Did I just figure something out about language and the brain?

Factual Questions
1

I started learning foreign languages late in life (when I was 21). For the last five years, I’ve studied French and Chinese. There are two interesting things I’ve noticed in doing so.

First, my English faltered. There are always those moments when you as a native speaker something like “Dessins, des saints, des seins: how do you tell them apart?” and they turn to you and say “no, know, can (noun), can (verb), read (past tense), red…” You start to think about the words you use when you speak your own language. You pay attention to the strange conjugations, the odd idioms, and the numerous exceptions to the rules in your own language, and, suddenly, you find yourself really thinking about the things you’re saying, to the point that it doesn’t just flow.

I see the same thing when playing guitar. There are things I can play on the guitar easily, without thinking, but if someone asked to slowly show them what I was doing, step by step, I couldn’t actually do it. I’d forget what I had been playing, essentially, even though I can play it fast without even thinking.

The second part is the disconnect between “what I’m thinking” and “what language I’m thinking in” (which is one of the first questions people ask you when you say you studied a language abroad). I started to realize that I would be thinking something, but I wouldn’t know how to express it. It wasn’t in a language though. There was no part of my brain saying something in English and telling me to translate it into French or Chinese. It’s just a knowledge that I’m thinking a certain thing that I can’t verbalize.

Well, in light of all this, I was watching an amazing, emotional and a little, um, groovy video at TED.com. In the video, neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor explains her experience of having a stroke. It’s really quite fascinating to hear a neurologist explain such an experience, but one thing that struck me afterwards was her explanation of the two sides of the brain (for which she brings out a real human brain).

Of course, I’ve always known that there are two sides of the brain and that they control different things. I know that certain people supposedly use predominantly one side of their brain, or something like that. But I’d never seen someone hold up a brain and crack it open to show how completely separate the two sides are.

I’ve since forgotten exactly the function of each side, but I’m now wondering if my language experiences are applicable to this new knowledge. For instance, she mentions that since one side of her brain shut down, she had to actually think to move her muscles, instead of just walking to the phone. This, obviously, was far more difficult than normal. When I start to actually “think” about language, am I using the other side of my brain to analyze something that is normally normally controlled by its counterpart?

Likewise, when we ask “What language do you think in?” Does that mean, which language do you use to translate the thoughts you’re having into a language that the other side of your brain understands?

2

This, at least, is very common. It happens every time you learn a new way of doing something, and it’s why programmers should learn a lot of different kinds of languages (procedural, functional, object-oriented, logical, declarative, etc.) instead of staying in an insular region. It’s also why people should travel: “What knows he of England, who only England knows?”, as Kipling said.

This is muscle memory. Never ask a centipede how he walks. :wink:

If you can figure out how the brain thinks, there’s a big prize in it for you. Many of them, most likely. The most I can say is that everyone seems to think differently, which is odd because our brains are all so much the same.

3

I am not a neurobiologist, but I would call this brain memory. This is very similar to the phenomenon where you are trying to recall a line from a song and you can’t start in the middle–you have to sing the song from the very beginning and then sort of listen to yourself sing the line you were trying to remember. The same thing can also happen when playing an instrument (I also play guitar) if you’re not reading music. The brain tends to remember things with associative methods and use “chunks” and it’s hard to recall just one sliver out of a chunk. Neuroscientists have been able to stimulate memory experience in subjects by an electrical stimulus to a point in the brain, and repeating the stimulus tends to cause the playback to rewind and start from the beginning like a tape.

4

What was really funky was in my high school psychology class when the teacher showed a film of a patient who had had the connection between left and right brain separated (as part of a treatment for epiliepsy, IIRC). It showed him trying to stack blocks up with his left hand and utterly failing. And then the right hand would keep trying to intervene and “show” the left hand how to do it.

5

Or a video of a patient buttoning his shirt with his left hand and unbuttoning it with his right…

No, you haven’t realized anything that wasn’t already known (B.S. in neuroscience, Ph.D. in linguistics).

6

I don’t know, but for me when I got functionally fluent in Chinese, that’s what I think in. I don’t “think” in English or in Chinese, I “think” in whatever language I’m using. Now, of course, my Chinese fluency is not the same as my English. When I get to a word or phrase I can’t say in Chinese, either my thoughts come to a stop or there is a seamless code switching to English. I think but haven’t tested it, but I believe that the languages the listener understands influences this greatly. For example, at work, it’s seamless to drop in English words when my Chinese vocabulary falls short. Especially for technical terms. However, that doesn’t happen for example when I speak with my in laws who speak zero English. YMMV