a large lab at MIT and they're doing experiments all the time, following up on stuff. So on the one hand, our language, our brain is adapted for language we've evolved to speak, but on the other hand, learning multiple languages just seems to make us smarter in some way, just in overall. There are no downsides and only upsides to learning multiple languages.

That's one reason that my kids speak more than one language and I don't particularly. Well, a little bit of Spanish in that.

That's great. That's a great gift from a parent to a child.

I've also seen studies say if you speak Mandarin and you read in Mandarin versus if you speak a Latin language, that you see meaningful changes in networks across the brain. Have you compared those to some of the other more unusual languages you know?

Well, I haven't done this research myself, but reading Mandarin is very different from reading Latin based languages because the writing system is based on a very different kind of principle. There are ways in which Mandarin is much more difficult to learn to read, but there are other ways in which if you know how to read Mandarin, I don't, unfortunately, you could really translate any language into that writing system. So it's an extremely accommodating writing system. And there are studies that show that reading Mandarin uses parts of the brain that reading Latin based scripts, alphabetic scripts, doesn't. But once again, whenever we're talking about the brain, there will be studies in conflict.

Your work on probably the most unusual language in the world kind of blew some minds. Can you tell me a little bit about that language and how it works and why it's so different?

Yes. In 1977, I was sent to a group of people in the Amazon, I was 26, called the Pitaha. They actually call themselves the Hiay Chehe, which means the straight ones and we are awe, which means the crooked ones, the bent ones. So they're very ethnocentric. They have a very high opinion of themselves, as most of us do. And so I was sent there because I had done well in my linguistics classes training to be a missionary. Certainly not a missionary anymore. I'm an atheist these days. But I went there because I had done well in linguistics and their language had not been able to be understood by anybody else. And my wife and I and our three small children went There we started learning the language, and indeed, it blew my mind, because although we've learned we were learning to speak it, I still couldn't believe that it had some of the things it had and that it didn't have some of the things I expected it to have. And so the thing that has made it so controversial is my claim that they don't have a property called recursion in the language. And recursion simply means one thing recurring inside another of the same type. So to give you an example, I can take a noun, say, truck, and I can put another noun in it and get truck driver. So driver's a noun, truck's a noun. I get the two together. I got truck, driver, driver. That's recursion. If I have John saw Bill, that's a simple sentence. But if I put it inside another sentence, Bill said that John saw Bill, then that's recursion, or at least many linguists would claim that it is. Technically, it's not fully recursion, but the simplest way to describe it is as recursion. So I've argued that Pirah doesn't have things like that. It just doesn't. And when I first made that claim, and in, you know, which was exactly 20 years ago this year, it provoked a torrent of criticism and attacks on me because Noam Chomsky had just said, this is what this is. The crucial ingredient to language recursion is what makes languages possible. So if there's a language that doesn't have clearly isn't necessary for language, just one language out of 8,000 shows that. But since then, other languages have been shown to appear to lack recursion. So how would the Pinahas say John said that Bill saw Mary? They would say, john spoke Bill saw Mary. And you can interpret that as together, or you can interpret them as two separate events. It's possible for John to speak, and that has nothing to do with Bill saw Mary. And then separately, you say, bill saw Mary. It's also possible that Bill saw Mary is what John spoke, but that's a matter of interpretation. It's not part of the grammar.

Wow.

And when the claim was made about recursion, it was specifically claimed to be for the grammar and for the grammar of sentences. And so the Pinahads simply don't have that. And it's been tested now, I don't know how many times, by people going down there collecting data, running experiments. You know, a group at MIT went down, did experiments, collected data, came back, ran it through all sorts of Checks on their own, leaving me out of it. In fact, I gave them a lot of texts by the Piraha, stories that were not collected by me, that were collected by a missionary before I got there, so that there could be no claim that I had doctored these in any way. And so they went through all of them, my texts, the other missionaries texts, they went through all of this. They found no evidence whatsoever for recursion, and it should have appeared if it was there. So I, and since then, other linguists recently, mit, Brain and Cognitive Science. The funny thing about MIT is that I'm not liked at all in the linguistics department, but I am liked in the brain and cognitive sciences department. And they had a conference in my honor in 2023, in June of 2023. And a couple of those papers had to do with the lack of recursion and evidence from other languages. Wow.

So outside of academia, most people would never know about this debate. I gotta ask this. Of all the criticism that you received, in what language was the best criticism?

Oh, that's a great question. I would have. I mean, there's been criticism in lots and lots of languages. I've gotten. I've gotten emails from all over the world, literally from linguists trying to second guess me or trying, you know, criticizing me. Did you think of this? Did you point? Did you investigate this? Those are good questions. And I answered them all to the best that I could. But the criticisms that most bothered me were all in English. And it's not because they were good criticisms. It was because instead of saying that he should have looked at this, you know, we've done more research and we found this. They said, he's got to be a liar. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And William James had something to say about this over 150 years ago. He said, when a new idea is presented or a contradiction to a theory, the first reaction is he doesn't know what he's talking about. The second reaction is he's lying. And the third reaction is we already knew that. The story of biology. I've been through all of these. These are very common criticisms that I have. That really summarizes all the criticisms.

It seems like all of the things the longevity movement's been through that you can't extend human life, well, actually we're doing it, and it just happens. I'm still fascinated by the ways that we could possibly use language to transform or improve our cognitive function. And one of the things you might say is, well, let's just Learn a language as an adult. How do adults learn language quickly?

Well, I do demonstrations, and I've done them all over the place called monolingual demonstrations. You can find me doing these, for example, for the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Michigan about 10 years ago on the Internet, on YouTube. And what I do is I have a speaker come out who speaks. I don't know what the language is. I make sure they don't tell me what the language is. And I have a bunch of props in front of me, things from nature. I don't use manufactured things because sometimes those can be borrowed words. They're not native words. But usually if you have rocks and water and sticks and leaves, things like this, you're going to get or fruits from that region. It doesn't help to have an orange if it's not where their language is spoken. So then, to make sure there's no language in common, I switch to Pirah and I start speaking to them in Pirah. They, of course, have no idea what I'm talking about, but I get them to give me the names for objects, and then I start doing things with the objects and get them to describe the actions. And then I might sit down and stand up, I might take a stick and hit myself, and then take the stick and pretend like I'm hitting them and get descriptions of all of this. So what that demonstration is supposed to show is that within 25 minutes, speaking no language in common, I can figure out more or less the broad principles of the grammar, how it works. I can identify those words. I can tell you a lot about the sound system of the language. And, you know, if you keep this up. And so I only do it for 25 minutes, then I turn and talk to the audience for about 30 minutes. And when you do this for a group of linguists, most of them are following what you're doing. So. But it's more fun to do it with people who aren't linguists, because it almost seems like magic. But it's not really that hard once you get the basic principles. And I think that the key ingredient is to make sure you're around the speakers of that language that you put yourself. You immerse yourself in this language, if possible. You can learn a lot from books and tapes and videos and things. There's so many more tools available today than there used to be. And I met a girl on the streets in Brazil one time in Porto Vellore, and she came up to me, and I don't look very Brazilian, even Though my Portuguese, I think is about as good as my English. I don't look very Brazilian. So she came up to me and started speaking in perfect English. And I said, wow, where did you learn your English? And she said, well, I just take a course down the street here and I read a lot in English and that's okay for being able to read English. But she spoke it so well and her pronunciation was so good that I was, I was really amazed. So she had never been around that many English speakers and she mastered the language really well. So although I think it's desirable to be around native speakers, I can't forget that young woman in this city in Brazil who had never been around native speakers and was speaking the language really well. So you need to want to do it. You need to, if possible, be around speakers. You can't simply go to bed at night listening to a tape and wake up in the morning speaking the language. But human creativity is an amazing thing. And I would never tell people what can't be done, because anytime you do that, you're in very dangerous ground. Because everything that can't be done at one time is done fine now.

Yeah, it's a pretty dangerous thing to say. You can't do something. In my world, that just means you haven't figured out how to do it yet, right?

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I'm remembering a story from my childhood. My father worked for one of the five national laboratories funded by the government doing deep research stuff. And one of his colleagues was a Jesuit priest who spoke nine languages. And he came in for the interview to be a computer programmer. And they said, do you know the computer language? And he said, no, but I know nine languages. How hard could it be? So he went home and read the book on it, came back the next day and wrote out all the code on paper the way you would back then with punch cards and all that.

Yeah, right.

And they gave him the job. And he was a very good developer because language had taught him how to structure his thinking so much that he's like, this is a really easy language because it follows consistent rules. And no other language I speak has rules that you don't break. Do you find that your thoughts are different because you can do this?

I think they are. There are a number of reasons why I think they would be. First, you do structure your thoughts differently. When you're speaking in another language, you use different words. You have to be careful when you say that words affect the way you think. There are experiments that actually show they do. So when you do speak another language, if you're in an experimental situation where you have to think fast, people from different languages perform differently. If you give people plenty of time to think, that effect starts to diminish. But if you speak more than one language, you have different resources you're calling upon, you have different words you have different structures, you have different cultural meaning. Because to learn another language is also to learn something about that culture and to learn. And each culture has its own way of. Of understanding and solving the same problems. This is one of the exciting things about learning other cultures and learning other languages, that you learn new solutions to the same problems. And also to new problems, you increase your versatility. It's like a musician that knows how to play several different instruments. They can be much more effective as a studio musician, for example, than somebody who just plays one instrument. But it's a marvelous effect. Some people. There's something called the Warfian effect, which is based on the work of Benjamin Lee wharf of about 100 years ago, about how languages affect the way we think.

I've been fascinated with how we use language to communicate about how to think, not the structure of language, But I've been studying at various monasteries with gurus all over the world, and they're trying to describe a felt state. And they'll say, you know, sit here, close your eyes, visualize the Buddha, think about the number of. And they're trying to get you to do something inside your brain that feels a certain way or. Another guest on the show from Harvard was Daniel P. Brown, who translates Sanskrit cave meditation texts from the 13th century into English. For people in my practice, I do it with electrodes on the brain. Well, do more of what makes the sound louder. So when we're talking about things like love or a state of bliss or a state of happiness or a state of sacred union or anything that doesn't.

Have a picture with it, how the.

Heck does language communicate that?

Well, language. One reason we know that language evolved rather than being created by a supreme being, if I may be so bold, I don't want to offend anyone, is that it doesn't work very well all the time. One reason that there are divorces, one of many reasons, is that miscommunication takes place all the time. And so two people can be talking and using the same language and still not be communicating effectively with one another. But when we go into meditation, when we talk to people who have very different cultural experiences, we communicate with our entire bodies. Not just the words that come out of our mouth, but our facial expressions, our body orientation, our hand movements. You know, in Brazil, if you talk to somebody, it doesn't matter what their gender is, male or female, they're probably going to touch you a lot while they're talking to you. This is a Brazilian thing, and it's really a wonderful thing, you know, I remember first talking to someone when I was learning Portuguese in Brazil. A young woman, and she grabbed my arm, and at first I thought, what, is she flirting with me? And then I realized, no, this has nothing to do with it. It doesn't matter what my gender is. She just. Brazilians touch you when they talk, and that's a very effective form of bond building and barrier breaking at the same time. They're talking. So when somebody wants to tell me about meditation or about calming down, because I tend to be rather tense a lot, they talk to me slowly, calmly. They show that they have it under control. Their breathing helps. They have gotten used to talking about subjects such as emotional control and brain control and. And body control that most of us aren't that familiar with talking about. And so they have developed an effective way of communicating holistically with their entire body. And the Piraha are very good at this. When I talk to the Piraha, they are so laid back and so chill when they talk that it almost puts me to sleep. I never. You know, somebody came to visit me once in the tribe, another scientist, and he said, boy, I have never seen you this calm. I have never seen you this chill in my whole life. And I said, that's the environment. When I'm talking to these people, I just relax. They just relax me.

Dr. Stephen Porges, who's the father of polyvagal theory, has done a lot of work on intonation and the speed of how we speak, and even the difference between female and male voices, harsh guttural sounds and. And the direct effect on the nervous system. So it would follow that some languages, when people speak them, they're just going to be neurologically calming in a way that doesn't have anything to do with our thinking about the language or the meaning, just in the way our biology receives them.

Right, right. In fact, the Pirah, because it's a tone language, like Mandarin, for example, they can whistle their language. They can hum their language without any consonants or vowels. So they use consonants and vowels in, you know, in many different speech settings. But if they want to be intimate, they're humming to each other. They're sitting in a corner. Usually mothers and children or fathers and children, but often young couples and older people. I mean, they sit in a corner, and it's sort of like whispering, but it's humming. But it works because it's tonal and they're carrying all the tones in their hums. And I've watched mothers pick their child up and start humming something about. It's time to go to sleep. And the child just falls to sleep. I mean, it's just like I almost fall asleep and I watch them do it. It's so relaxing. And whistling. When the men are out hunting especially, they whistle to one another, communicating effectively. Anything that we can communicate with consonants and vowels, they can do whistling or humming. And these just really affect your emotions when you're around this also, they laugh all the time. They have such amazing sense of humor. So they're not only chill, they not only hum, they not only whistle as normal communication, but they laugh at everything. I mean, not in a nasty way, they don't laugh at people, but they just find life fun. And they're often, often laughing. So this immersive experience has, I think, added years to my life. Wow.

Okay. If Piraha, if I said that right, yeah. Is a language that's going to make you just calm and maybe a little bit joyful. What language would make someone have the best memory?

Oh, well, many languages of hunter gatherers and others are not written down. And one of the drawbacks of literacy is that we place the burden that hunter gatherers have to place on their memory. We place in the written word. So I have found that memory appears to be greater in hunter gatherers who only have oral language and not written language. And so they have to remember all these stories. So it would be like remembering large passages of the Bible, for example, if you were a Christian or the Torah or the Quran, Some people try to memorize large sections. But in hunter gatherer societies, to know the stories of your ancestors, to know the stories that are important, there's no choice but to remember them. And you hear different people tell the story, they tell it the same way because this is part of the way the language operates. There's no other sub language like writing to throw it off on. So in that respect, there is an advantage to not having a written language. There are a lot of the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in a modern technological society. But if you're a hunter gatherer society, having increased memory is very important for your survival.

So increasing memory works. And there are ways to increase working memory, at least with some brain training, things that I've written about, but they're not language based. One of the biggest challenges that I have in my weird neurological post, we'll call it post Asperger's wiring, I do not have a sense of cardinal direction, innate directions whatsoever.

Right.

Can you tell me about some languages that unusually use spatial awareness?

Yes, this is very common. You Know, when I was first working with the Pitahan, they're by no means the only language like this. I was trying to get some terms that we might use in English. You know, our absolute directions are north, south, east, west, southeast, that kind of thing, which I have to say most English speakers, if I were walking down the street and I said, let's turn north, very few people would know what I'm talking about. So the Piraha, what they do is they live by a river, and they know which way the river flows, and they always know where the river is. They remember this. So when you're walking with them in the jungle, they will say, turn up river, or they will say, turn away from the river or turn towards the river. And so when you take a Pirah out to another place they've never been before, the first thing they want to know is, where's the river? And I have seen. I have taken Piraha out for medical treatment. And I took this guy, he had cirrhosis of the liver. He really needed to see a doctor. So we flew out of the village. I took him to my rented house in the city, and then I said, okay, now I'm taking you to the hospital. So we got into a car and we drove him to the hospital. And he said, yeah, but I don't want to stay here. And I said, well, this is where the doctor is. I don't know how to help you. The doctor knows how to help you. He said, I don't want to stay here. I said, let's just try it for tonight and see what it's. I'll be here first thing in the morning. And so I left. The doctor was with him. But at about 5 in the morning, there's a knock on my door. And I open it, and here's this Peter Ha man with the hospital gown all open in the back with no underwear or anything. And he's walked almost 20 miles during the night from that hospital to my house. And he's never seen these places before in his whole life because he knew where the river was. And when he saw my house, he immediately mapped it out relative to the river. And then when I got him to the hospital, he mapped that out relative to the river. So he just walked from the hospital to my house. And having only seen them one time, and that was fairly astounding. Barefoot, half naked, with just a hospital gown on, he made it. And so I didn't make him go back to the hospital. I said, if you don't see the doctor, you could die. He says, well, then I'll die. And so I took him back to the village.

Did he die?

Yep, he died about a week after we got back. But he was not afraid of death. I mean, the Piraha simply don't fear death. They don't like to be sick. Nobody likes to be sick. But he was there with his friends. He told me, he said, I want to die with my brothers. I don't want to die out here.

We can learn a lot from that mindset in the West. That's an incredible gift. There's another language that fascinates me. I'm always looking at things that I suck at and be like, well, how could I suck less at that? Or just like, I'm curious about it. So call me direction blind. And my father, I guess, boy scout or something, he always knows which way is north. And I'm like, that's. That's gross, actually, I'd like to do that. So there's a language from the Aboriginals where they only use cardinal directions. So they would say things like, the cup is to the east of the plate, Right. So their entire reality is always mapped out in four directions. And what that would do to my brain if I saw the whole world. And I always knew, I feel like my sense of self would be so different versus the way some languages would say, well, it's to the left of you or to the right of you.

Right.

Do you think that that affects the way we interact even with the whole world? Are we a part of the world? Is the world part of us? Individualism, how does language affect that?

Yeah, there are a lot of experiments that show that different directional systems can lead to very different degrees of effectiveness in navigating through novel environments. So someone like the Piraha, who basically, from the time they're little, build a map of their whole environment in their head. So at Piraha, they don't have numbers, so they can't say, I'll meet you in two. I'll meet you. Go two kilometers that way, and I'll meet you out there. Go north, go south. They simply have a name for that part of the jungle they want to meet in. And they say, I'll meet you out there. But they've mapped it all out in their brain. But anyway, their directional system based on finding the river, if you know where the river is, if you can find a river, I don't know how this would work. In the Sahara Desert, they would be in bad shape. But in most places, like in the US where there are lots of rivers, experiments show that they would find their way around much faster than most of us. And that's exactly what this Piraha guy did when I took him out to the hospital. If you took me out to a brand new city and showed me somebody's house, then took me to the hospital 20 miles away, I doubt that I could walk back to that house. I might if I could cheat and use street names. But this guy doesn't read and doesn't know any street names and doesn't have a gps.

It feels like you could create a really strong psychedelic experience for the Piraha. Put him in the middle of a circular river.

Oh, right.

Like reality just collapsed. And they'd probably, you know, go somewhere. What do you think?

Yeah, they actually have some sort of circular rivers, oxbow rivers that are vestiges of other rivers, but. But they always have the main river to refer to.

The main river is dominant, then. Okay, that's no fun.

Yeah, the main river is dominant. So if you take away the main river, so you put them in a place where there's only one body of water and it keeps going around in a circle like a moat, or you take them to the Sahara Desert where there simply is no water, that would be extremely difficult for them.

It just points out there's so much about objective reality that isn't really that objective. It's very much a subjective reality we just all have this shared belief about. Sounds like words don't even reflect objective reality. They're just cultural constructs. Is that real?

That's basically what a symbol is. It's a cultural construct. And it doesn't have to reflect objective reality. It only has to reflect how the people want to talk about it. And this is something that comes up again and again. So what is fact and what is fiction? We tend to think there's this hard line between the two that every culture observes. But I've been in many societies where I really can't tell when they're talking about something, whether that's fact or fiction. And sometimes it seems to be a blend of both. So the Piraha believe, like the news.

I get it.

Yeah, right, right, exactly. You know, you watch any two people watch the news, and they're going to take away very different conclusions. He said this. No, he didn't. He said this. So that's what another thing. And that points to the fact that language evolved, because it's not. You know, I once was interviewed, you know, about 40 years ago, I was interviewed by the New York Times, because somebody had claimed that a language of South America, Imata, was the perfect logical language. It was even more logical than computer languages and that if we all spoke this, there would be no ambiguity. And I told the reporter, I said, it's just impossible that this is the case because human languages are superior and more complex than computer languages because they have ambiguity and because they have vagueness. No politician could survive without ambiguity and vagueness. We all use these things purposely to mislead people. So one of the functions of language is to mislead people. You know, oh, wait, there's a tiger over here. We better not come, because I actually saw food over here and I don't want to share it with anybody. So lying can be to our advantage, which is why everybody lies.

Did we invent language so we could lie?

Well, I think lying has a big part, is a big part of it. I think that lying was there from the very beginning. My dog lies.

They will. They'll try to hide things. And we've seen chimpanzees, you know, they'll misdirect others to hide.

The lying is not unique to us, but we're just better at it because we have language and we can say it with a straight face. We can say we're not lying. So, like, the pinaha have these little endings at the end of every verb that tells me the degree of certainty I have for what I just said. Whoa. Did I deduce it? Did I induce it? Did I just hear somebody say that? They're just little particles, and each one of them tells me that somebody said, so we always know they're telling the truth. I said, no, sometimes they will use the one that means absolute truth when they're lying.

Imagine if, like every post on the Internet, if the author was saying, here's one of three things, I'm pretty sure.

I heard it somewhere.

And no, I've studied the crap out of this. Like, wow, that would blow all this time, people.

Like, that's true.

That's not true. Like, it's actually probably somewhere in the middle. Well, okay, that's cool.

So they could say that, but in Pirah, you have to say it. It's part of the verb. You have no other option.

Oh, man, this is so mind blowing. All right.

Do you think there's, like a secret.

Universal language that's hidden underneath all languages?

Well, that is the view of some linguists, actually called universal grammar. Actually, universal grammar is an idea that started in the 13th century with the monk Roger Bacon. He was the first one to use this term. And what he meant was that there are logical principles that languages have to follow. He didn't mean it's biological, he just meant that it's logical. The same term, universal grammar, was first used in the United States in 1865 by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, whose biography I'm just now finishing. And he meant the same thing by it that Roger Bacon meant. And he actually gives Roger Bacon the credit for the idea that we have symbols and they can only be arranged in certain ways. So in that sense, we're all. All humans are subject, are bound to a certain logic, but that logic is not totally tight. I mean, it's just a sort of a loose framework. So languages can vary tremendously. And how people think about the world and how they talk about the world are very different in each of the 8,000 languages spoken in the world today. So the more we know about those languages, the more we know about how to reason and how to talk about the world and how to solve problems. But at the same time, there is a loose logic to how language works. And so if I met aliens, like I commented in a couple of places on the movie Arrival, where you've got these space aliens coming down, and a linguist has to figure out what they're saying, and that's pretty much how fieldwork functions. I mean, I love the movie. Not always for the whole movie, but I love the part where she was talking to the aliens or communicating with them, because that's exactly how I would work. And it's one thing that makes learning another language possible. If there were no constraints at all, if languages were utterly different, it would be almost impossible to learn another one. But once we start to learn some of the symbols and start to put them together, the logic doesn't do everything by any means, but it is an extremely useful fallback as we're learning another language.

Do you think AI really understands language nuance?

Oh, that's a great question. I think AI proves most linguistic theories that are based on biology to be false, because there's no biology in AI. Okay, so does it understand the meaning of what it's saying? Maybe not. It's not even necessary that it do that. There was this famous thought experiment by the philosopher John Searle about 45 years ago called the Chinese Room. And he said, let's imagine that you've got a big computer, but it's empty inside. There's a guy in there, and the guy has instructions, and he's got two buckets of symbols. And it says if you get a symbol that looks like this, some squiggly little line put out of the opening, which turns out to look like a mouth because he doesn't know he's in a big robot head, put out this other symbol and the guy starts doing that and he gets really good at it. And pretty soon he's taking, and he doesn't know that he's taking Chinese, putting out English. Pretty soon he's so good at it that nobody can tell. Everybody thinks he speaks Chinese. But does he speak Chinese? Well, you can't say he really understands Chinese, but he's doing a really good job. So when Alan Turing proposed the Turing test, he, he thought that if a computer could imitate a human well enough, we'd have to say that they were thinking like a human. But AI today and John Searle's 45 year old thought experiments show that. But it doesn't matter. If they're doing it the way we do it, they're doing it. I use AI all the time, not, you know, to combat it in the classroom. I always give writtenness. I don't allow any electronic devices and I have weekly essays that have to be written with pen and paper. And my students think they're going back another century. But for now, I mean, if I were really creative, I would have. But I do have them do some AI assignments. It's like, like, it's not like AI is bad for you, it's very good for you, but. So I don't think it's relevant to ask whether it's act, whether it's doing this exactly like a human would, it's doing it really well. And if you say that it's only possible to learn a language in a way that we, that AI does based on a biology, that's just wrong because AI has proven you don't need any biology to do that.

Do you follow Project SETI with Understanding Language in Wales?

I have read quite a few of the different reports on language in Wales.

Yeah, I attended a presentation by one of the researchers in Switzerland recently and it's incredible. They've decoded major portions of the clicking language in Wales, all using AI. And again, does the AI understand anything? We don't really know, but it can tell you when the whale clicks this way, they're talking about the one over there who's named Click Click Click it. Do you think there's other language all over the world that we're going to be able to decode, like bird language or slime molds sliming, I don't know.

Well, every creature communicates. There's not a living creature that doesn't communicate. The big difference to call it language, in my opinion, is the use of symbols that are created by convention. Can other animals do that? I think almost certainly they can. Can they do it to the same degree that we do? I don't know. But I would never say again that an animal can't have a language. I would simply say that until recently we haven't had the ability to study it like these researchers are doing now. Many linguists would still say, I mean, Noam Chomsky is famous for saying that trying to say that an ape or a whale has language is like saying a man jumping out of a fifth story window, flapping his arms, is flying. But that, although it's funny, doesn't have any real basis. Because if you can show that these whales are using symbols, and it's almost certainly the case that they are, my dog recognizes symbols and, you know, there are certain words that all my dogs, so they can learn them. They don't seem to create them. But whales do seem to create them. I mean, after all, the brain of a sperm whale is a. Is over 5,000 cubic centimeters, whereas the brain of the most. The biggest brain in the human line was Homo neanderthalensis, which had a brain of about 1300-1450 ccs. Our brains are about 1250 cc, except that European women brains average size about 950 cc.

So did you just say that women have smaller brains than men?

Yeah, they do because their bodies are smaller.

I'm telling my girlfriend.

Yeah. My response to that is size doesn't matter.

Exactly. I was hoping you were going to go there. If not.

I was, yeah. Yeah. So if a creature, you know, the sperm whale brain is not organized like our brain, but it's 5,000 cubic. I mean, it's huge. It's the biggest brain in the world. So I'm not shocked. Elephants can do things that we never thought possible. Animals. We are animals. And the fact that we think of ourselves and a lot of this is the influence of the philosopher Rene Descartes, who basically said that all animals except humans, he would have never called humans animals. Animals are basically meat machines. They don't have any thoughts, they don't have any emotions. They just have instincts and reactions and so killing them doesn't matter at all. But once you start to study animals and realize we're also animals, that we're better at some things than other animals and other animals are better at many things than we are, then you start to realize that we've undervalued these creatures, these beautiful, sentient creatures that coexist in the world with us. It makes you think about the ethics of what you eat. It makes you think about the ethics of harming others. You know, if whales can speak to each other, what does that mean about killing them? You know, I mean, we kill humans, so I guess the people who kill humans aren't too worried about killing whales. But we don't do a lot of eating of humans anyway.

It's not too often. Although when I was going to school, we used to have some vegans who would blow up laboratories of university researchers working on chicken eggs. Oh yeah, that was kind of always. I was like, if you're willing to blow up one thing, you might as well be willing to eat them. But I guess.

Right, right, Exactly.

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Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?

I have not. I've seen it advertised, but I haven't seen it.

It's a cult classic. It's hilarious. About the world's smartest man today gets frozen and wakes up 200 years from now. Accidentally.

I'm sorry.

The world's dumbest man from today gets frozen and 200 years from now he wakes up and he's the world's smartest man, you know, saves the world. Because they're spraying crops with Gatorade, because electrolytes, you know, just it's. It's a sort of a commentary about how generation by generation we seem to be getting dumber. What I'm curious is if I froze myself and I could wake up at some point in time, how long could I go before I wouldn't recognize English anymore?

In the last 1,000 years, English, English a thousand years ago would be completely unintelligible to us today. You just couldn't understand it. So you don't have to go back a thousand years. You go back to a few hundred years to Shakespeare, and it's already difficult to follow what Shakespeare's writing if you don't have some sort of marginal notes to tell you what this phrase means. And that phrase means so many words fall out of use in other words come into use. But languages are always changing. And so English and German used to be the same language. In fact, English and French 6,000 years ago, 6,500 years ago were the same language. And we can tell that by different things. So language changes. Each generation has new words and new expressions. So in a hundred years you would understand, but you would lose a lot of the thread of things that were being said. I mean, I have grown grandchildren. And if we take just the textual language, text, language, I don't understand half of what they text me. I have to write back and ask for an explanation because language is changing, becoming more visual for them. Emojis are becoming part of language. So we have these two modalities when I speak to them. Them like my granddaughter, who is one of the smartest people I know. She's a senior in high school. She graduates this year. She's always using words. I don't know what they mean. You know, I consider myself to have a good vocabulary. I write books, I read all the time. But she's always using words from her generation that I don't understand. And I have to ask her and she said, you don't know this?

Yeah, that's.

I suspect that if I went to sleep and woke up in a hundred years, I would have a hard time following a conversation.

I agree. And I'm on the record, wrote a big book about. I'm planning to live to at least 180. And that may sound a little crazy, but hey, I just want 50% better than our current best. I've got AI and gene therapy in 100 years to play around. Maybe I'll make it, maybe I won't. But if I do, when I'm 180, will I understand the language of 12 year olds? And I kind of think I won't.

Well, you won't if you have no contact with them for all that time, but probably you will. So your own speaking your own language will change, so you'll keep up with them. But if you go to sleep and wake up in 180 years and haven't had that contact, then you probably won't understand them. But if you live constantly and have that kind of regular contact, then I suspect you will be able to follow them as long as you talk to them. The simple rule is we talk like who we talk with. And if you stop talking with a particular group of people, you're going to stop talking like them. And if you stop talking like them long enough. So many years ago there was a study by the founder of sociolinguistics, William Labov at the University of Pennsylvania, who showed that African American dialect or language of the inner city and the surrounding white language of the suburbs were becoming so far apart, it was really difficult for them to talk to each other. So that's just because they stopped talking to each other. So they stopped talking like each other. And this shows a severe social problem. We're not talking with each other, and we find this along economic lines and age lines and ethnic lines. So one of the great things about diversity is to be able to know what everybody's talking about. You know, you hang around and you listen to different ways of speaking. And it's almost like becoming bilingual. When I lecture to A large class that has a lot of African Americans. I tell my students, especially the white students, I said, you know how to speak English in one way. These people all know how to speak it in two ways. They speak African American vernacular and they speak white English because they've got to speak it. And in my school, growing up In Southern California, eight miles from the Mexican border, 80% of my friends in school were Spanish speaking. In the home, they all spoke good English. But, you know, when you played football or something, everybody was speaking Spanish. So I realized if I wanted to have these friends, I have to learn to speak Spanish. And we had Spanish classes required from third grade on. And I'm so glad that that happened. It's not like they didn't speak English. We could speak English, but, like, if you go to another country, probably they're going to understand English. So you could just, you know, business people, when they travel, they don't have that much time. They speak English and they get by. But if you speak to them in their language or you make a serious effort to learn this other language, that's a great sign of respect on the one hand, and it can show them that you're serious about knowing who they are and getting to know them, not just simply using them for business purposes, at the same time that it's expanding your own consciousness. So you're doing two favors at once.

Couldn't you argue that that's cultural appropriation? You're stealing a language from someone else? I mean, there's crazy people out there who'd say that, but what do you think?

Oh, I've heard a lot of people say that. Yeah, people have said that to me. They said, said you stole the language from the Piraha. I said, yeah, well, if I stole the language, they wouldn't be speaking it, would they? I would have taken it out of their mouths, but they're all speaking it just fine. You know, did I steal math from my math teacher? Just doesn't make any sense at all to say that you're stealing from them because you're learning their language. Thank you. It's important to learn these languages. The only way you could steal a language is if you. You took it out of their brain.

Exactly. This whole idea that you own a language or a food, it's nonsense. You don't steal food from someone unless.

You take it off their plate.

Exactly.

So I eat tacos. Actually, I don't eat tacos because of the corn, but I want to eat tacos. So there.

Yeah, I used to eat A lot of tacos growing up, but I don't eat the carbs now, either, so I take the tortilla and scrape everything out.

Yeah, we can agree with, but, yeah.

You'Re not stealing tacos. All my good friends in Southern California are still making tacos. They post it on Facebook all the time. So I didn't steal that from them. In fact, they would find it rather strange if I didn't like the food I was raised on.

And also, no one's ever stolen a hamburger from me, so.

Right. I'm very happy. If people want to eat hamburgers in Beijing, that's fine. I know. Don't. I don't feel like I've been culturally misappropriated or something like that.

Cool. Now we're getting into things that are a little humorous. And I'm curious, how does humor change in language? Do some languages have a little flag, like, I'm joking, or how do you communicate humor differently?

Well, we do it. You know, one way we do it is codified. Codified jokes, you know, where we have these jokes and we tell them, Peter Ha don't have jokes like that, for example. They don't have that. But they use a lot of sarcasm so that rely on cultural knowledge so somebody can tell you something. It sounds perfectly serious. So I had Peter Ha come in one time because I was always asking him questions about their culture and everything. And the guy comes in and he starts telling me this story about how they kill their babies if they don't like the way they look. And I'm getting horrified, and I. And at the end, he's told me all this. I'm taking notes, and I said, you kill your babies. And he bursts out laughing and he says, who would kill your babies? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard of. You believe that? No. He said, you know, I like these guys already. Yeah. So, yeah, they're very funny. And they like to. They like my gullibility, you know, because they know I'm there studying and I take it all seriously. So they. They teach me bad words, you know, dirty words, just for a joke, to see if I'll say it, and then I'll try it out in public, you know, because I get. You have to practice the language. And the guy who taught it to me is elbowing the guy next to him. He said, watch, he's going to say this word. But they don't mean to humiliate me. It's just fun for them. And, you know, we change our intonation a little bit. We change our facial expressions. But if you're really good at telling jokes or making people laugh using sarcasm, you act like you're being serious. It's only when they realize the absurdity and that they've been taken in that it becomes funny, both to you and to them. If they've got a good sense of.

Humor, wow, that's definitely the way.

But there are linguists have written entire books on humor and how humor works in language. It's not something that I've studied profoundly, but I have friends who specialize in the study of humor and language. Language.

I ran a little experiment once, and I will confess, there are sounds in Swedish and French. I don't think my brain processes them right. You can say the word to me and I'll say a different word back. And it's driven me nuts. And I used to have auditory processing issues. I've done a bunch of retraining of my ears to be able to hear things I couldn't hear before. And to this day, it's still very difficult for me compared to what it used to be. And I'm like, ah. Like, what is going on here? And so I said, all right, I'm gonna see if I can fix this. So I took an infrared laser that penetrates the skull and stimulates brain function, and I put it above my left ear over the language processing center in my brain. And I ran it, supposed to be for two minutes. I'm like, I'm a biohacker. I'll do three. And then I tried talking, and I spoke in garbled sentences, and it freaked me out because I made my living at the time on stage, talking about cloud computing and security and encryption and all that kind of stuff. All right, I'm going to be broke. And it took about four or five hours. I'd overstimulated my language processing center, which is probably good in the long term. We don't really know. And I returned to normal. I still don't hear the sounds very well. But what do we learn about language from people who have brain injuries?

Well, we learn quite a bit in my book How Language Began. I have four chapters on the brain, in which I go into healthy brains and brains with different kinds of problems and what these things teach us. You know, we have the famous story of Phineas Gage, who had the rod go through his brain and do severe damage, but it changes personality but not his linguistic abilities so much. We find other cases. You know, there was, when I was at the University of Pittsburgh, we had a fellow who had a PhD in neurology and a PhD in computer science, and he worked with aphasics. And he had a guy who had a type of aphasia where he could only. Any new noun. He could only think of the word Reagan because Ronald Reagan had been the president. So you would show him a picture and the guy of some object, new object, and the guy says, I know this is not it, but I want to say that's Reagan. And he would start crying because he knew he wasn't saying it right. But that's the only word that he had. And so we learn about language being so compartmentalized in some ways that, you know, there's the sound system, which you know is important. There's the meaning system, which is important. There's the word structure system, that's important. There's the mental dictionary, that's important, important. And we find that damage can be done to each of these areas. So that. But when you're learning new sounds, I mean, there's this field called articulatory phonetics, which is essential for the field worker because you're going to wind up going into a language that nobody's ever studied before. So you need to know the kinds of sounds that the human vocal apparatus can produce and how it produces them. And once you start to study that, if you listen to it, you say, okay, that sound is the tongue is doing this and the lips are doing this, and the teeth are doing this, and the nasal openings, pharyngeal opening is doing this. And so you can then sort of piece together how the sound is made. And nowadays with computers, you can actually look at the waveform of the sound and take away all the problems of your ears and say, okay, now I know how this sound is made. You practice it and you can say it. But that requires practice. And we form habits. This is one of the most fundamental things about being alive. Every creature forms habits, and we form habits. And one of the habits we form is producing sounds in a certain way and only a certain limit of a certain range of sounds and hearing sounds in a certain, certain way. But this isn't limited to language. You know, people who can distinguish a wide variety of tastes of wine. Sommeliers, for example, I'm not sure what I think of all the adjectives they use to describe wine. I never taste edam cheese in a wine or something. But they learn definitely by practice to discriminate the different tastes. Or a musician learns by practice to listen to a song and tell what chord it's in what Key it's in. So all the things that can be perceived real, like fictional elements like unicorns and fictional elements like unicorns and all the real things. Charles Peirce called the Phaneron, all the things that can be experienced. And he said that one of the great points of education is to learn to discriminate the aspects of the pheneron. So he learned to discriminate wines, he learned many languages, he learned many fields of science. He did all of these things partly because he wanted as a goal to discriminate all the things that happen to us and experience. And most of us just ignore the bulk of that. There's all this background noise that we don't pay attention to because it's really hard. We have to ignore most of what's in our environment in order to focus on what's most important to us. And this is hard, but at the same time, we can do better. We can learn to start discriminating those things we've always been ignoring and learn about the sounds of Swedish or learn about the trilled r of Spanish or the uvular trill of German. You know, the. All the different sounds that. Or the tones. You know, some. Some people told me, I'll give them examples. So in Piraha, the word for ear is awe, and the word for skin is awe, and the word for hand is awe, and the word for foreigner is awe. So you've got to hear the tones. And somebody said, oh, that's impossible. I. You must have to be born learning that. I said, can you carry a tune? If you can sing anything, that means you can discriminate the tones. In fact, English uses tones also, but we use it in intonation. Rising, intonation, falling intonation. What's difficult is having the tones on each individual vowel. But it's not like we don't do that in English. It's just that we don't do it in the same way. So we have to train ourselves. And this is one of the things that having new experiences does for us. It breaks our old habits and helps us form new habits and powers of discrimination.

It feels like that's a relatively easy thing to train if you just make a video game. Like you can only shoot, you know, rockets at the bad guys if you hear the. Right away. Right. It's things like that.

Conceptually difficult. Yeah, it's just we don't do it right. So video games are great. We have so many new ways with electronics and AI and, and. And YouTube. You know, when I was playing in a rock and roll Band, you listen to the song and you figured out how to play it. But now you just go to YouTube and somebody will actually show you how to play it. There's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't mean you're a worse. If you can play it and you can play it, well, I don't care how you learn to play it, you know, so we have all these extra tools that help us do things now that were much harder or impossible for us in the past.

It's so beautiful to think what we can do. And it seems like social media may go in the opposite direction. I've got one more question for you. Do you think it's possible that psychedelics drove the evolution of language? The drunk ape theory?

Well, it's possible. I've read theories that it did contribute. And I was recently at a series of meetings in Europe with people from the European Research Council talking about a form of psychedelic that has been developed recently that can take away person's concept of their self. And it's very effective for certain kinds of therapy. But, you know, I'm a child of California in the 60s, and we took a lot of psychedelics back then, and I certainly feel that they were consciousness expanding. And in my own case, I never had a negative reaction. It was just taught me to think. I thought, at least at the time, in different ways about the world. So it's possible. But there's certainly a lot of language development. You know, I don't know that Homo erectus ever had access to psychedelics. I can't prove they did or they didn't. So this is one of those things where we just would need a record of all the plants they ate and everything that was in their environment. To say this. I can't say that it's implausible. I can't even say that it's plausible because I haven't read enough about it. But again, it's silly to rule out everything as impossible. One of the things that worries me about the world today, especially when I listen to political discourse, is everything seems simple to people. It's just obvious. Black and white, they could be on opposite sides. What's black for me could be white for you and vice versa. But it still seems simple, you know, so you take a political position and somebody says, well, that's just wrong. Well, it might be, but, you know, nothing is as simple as we like to think it is. We like to simplify because it makes our lives simple, simpler. We like to be right and we like to think we're Right. So we rule out possibilities and that's really not the way of science. Charles Peirce had an expression that I really like which is, do not block the way of inquiry. Do not block the possibility of finding out new things. Investigate everything. William James didn't believe in ghosts, but he did. He didn't tell people they were wrong to believe in ghosts. He simply did experiments. He went to seances, he went to haunted houses. He investigated this. And at the end he said, I can't really say it's totally wrong. He said, you know, I'm not totally convinced they're there and I'm not totally convinced they're not there. There's more plausibility than I thought when I started this. And that's like an honest conclusion, even if I don't agree with him. But I didn't do the research.

He did such a, such a fascinating thing. I look at the way my mind understands the world around me and there's a whole picture inside there. And I've done a lot of esoteric practices and I kind of have this picture that isn't really what I just see. And I know language is a part of it and I know that I don't really have much of a voice in my head anymore. And I've been pondering more and more what's really going on in there. How do we use language to enhance our customers cognitive function? How do we transform language to transform the way we see the world? And I think the work you're doing, finding the biggest outliers out there in language and studying them, it's so fascinating and it's so unusual and I really thank you for just your life's work and your curiosity, relentless curiosity, and for sharing it.

Thank you so much for having me and giving me an opportunity to talk about these things.

You have a URL where people who are interested in becoming linguists can learn about your work and it's fascinating stuff. If you're into how does the brain really work? And a lot of the audience is where do people find your books?

It's@daneverettbooks.com Dann everettbooks.com just danneverettbooks.com well, keep.

Studying all the cool languages. If you ever write a book in Klingon, I want to read it. I just don't know how much appreciation.

Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me and I hope more people take it upon themselves to study languages as a result of this conversation.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.

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