The New York Times: The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 Languages | by Jessica Contrera | April 5, 2022
This is a great article and video about 46-year-old Vaughn Smith, who works as a carpet cleaner and is a hyperpolyglot* who speaks 24 languages and has some basic knowledge about many more.
As a child growing up in Maryland, Vaughn (who has a Mexican mother and an American father) felt different and left out. He discovered that learning languages was a way he could connect with others, especially when he moved to Washington, DC and met international children attending school in DC.
Vaughn’s language learning was helped by the fact that he could recall nearly “perfectly" anything he read, so he could take advantage of language books. It also helped that he was “muy, muy intelligente,” based on a psychologist’s assessment of a young Vaughn’s cognitive abilities.
This article describes the process that Vaughn went through to have his brain studied by MIT neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko, Ph.D. Below are some excerpts from the article by Jessica Contrera (who also had her brain scanned) and some gifs from the above video to illustrate the process that Dr. Fedorenko used to study Vaughn’s brain.
In the years Vaughn spent amassing languages, a Russian-born neuroscientist named Evelina Fedorenko was here at one of the world’s most renowned universities, studying...people with advanced language skills. What distinguishes polyglots and hyperpolyglots from the rest of us? [emphasis added]
Dr. Fedorenko invited Vaughn Smith and reporter Jessica Contrera to come to MIT and have their brains scanned. While Vaughn was having his brain scanned, he read English words, watched “blue squares move around” and listened to both familiar and unfamiliar languages. Meanwhile, the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scan was taking “three-dimensional images” of Vaughn’s brain, divided “into two-centimeter cubes” at “two second” intervals.
The images showed the “amount of blood oxygen” in each of the cubes when “the language processing areas are activated,” thus delineating a precise map of the areas of Vaughn’s brain that he uses to process various languages.
The results of the fMRI scans of Vaughn and Jessica showed “two colorful maps” of their brains--but those maps were different than Jessica expected:
I’d assumed that Vaughn’s language areas would be massive and highly active, and mine pathetically puny. But the scans showed the opposite: the parts of Vaughn’s brain used to comprehend language are far smaller and quieter than mine. Even when we are reading the same words in English, I am using more of my brain and working harder than he ever has to. [emphasis added]
This matches what the researchers have found in other hyperpolyglots they’ve scanned.
“Vaughn needs less oxygen to be sent to those regions of his brain that process language when he is speaking in his native language,” [PhD candidate Saima] Malik-Moraleda explains. “He uses language so much, he’s become really efficient in using those areas for the production of language.” [emphasis added.
Jessica Contrara pondered the origin of Vaughn’s abilities:
It’s possible that Vaughn was born with his language areas being smaller and more efficient. It’s possible that his brain started out like mine, but because he learned so many languages while it was still developing, his dedication transformed his anatomy. It could be both. Until researchers can scan language learners as they grow, there’s no way to know for sure. [emphasis added]
I think that Vaughn’s ability is probably a combination of nature and nurture. Certainly, there is evidence that Vaughn had some innate cognitive abilities [e.g., a nearly eidetic (i.e. photographic) memory for visual stimuli and superior intelligence at a young age (based on the “muy, muy intelligente” assessment of a psychologist)].
However, Vaughn was also motivated to learn multiple languages, and worked hard to do so, which undoubtedly did affect his brain’s development. In fact, Vaughn still sets aside time each day to learn new languages--currently he is working on Welsh using the Duolingo app.
All Vaughn’s hard work to learn languages appears to have finally paid off, at least in terms of Vaughn finally learning to appreciate himself:
At our gate, I ask how he is feeling. He is thinking about the way the Harvard and MIT neuroscientists spent the day asking him questions. Not just for their research, but because they want to understand how, in their own language learning, they could be more like him.
“It’s really comforting,” Vaughn says. “I always wonder, it’s like, how do I compare on the larger scale? What if this is really nothing to be excited about?”
But they’d been excited, and now, he could be too.
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*The author of this article defines hyperpolyglots as people who “can speak 11 languages or more” (based on a definition by Michael Erard).
All gifs were modified slightly from their video source; gif #4 incorporated some text from an illustration in the article into the gif. The two images from the article were also modified slightly from the source.
