The Social Brain Hypothesis and Language

There is archeological evidence that our social skills developed in tandem with our language skills. This interaction, Curtis, Swisher and Lewin argue, facilitated the emergence of human consciousness. They believe, “Through language, or more precisely, through reflective thought and imagery, the human mind creates an internal model of the world that is uniquely capable of representing – and coping with – complex practical and social challenges.” According to their social brain hypothesis, “It is impossible to separate the evolution of language from the evolution of introspective consciousness, a human facility that philosophers have wrestled with for millennia. Both language and consciousness, anthropologists are coming to believe, evolved in the increasingly intense nexus of our ancestors’ social and economic lives. Individuals need to be able to understand, and predict, the behavior of others in their group, and the most efficient way to do that is to create a complex model of social interaction, partly by being intensely aware of one’s own behaviors and motivations. Languages and introspective consciousness can combine to do that.”

Just as humans are predisposed to be social animals they are also predisposed to speak languages. In the 1950s the linguist Noam Chomsky argued that language was simply too complex for each individual brain to learn it from scratch. Without a stumble, the average adult can produce 150 words a minute, each word selected in milliseconds from as many as 50,000 possibilities and arranged in a meaningful sequence dictated by an elaborate mental stylebook of grammar and syntax. Chomsky’s notion was that human infants must be born with brain circuitry that functions as a sort of blueprint for universal grammatical rules. This circuitry allows very young children to properly employ the grammar of any language to which they are exposed rather than learn all the rules piecemeal by listening to adult speakers. Every child, this view argues, is born with an implicit knowledge of universal principles that structure language and with a genetic program for its acquisition.

The geneticist Lugi Luca Cavalli-Sforza writes, “All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language provided they start at a very young age. After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that. After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the pronunciation of a second language.” Cavalli-Sforza believes there is a lesson here for educators when he argues, “This is an excellent reason to begin foreign language instruction in elementary school, but few governments seem to have noticed this virtually absolute rule.”

Ehrlich adds, “Exposing children to a great deal of appropriate aural stimulation early on, including foreign languages, would probably benefit the educational process. Language, mathematics, art, and music appear to have been tightly woven by evolution, all involve symbolism, and all may have similar developmental windows of opportunity. It would seem wise to encourage their expression early in life.” Such advice needs to be considered carefully. Some read or hear such comments and think that science is now calling for more rigorous academic studies by three and four year olds. This is to misunderstand the real significance of the early years, and our inherited predispositions.

The eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner understands as well as anyone what all this research might mean when he asks, “Does it make sense to begin reading and writing at three?” He notes that Hungarian schoolchildren do not start formal reading and writing until they are seven; yet they end up near the top of the European league by age twelve. Bruner believes, “Hungary’s preschools are instructive: they emphasize that there should be much more oral work as a prelude to reading (including nursery rhymes, songs, and show-and-tells). And it works. So does it work in Flemish Belgium. And in German-speaking Switzerland, kids who start reading later and are given lots of oral training are more literate by age twelve than their French-Swiss cousins, who begin reading at four.” In contrast, Bruner observes, “The ‘new’ Britain, probably the most hurry-up-and-read country in Europe, drops steadily lower in the literacy league tables.” We need to ask ourselves if such efforts as those currently underway in England are doomed to fail, and even cause damage, because they go against, rather than with, our human natures?

In concluding their book, The Scientist in the Crib, the authors observe, “Scientific explanation always increases rather than diminishes our sense of wonder and awe. It is still wonderful and awesome that babies learn so much so quickly, even when we begin to understand how they do it. And while we may occasionally condemn nature for her mindless cruelties, we have much to be grateful for. Evolution seems automatically to grant most children a fundamental capacity for intimacy, a profound psychological curiosity, and plenty of kinfolk to be intimate with and curious about. What more could we ask for?” We are only asking for one more thing – a better appreciation of our inherited gifts and what they might mean for formal systems of education.

Bibliography

1. Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect by Paul Ehrlich
2. Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History by Robert McElvaine
3. The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn by Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl
4. Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
5. Man, Beast and Zombie: What science can and cannot tell us about human nature by Kenan Malik
6. Java Man: How two geologists changed the history of human evolution by Garniss Curtis, Carl Swisher and Roger Lewin.
7. “School Size Counts” in Education Digest by Susan Galletti
8. “Tot Thought” in The New York Review by Jerome Bruner

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