[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay, let us begin ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: Hello, hello.

ROBERT: ... with an unusual encounter which comes from this lady here.

SUSAN SCHALLER: I'm Susan Schaller, and where do you want me to start?

ROBERT: Her story starts—actually it starts kind of abruptly.

SUSAN SCHALLER: I was indeed riding a bicycle to high school, and a catering truck hit me and I was put in the hospital with a concussion. I was 17 years old. And the concussion was bad enough that it slowed my brain enough that I couldn't read. And so naturally, I couldn't go to school.

JAD ABUMRAD: Which sucked for her.

SUSAN SCHALLER: At 17 I was very much a nerd, and I was bored out of my mind.

ROBERT: So imagine Susan sitting there in the hospital. One day, one of her friends ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: A friend of mine who was just a little older and had graduated the semester before me suggested going to the nearby university and crashing classes.

ROBERT: Now wait a second why would you go—if your brain was working slowly why wouldn't you go swimming?

SUSAN SCHALLER: Well, I couldn't read but I could listen and I could hear. And the person was saying that "Oh, it's a lot better than high school."

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And so one day she was at this college ...

ROBERT: ... just kind of wandering down a random hallway.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And I opened the first door on the left. That was the accident that changed my whole life, just picking that door.

ROBERT: At the front of the room there was this older guy. He was thin, he was bald and he was tracing shapes in the air with his hands.

SUSAN SCHALLER: It was as if there were pictures being painted in the air and then they immediately disappeared. Then another picture appeared. I was mesmerized.

ROBERT: Wow.

SUSAN SCHALLER: The professor was signing.

ROBERT: This class was actually one of the first classes to teach sign at a regular hearing university ever.

SUSAN SCHALLER: I had also walked into history but didn't know it.

ROBERT: Fast forward five years, Susan now is fluent in sign. She moves to Los Angeles. It's the late 1970s.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And I was snatched and put into interpreter training programs because at that time they were very, very few interpreters. And I found myself in a classroom.

ROBERT: In a community college.

SUSAN SCHALLER: In something called a reading skills class.

ROBERT: So she walks into the class, sees kids all over the classroom making big excited gestures one to the other.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And at the door I saw this man holding himself.

ROBERT: Kind of off by himself.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Making his own straitjacket.

ROBERT: She went over to the instructor, and she pointed at the guy and she said, "Who—who's that guy over there?" And the instructor said, "Well, he was born deaf. His uncle, he has this kind of insistent uncle who brings him here every day. We don't know exactly what to do with him, though."

SUSAN SCHALLER: And ...

JAD: What did this guy look like?

SUSAN SCHALLER: He was a beautiful—well now I know, I don't know if I would have had that in my head at the time, but a beautiful looking Mayan. You know, high cheekbones and black hair, black eyes.

ROBERT: And something about his eyes caught her attention.

SUSAN SCHALLER: He was studying mouths. And I walked up to him and said, "Hello, my name is Susan."

JAD: And this is where things start to get a little weird. He looks at her, and instead of signing his name—whatever it was ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: He brings up his hands ...

JAD: And signs right back to her ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: "Hello, my name is Susan."

ROBERT: Susan, like, shakes her head and says, "No. I'm Susan."

JAD: And he responds, "No, no. I'm Susan."

ROBERT: Everything you said he tried to say?

SUSAN SCHALLER: Exactly. I call it visual echolalia. And I remember thinking ...

ROBERT: Why is he doing this?

JAD: I mean Susan, did he—did he look like he had some kind of disability or condition?

SUSAN SCHALLER: He was—he was intelligent. I wouldn't have been able to answer if you had asked me "How can you see intelligence?" But you can actually see intelligence in people's eyes.

ROBERT: He was just missing something.

SUSAN SCHALLER: To copy me meant that he didn't really know what I was doing.

ROBERT: And that's when it occurred to her ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: This man doesn't have language.

JAD: Wait, how old was this guy?

SUSAN SCHALLER: He was 27 years old.

JAD: And in all that time no one had taught him sign language or anything?

SUSAN SCHALLER: Well, he didn't know he was deaf. He was born deaf. He didn't know there was sound.

JAD: Really?

SUSAN SCHALLER: 27 years, no idea that there was sound. He could see the mouth moving. He could see people responding. He thought we figured all this stuff out visually. And he thought, "I must be stupid."

JAD: And so here's the question for our hour. This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Words. What do words do for us?

ROBERT: Are they necessary?

JAD: Can you live without them?

ROBERT: Can you think without them?

JAD: Can you dream without them? Can you ...

ROBERT: That's enough.

JAD: Can you swim without them?

ROBERT: No, no, that's enough.

JAD: All right, back to the story.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So this man that Susan met, we don't actually know his real name, but when she wrote about him in her book, A Man Without Words, she called him Ildefonso.

ROBERT: There they are sitting in the classroom. She's right there with him.

JAD: And of course she's wondering ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: What have you been doing for 27 years? [laughs]

ROBERT: So she thinks, "Well, let me see if I can teach him some just basic sign language. In an interesting case she takes out a book and makes the sign "book."

SUSAN SCHALLER: But the sign for book looks like opening up a book. So he thought I was ordering him to open a book.

ROBERT: So he grabs the book and he opens it.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Because he thought I was asking him to do something. It was very difficult. If I gave him the sign for standing up, he thought I wanted him to stand up. And so I couldn't—I couldn't have a conversation with him. And it was the most frustrating thing I have ever done in my life.

JAD: Wait a second, how long did this go on for?

SUSAN SCHALLER: Well, weeks. It was weeks.

JAD: Wow!

SUSAN SCHALLER: Oftentimes when we said goodbye or just left—we couldn't really say goodbye—I really believed that we wouldn't see each other again. And I was oftentimes very surprised when he would be sitting there at the table. And I think sometimes he looked surprised that I showed up. [laughs]

ROBERT: But after a couple of weeks of him ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: Constantly miming, copying me.

ROBERT: ... she had an idea.

SUSAN SCHALLER: Perhaps it's just possible that if I died tomorrow I would have had only one really, really good thought in my life and this was it. I thought, "I'm going to ignore him." I taught an invisible student. I stopped talking to him and I stopped having eye contact. And I set up an empty chair.

JAD: And then she says she would hold up to this empty chair a picture of a cat.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And I was trying to explain to this invisible student that this creature, a cat—so I'd be miming a cat and petting a cat—and then I'd sign the sign for cat.

JAD: Then she would hop to the other seat, the invisible student's seat, and pretend to get it.

SUSAN SCHALLER: "Oh! Oh, I know!" you know, with my facial expression, "Oh, I get it!"

ROBERT: So you're playing all the parts. You're both the teacher and the invisible student.

SUSAN SCHALLER: That's right. That's right.

JAD: Wow!

SUSAN SCHALLER: Doing all these crazy things. And he just watched me.

JAD: He stopped copying her, which was good ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: But I'd do this over and over and over for days and days and days ...

ROBERT: And she says he just didn't get it.

SUSAN SCHALLER: He was—he looked bored a lot of times.

ROBERT: But one day in the middle of one of these endless pretend student exercises ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: Something happened.

ROBERT: Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him shift his body.

SUSAN SCHALLER: And he looked—it's interesting how his body was upright and he looked like something was about to happen. He looked around the room—this is a 27-year-old man, and he looks around the room as if he had just landed from Mars and it was the first time he ever saw anything. Something was about to happen.

JAD: His eyes grew wider, she says, and then wider. And then ...

SUSAN SCHALLER: He slaps his hands on the table. "Oh! Everything has a name!" And he looks at me in this demanding way and I sign "table." And he points to the door and I sign "door." And he points to the clock and he points to me, and I sign "Susan." And then he started crying. He just collapsed and he started crying. What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols and we start trading symbols? It changes our thinking. It changes our ideas of—it is no longer the thing, a table that we eat on, but there's something about the symbol "table" that makes the table look different. Ildefonso was in love. He was in love. Like, everything has a name. And for the first couple weeks he had this list of names that kept growing and growing.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Paper.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Eagle.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Clock.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Green.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: I kept copying words for him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Cat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Alligator.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Hat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Cardinal.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: Gave him the sign for door.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Door.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Door.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: Then I would ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Door.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: ... write D-O-O-R.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Serpent.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Cheetah.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: And he ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Strawberries.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: ... folded this paper.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Paper.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: As if it was ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Treasure! [laughs]]

SUSAN SCHALLER: ... treasure. And he would pull it out everyday, and he would ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Lion.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: ... carefully unfold it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Tiger.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: And he would add to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Orange juice.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Apple.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Blue jay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Thinking.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Believe.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Horse.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Leaf.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Idea.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: Add to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Lamb.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Blue.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Table.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Bird.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Wall.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Dove.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Name.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: Add to it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Pig.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Left.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Friend.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Cows.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Hawk.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Left of the blue wall.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Octopus.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Symbol.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Treasure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Words.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Eggs.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Ham.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Hippopotamus.]

SUSAN SCHALLER: What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, CHILD: Symbols.]

ROBERT: And that—you know, once you have begun to put words onto things you can look at a thing, say this symbolic sound, "table," and the person opposite you knows what you are talking about.

JAD: But she seems to be saying something deeper though that, like, when you get the word for table then suddenly the table, like this table right here [knocking on table], looks different. Like, that somehow the word changes the world in some fundamental way. Now I don't know if that's true about the table thing, but consider what happens when you put words together, okay? When you link them up.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Good. Okay.

JAD: So I want to tell you about this experiment.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Fantastic.

JAD: That I learned about from a fellow I talk to sometimes.

JAD: Charles?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I'm Charles Fernyhough. I'm a psychologist at Durham University in the UK.

ROBERT: Fernyhough.

JAD: And when I first read about this experiment in Charles's book ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Called A Thousand Days of Wonder.

JAD: It blew my mind out of my nose and onto the book.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: It was a little messy.

ROBERT: I never want to be with you in a library.

JAD: [laughs] It takes a little journey to get to the mind-blowing part, but luckily—I'll let Charles explain it. The whole thing happens in a room.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah, you're put into this room which is colored completely white. The walls are white. The ceiling's white. The floor's white.

ROBERT: So it's all white.

JAD: All white.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Everything's white. And you can tell where you are to the extent that some of the walls are longer than others. So on your left hand side ...

JAD: Are we in a rectangle, is what you're describing?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah, it's a rectangular room.

JAD: Are you with me so far?

ROBERT: I'm with you so far.

JAD: Okay, just to give you a sense of the baseline conditions here: imagine you are a rat in this room. Okay?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And somebody comes along and hides an object in one corner of the room.

JAD: What?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It can be anything. I mean, for rats you could use food.

JAD: Like a biscuit or something?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah.

JAD: You hide a biscuit in one of the four corners.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: In one corner.

JAD: You see it.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: But before you can get to it, they pick you up by your tail, spin you around a bunch of times ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: So you don't know where you are. You don't know which direction you are facing in. And then they say, "Right, now go find the biscuit."

JAD: So if you do this with a rat, what will happen is it will say "All right, let me go find the biscuit." And it will ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Go to one corner which looks right. But of course, the room also looks like that if you turn around through 180 degrees and face exactly the opposite direction.

JAD: Because it's a rectangle.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: So they get it right about 50 percent of the time.

ROBERT: Because corners of rectangles, two of them are identical.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: All right, so should we get on with this? Because I'm well aware of rectangles.

JAD: I just needed to get that out of the way because the cool part is coming up now.

ROBERT: I hope so.

JAD: So what the experimenters did next is they took one of the four white walls and they turned it blue. So imagine this scenario: you're in this room, you've got these four white walls, or rather three white walls.

ROBERT: One of them is blue.

JAD: Right. Well, now you're not confused anymore. You can relate everything to the blue wall. You can be like, "Oh, the corner with the biscuit was left of the blue wall or right of the blue wall."

ROBERT: I like it to the left.

JAD: You now have the blue wall as a ...

ROBERT: Navigational clue.

JAD: Yes!

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: That makes sense. You know, we would all be able to do that. That's not going to be difficult for us.

ROBERT: All right. Have we got to the good part yet?

JAD: Yeah, it's coming. It's coming.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Turns out though ...

JAD: The rats, he says ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: They're still scoring 50-50.

ROBERT: What?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It's as if they can't take any notice of the blue wall.

JAD: Even with the blue wall they're only finding the biscuit 50 percent of the time!

ROBERT: Wait a second, can a rat see color?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah, rats can do color.

JAD: They do color pretty well.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: They also do left, right just fine.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: But what they can't do is connect those two bits of information together.

JAD: In other words, they can only—well, they can do left. That they can do. They can do blue. But they're both separate. They can't do left of blue.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: These different kinds of knowledge can't talk to each other.

ROBERT: How does anyone know that? I mean, what rats have been interviewed for this survey?

JAD: What? They infer this based on studying the rats.

ROBERT: So the rat doesn't have what? Doesn't have the neurons? Doesn't have the—what doesn't he have?

JAD: The rat can't do it, that's all they need to know. And I'm gonna make it weirder now—neither can some humans.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: I spent the first 10 or 15 years of my scientific life studying creatures who don't talk yet.

JAD: That's Elizabeth Spelke. She's a psychologist at Harvard. Quite famous for her work with ...

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Kai.
JAD: As you can hear ...

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Babies. And I was interested in their abilities in relation to the abilities of other animals.

LAB ASSISTANT: Come on, get up. We're gonna go to the monkey room.

JAD: So she began the baby development lab, which is filled with toys and on any given day five or six really tiny kids.

LULU MILLER: How old is she?

WOMAN: She's six months.

LULU: And who's this?

CHILD: I'm a big kid.

JAD: Toddlers too.

LULU: How old are you?

CHILD: Three and a half.

LULU: Three and a half. Big time.

JAD: So at a certain point, Elizabeth Spelke decided to build a version of the white room in this lab because she wondered: if rats have so much trouble connecting the idea of left to blue, what about ...

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Surely ...

JAD: ... baby humans?

ELIZABETH SPELKE: ... a self-respecting 18-month-old human child will succeed in putting them together. But ...

CHILD: No.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: ... what we find is that children behave just like the rats.

JAD: Just like the rats.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Just like the rats.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: Just like the rats or almost just like the rats?

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Well, we don't test them with food, we don't test them with digging.

ROBERT: [laughs]

ELIZABETH SPELKE: So in superficial ways, superficial features of the studies are different.

JAD: But she says kids, like the rats, cannot connect the idea of left to the idea of blue. They just can't do it. And they can't do it at ...

CHILD: One.

JAD: They can't do it at ...

CHILD: Two.

JAD: They can't do it at three.

CHILD: Four, five.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: And we find that those children start performing like adults around six years of age.

ROBERT: Now I'm interested.

JAD: Good.

ROBERT: Something happens at the ripe old age of six.

JAD: It is shockingly late, right?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Well, something happens at the age of six that suddenly allows the kid to connect concepts like left to concepts like blue. And the question is what? What happens?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Several people have suggested that one candidate for a process that's doing this is language.

ROBERT: What do you mean it's language? Kids are talking, certainly at three, four, five and six. They're talking like—like, you know, too much!

ELIZABETH SPELKE: But they're not—what they haven't yet started to use is spatial language, and particularly the kinds of spatial language that adults would use in this situation to describe what they're doing.

JAD: And somewhere around the age of six they start to use phrases like ...

CHILD: Left of the blue wall.

JAD: And those aren't just words that come out of the child's mouth. Liz thinks that inside the child's brain, what that phrase does ...

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Is link these concepts together.

JAD: Clink! And at that moment ...

CHILD: Left of the blue wall!

JAD: ... the child leaves the rats behind.

ROBERT: I can't—are you—she doesn't think that kids have that ...

JAD: Well, let me put it to you a different way.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: And this is my best understanding of what she thinks. Her basic idea is that a child's brain begins as a series of islands. And on one island way over here in the brain you've got, say, color. We can call that the blue island.

ROBERT: Blue blue, blue ...

JAD: That's the part of you that perceives the color blue. Way on the other side of the brain, you've got the part of you that perceives spatial stuff like left.

ROBERT: Left, left, left ...

JAD: Maybe a third, objects like wall.

ROBERT: Wall, wall, wall ...

JAD: These things are there from the beginning, but they're separate. Then you get the words "left," "blue," "wall." And then the child, for the first time, comes upon the phrase ...

ROBERT: Left of the blue wall.

JAD: And in that moment, all the islands ...

CHILD: Kaboom!

JAD: ... come together.

CHILD: [laughs]

JAD: It is literally the phrase itself, she says, that creates that internal connection.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Everybody's always talked about how language is this incredible tool for communication that allows us to exchange information with other people so much more richly and effectively than other animals can. But language also seems to me to serve as a mechanism of communication between different systems within a single mind.

JAD: There you go.

ROBERT: Wouldn't it be just as possible—just listen to me here.

JAD: Mm-hmm?

ROBERT: That the kid's brain is developing some new connections and what follows then, follows from the changes in the brain.

JAD: So the words are like an after—after ...

ROBERT: Yeah. After.

JAD: After fact?

ROBERT: After effect.

JAD: Well that's—no. No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: The experimenters actually accounted for that.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: What the experimenters did next is that they thought okay, if language is adding this extra element, let's try and knock it out.

JAD: How would you do that? Would you, like, shoot something into their brain that kills the language part or something?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: There's a much simpler way of doing it and a much more humane thing that you can do.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: What we did is put adults in the room.

JAD: And then, she says, she gave them an iPod.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: They've got headphones on.

JAD: Playing through those headphones is someone talking.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Yup.

JAD: And their job while they're in the room is to just repeat what the person is saying.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Continuously listening to speech and repeating it the whole time they were in there.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It's actually a really hard thing to do. If you've ever tried shadowing somebody speaking. I mean if you tried ...

JAD: Can we try it? You go and I'll—and I'll shadow you.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Okay Jad.

JAD: Okay Jad.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I'm going to ...

JAD: I'm going to ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: ... try and start speaking now.

JAD: ... start speaking now.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And I want you to say it ...

JAD: And I want you to say it ...

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: ... right back to me exactly as I say it.

JAD: ... exactly as I say it.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: And without any ...

JAD: Oh my God, that's starting to hurt my head. That's really hard, actually.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: It is hard, yeah. And what that does is it knocks out your capacity to use language for yourself.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Basically battering the words out of the adult's head.

ROBERT: Why are they doing this again?

JAD: Well, they wanted to see, like, if you blast the words out of somebody's head ...

ELIZABETH SPELKE: What would happen?

JAD: Can they find the biscuit? Will they be able to form that simple thought, "left of the blue wall," or will they be like the rats who can't?

ROBERT: And?

ELIZABETH SPELKE: And we actually got very dramatic results.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: They went right back to being like the rats.

ROBERT: Wow!

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Yeah.

JAD: But Charles, what I'm wondering is if language allows you to construct a thought that is so basic as, "The biscuit is left of the blue wall," what is thought without language?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Well, I don't think it's very much at all.

JAD: What do you mean?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I'm going to put it a different way, and this involves making quite a controversial statement. I don't think very young children do think.

JAD: Like, think period? Was there a period at the end of that sentence?

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: I don't think they think in the way I want to call thinking, which is a bit of cheat, but let me say what I mean by thinking.

JAD: Okay.

CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: If you reflect on your own experience, if you think about what's going on inside your head as you're just walking to work or sitting on a subway train, much of what's going on in your head at that point is actually verbal. I'm going to suggest that the central thread of all that is actually language, it's a stream of inner speech. That's what most of us think of as thinking.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Well, on the other hand, what I'm most aware of when I'm reflecting is the stuff that I can't put into words. I think that he's exaggerating the role of language here. Yes ...

JAD: This all really hinges on how you would define thinking. And Liz would say take a musician. Like, I'll give you my example: Bill Evans. Here is a form of thought that carries you through a definite sequence of phrases, feelings, emotions, changes. And there are no words!

ELIZABETH SPELKE: But there's something that we get access to when we gain a full natural language that we can use not only to communicate with other people but with ourselves.

JAD: Test. Testing. Test. Test. Test. Test.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: Language is fundamentally a combinatorial system.

ROBERT: As we head up the steps. What is this? This is a ...

JAD: We're going to Columbia University.

ROBERT: Columbia University.

JAD: See, we'd gotten interested in the last thing that Liz Spelke said about language being a combinatorial thing.

ELIZABETH SPELKE: System.

JAD: Right. And that led us to Columbia. Here's the deal ...

ROBERT: You have words now. You have words in combination now. Now you can play with the combinations.

JAD: And that, as you'll hear ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: It's just us three then, right?

ROBERT: It's just us three.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Good.

JAD: ... opens up a kind of infinity.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Head to foot Now is he total gules, horridly tricked with blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, Baked and impasted with the parching streets, That lend a tyrannous and damnèd light To their vile murders.

ROBERT: This is Shakespeare.

JAMES SHAPIRO: When I sat in middle school and they gave us Shakespeare ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: ... roasted in wrath and fire, And thus o'er-sized with coagulate gore.

JAMES SHAPIRO: I was completely confused, and I felt stupid.

JAD: Can you just introduce yourself?

ROBERT: This is ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: James Shapiro. I'm a ...

ROBERT: He is a Shakespeare scholar, obviously.

JAMES SHAPIRO: At Columbia University, where I've taught for 25 years.

ROBERT: And one reason he says that Shakespeare can be confusing is that often Shakespeare behaved not so much like a writer but more like a ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: Like a chemist combining elements. He's taking words and he's shoving them together, smashing them together if you will.

ROBERT: And ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: Combining ...

ROBERT: ... sometimes these word experiments, they didn't go so well.

JAMES SHAPIRO: There's "The prince's orgulous." Orgulous has not stuck.

ROBERT: No.

JAD: [laughs] What does it mean?

JAMES SHAPIRO: You got me. I mean I should know. I taught ...

ROBERT: But look what he did just by adding a little prefix, "un."

JAMES SHAPIRO: There's so many words that we're now familiar with—unnerved. You know, we all know what that means, but nobody had heard "unnerved," "unaware," "uncomfortable."

ROBERT: He made up uncomfortable?

JAMES SHAPIRO: He was the first to use that word ...

ROBERT: On a stage.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Right. "Unearthly," "unhand," "undress," "uneducated," "ungoverned," "unmitigated," "unwillingness," "unpublished," something that's near and dear to me.

ROBERT: Unpublished.

JAMES SHAPIRO: "Unsolicited," "unswayed," "unclogged," "unappeased," "unchanging," "unreal."

ROBERT: He made up unreal?

JAMES SHAPIRO: He was the first to use it in print or on stage.

JAD: Would an audience at the time have understood what the "un" prefix meant? Not real?

JAMES SHAPIRO: I think it takes you a split second to kind of put that "un" on the real.

ROBERT: But then suddenly you got this new concept that there's something real but not.

JAMES SHAPIRO: He's taking words that ordinarily are not stuck together. Things like madcap, ladybird. Shoving them together—eyedrops—to achieve a kind of atomic power. Eyesore, eyeball.

JAD: He did eyeball?

JAMES SHAPIRO: Yes.

ROBERT: It's hard to understand how someone could think that up. It seems like it's always been there.

JAMES SHAPIRO: If you ask me what his greatest gift is, he's putting them together into phrases that have stuck in our heads. So truth will out.

ROBERT: Truth will out.

JAMES SHAPIRO: What's done is done. I could go on and on.

JAD: Go on and on!

ROBERT: He wants you to go on and on.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Crack of doom. My favorite: dead as a doornail. A dish fit for the gods. A dog will have his day. Fainthearted, fool's paradise, forever and a day, foregone conclusion, the game is afoot, the game is up. Greek to me, in a pickle, in my heart of hearts, in my mind's eye, kill with kindness. Believe it or not, knock, knock, who's there?

JAD & ROBERT: Oh! [laughs]

JAMES SHAPIRO: Laugh yourself into stitches, love is blind, what the Dickens, all's well that ends well. Something wicked this way comes. And a sorry sight.

JAD & ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: That's a champion.

JAD: That's pretty fantastic.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAMES SHAPIRO: How did he create phrases that stick in the mind, that make it seem as if they always existed?

ROBERT: Yeah, how? You're taking out a book.

JAMES SHAPIRO: I'm thinking of a passage here.

JAD: That is maybe the biggest book I have ever seen.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAMES SHAPIRO: Nonsense.

JAD: It was at least 3,000 pages.

JAMES SHAPIRO: Shakespeare doesn't write a lot about process. But there are one or two places where he does. In a poem called "Lucrece" in which a woman is raped. "Lucrece's Rape." And she has to write a letter to her husband explaining what happened to her. And she's struggling to find the words in which to do this. And finally she picks up the pen and it goes: "She prepares to write. First hovering o'er the paper with her quill; Conceit and grief and eager combat fight; What wit sets down is blotted straight with will; This too curious good, this blunt and ill. Much like a press of people at a door Throng her inventions, which shall go before." I'll read that couplet again: Much like a press of people at a door Throng her inventions, which shall go before." If you want to extrapolate from this something that Shakespeare might have himself experienced, you have a situation which all these ideas are pressing. It's like a throng of them. Who's getting through that doorway first?

JAD: It's a little bit maybe like that experience you might have at a nightmare New York club, where you've got like thousands of people in a tiny space and everyone's trying to push their way out, and they're like, "God, let me through the door! Get out of my way!" And it's just like this ...

JAMES SHAPIRO: Throng of images, of sounds, conceits, thoughts, ideas. And they are providing the pressure that's needed to produce words.

JAD: You know what?

ROBERT: What?

JAD: This makes sense to me, this interpretation. And not just for Shakespeare, maybe for anybody. Certainly the guy we met at the beginning, Ildefonso.

ROBERT: Who just learned words for the first time.

JAD: Yeah. I mean, as you move through the world, if you're sensitive at all and you're observant, you're gonna get filled up with all of these things which you have to express but can't until you get those words. Then—boom! The door opens.

ROBERT: And thanks to James Shapiro, professor at Columbia University, whose newest book is Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

JAD: Also, thanks to our kids: Louisa Krasnow, Stella Astory and Isaiah Harrison, and also thanks to the moms that brought them in: Therese Tripoli, Kerry Donahue and Patricia Starreck.

[SUSAN SCHALLER: Hello, this is Susan Schaller. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

[CHARLES FERNYHOUGH: Charles Fernyhough. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by NPR.]

 

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