Jimmy Akin

Say same technique will allow making human zombies.

YOU’RE NEXT!!!

GET THE STORY.

Regarding our recent discussion of deafness and mentalese, a reader writes:

But what about deaf people who don’t know sign language? I recently read an article that claimed a surprising number of deaf people don’t know sign language, or at least don’t know it very well, especially deaf children who grow up with parents who have normal hearing. So how do they think? Or what about deaf people in remote areas who never encounter sign language? They are obviously thinking somehow but what form do the thoughts take?

If a person were totally deprived of language–both spoken, gestural, and anything else one might propose–then the person would have no option but to think in pure mentalese.

That being said, it isn’t clear to me how common completely language-less people are. I question whether they even exist. The language instinct is so strong in humans that the accounts I have read indicate that even deaf people not exposed to a formal sign languages come up with informal signs.

Recently I was reading an account of a deaf man from Mexico who was never exposed to formal signing. This gentleman not only was able to get across the border with the United States, he was able to survive in the Los Angeles area. When he was discovered, he did not know any established language, including sign languages. An effort was made to teach him a sign language, and soon he “made the breakthrough.” Afterwards, he not only was able to describe his prior experience, he also was able to lead those working with him to other non-signing deaf individuals, who were more common than had been known.

These individuals had a network amongst themselves that had previously escaped notice. Despite their lack of conventional language, they had found ways to communicate with each other and often entertained each others with elaborate pantomimes describing their experiences.

This suggests that the language instinct in humans is so strong that even in the absence of exposure to a formal language, they will come up with an informal one.

This suggests that even these individuals may not think in pure mentalese but might have an accompanying “translation” of their thoughts into the informal gestural methods of communication they invent.

It would be fascinating to have better data on this, however.

There’s going to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight, and North America has the best seat in the house for it.

You may be able to catch the eclipse on FOX, as it will occur during the World Series game that FOX is broadcasting.

For full viewing instructions, including when totality will occur in your timezone, as well as background on what a lunar eclipse is, etc., GO HERE.

For those in the continental US, totality (which lasts less than 5 min.) will occur at 7:18 Pacific, 8:18 Mountain, 9:18 Central, and 10:18 Eastern.

Enjoy!

P.S. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, you can look directly at an eclipse of the moon!

Concerning my recent post on Thinking Without Words, a reader writes:

What about people who are deaf from birth? How do they think? Do they make up their own words? Or do they think without words, in a form of mentalese?

Good question!

This is something I was thinking about a while back (actually, about twenty years ago), so I asked one of my cousins, who was born deaf.

He responded that he sees people signing in his head reflecting his internal monologue.

Deaf folks have the same translation reflex that we do, they just translate their mentalese into a gestural language (typically ASL or American Sign Language here in America) rather than into a spoken language (like English).

In a related question that occurred to me, I wondered what people blind from birth associate with colors. It occurred to me that they would likely associate colors with tactile sensations–their minds filling in something they are familiar with (tactile sensations) for something they aren’t familiar with (colors).

So I asked a blind friend and he told me that it was indeed true: He associated the color red with the tactile sensation of heat, the color green with the tactile sensation of handling a dollar bill, and the color yellow with the feeling of touching a little yellow wooden bench he sat on when he was a small child. He hadn’t ever seen these colors, but he formed the tactile substitute impressions for the colors based on what others told him about things having these colors (i.e., things that are “red hot,” “greenbacks,” and in his own case, a yellow child’s bench).

Amazing how the human mind works, isn’t it!