Wolfram Hinzen, linguist: “The language of someone who believes he is Jesus Christ can light up his brain”

Is it possible to think without words?

Try it in your head.

Many researchers believe that yes, thinking takes place in the human brain outside of language.

The German philosopher and linguist Wolfram Hinzen defends exactly the opposite.

In his view, language and thought are intrinsically connected.

They are inseparable.

Hinzen, director of the Grammar and Cognition group at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, ​​carefully analyzes what people with brain disorders, such as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, autism and severe depression, say.

In his opinion, language is a fundamental factor in all of them, which would demonstrate his hypothesis: if thought is altered, it is necessarily reflected in the words.

Hinzen is one of four lead scientists in a €10 million European project that will try to detect changes in the language of people with psychotic symptoms.

These patients – usually with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or depression – can suffer from all types of delusions: believing that they are aliens, that a famous person is their partner, that someone wants to kill them or that they make prodigious inventions that will save humanity.

For Hinzen, from the Catalan ICREA foundation, these delusions are also a language phenomenon.

And an exceptional window into the human brain.

Ask.

What is language?

Answer.

A common intuition is that language is simply a way of communicating.

In other words, we think, there is something we want to say and then we translate this communicative intention into language, which is the way to transmit it.

It's like you have a computer and you connect a printer to it.

The language would be the printer, which is what extracts the content from the computer to the physical world.

Thought would be separated from language: if you unplug the printer, the computer continues to work the same.

I reject this idea.

Q.

Why?

A.

In my opinion, language is not only a means of communication, but a means of structuring one's own thought process.

We humans need a particular linguistic framework that allows us to achieve the creativity of our thinking.

This framework is provided by the language.

Without this framework, thinking would fall apart.

We study mental disorders because in them thinking is breaking down.

If language is a way in which thought is organized, and in mental disorders we see that thought is disorganized, it follows that we should see that language is also disorganized.

Language is not like a printer that can be disconnected from the computer

Q.

Do you believe that thought does not exist separately from language?

A. It

depends.

There are other forms of thinking, such as mathematical or musical, that potentially exist outside our linguistic capacity.

I think this is a question still unanswered.

The truth is that we do not know if mathematical thinking could exist in the absence of language.

It's very controversial, but it's entirely possible.

All I am saying is that the type of thought expressed in language depends intrinsically on language.

It is not only expressed in it, but depends on it for its existence.

Q.

It is common to think that there is a place in the brain for thought, apart from language.

A.

If there were, it would be logical to have found it already, but we have not done so.

There is no circuit or place in the brain that is the network of thought.

It does not work like that.

Q.

Does every corner of the cerebral cortex participate in thinking?

A.

There was a time, at the end of the 19th century, when the organization of language was seen in a very localized way.

A stroke can cause a focal lesion in the brain, in Broca's or Wernicke's area, and disturb language function.

That's aphasia.

Then people thought: “That's it, we have found language in the brain, it is in these areas.”

Currently, this is very controversial.

Language is thought to be basically a whole-brain phenomenon, although it is not present everywhere to the same extent.

If you accept this, you can see language as something that is not a separable cognitive function, but a system that organizes our cognition as a whole.

The linguist Wolfram Hinzen, at the Pompeu Fabra University, in Barcelona.Albert Garcia

Q.

You have stated that the human brain would be the most complex object in the universe if it were not for the fact that its product: language is even more complex, because it creates a community of minds.

Do you really think about it?

A.

We have very strange brains, with this enormous capacity to produce language.

They generate a structure that goes beyond our own brains, because language is something objective that we share, it is not in your head or mine.

It's like the internet.

The Internet is produced by computers, which are like brains, but the Internet is an enormous structure that cannot be reduced to a specific computer.

It is the network itself.

Something similar happens with language.

It is a network that encompasses human knowledge and is fed by brains, but it cannot be reduced to brains.

I reject the idea that thought is separate from language

Q.

Your project, funded by the European Research Council, focuses on psychosis.

A.

Yes. In psychosis, people experience mental fluctuations, which is why they go to the clinic during the first episode.

They may have delusions, hear voices, and display disorganized thoughts and speech.

In this acute state of psychosis, they are usually given medication and go into remission: no symptoms or under control.

We are interested in the changes that occur in language.

Is there a specific linguistic state in that acute phase?

Does language reflect your mental states?

That is the question.

The idea of ​​the project is to regularly monitor these people with a mobile device, to listen to their speech every week.

We want to find out if changes in their speech or linguistic structures predict relapses.

Q.

Can language be a kind of biomarker to diagnose psychosis?

A.

Of psychosis and, in the best of cases, it can also serve to predict relapses.

It's like storms: you don't want to be surprised, you want to predict them before they happen.

And we believe that language can change in subtle ways and announce this impending storm.

Q.

Do you think that just by listening to the voice it is possible to know if someone has psychosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or other disorders?

A.

The evidence suggests that the answer could be yes in these cases, but we don't just analyze the voice, we also transcribe what they say and examine the text structure and semantics.

In this European project, we focus on psychosis.

The question is whether we can use our language markers to diagnose different disorders.

We are also interested in clinical depression: it is very likely that language features will change, but not as drastically as in schizophrenia, in which people have delusions, such as saying that they have 1,000 children, that they have arrived on Earth aboard a cosmic bubble or that the mafia is after them.

A delusion has to manifest itself linguistically.

It's not enough to feel like you could be Jesus Christ, you have to say it

Q.

In one of your studies, you asked whether delusions can be understood linguistically.

The answer is yes?

A.

That is what we propose.

We have reasons to think so.

The first reason is that, clinically, a delusion has to manifest itself linguistically.

It's not enough to feel like you could be Jesus Christ, you have to say it, manifest the delusion.

It is a linguistic phenomenon.

You're saying strange phrases that don't have the same meaning in your mouth or mine.

If I tell you that I am Jesus Christ, it could be a joke or perhaps a metaphor to describe me as a saint.

It wouldn't be worrying.

But one patient is serious, he is absolutely convinced.

You can't persuade him otherwise.

The meaning changes, so it is a linguistic phenomenon.

We have many indications that something is happening with the organization of meaning in the speech of psychotic patients.

Q.

What signs?

A.

When you speak, you produce one word after another and each one of them has a specific meaning.

You need to relate these meanings to each other.

And the way these words relate to each other, the way your sentences are organized, changes in psychosis.

We think this could help us understand how thinking changes, because thinking depends on building semantic structures.

Q.

There are many types of delusions, such as believing you are famous, Jesus Christ or an alien.

Do you include all kinds of delusions in your project?

A.

Yes, of any kind.

I don't think it's of great clinical importance whether someone believes Jesus Christ or Pedro Sánchez.

The content of the delirium is not what is really important.

The essential thing is that you have a delusion and that you use language in a particular way, which can illuminate the brain mechanisms involved.

The crucial feature of delusions is that they are ideas shielded from evidence.

That, for me, is a change in the organization of semantic space.

Q.

Could language also be a biomarker in other disorders?

A.

I think that in autism it is absolutely fundamental.

Most of the first warning signs in a child with autism are related to language.

Babies start babbling around six months.

In autism, there is either no babbling or it is abnormal.

And that continues later.

When we call the child, he does not react.

He doesn't react to language.

When they are one year old, children begin to point their fingers at things: this is a scarf, this is a table.

It is an aspect of language development, because they point to things that they can also name.

And this signaling with the index finger is also affected in autism.

Q.

Why do 30% of people with autism not speak?

A.

That is the 100,000 euro question.

It is the key question.

If you have a theory that language is not important for autism, how do you explain the fact that up to 30% of people with autism don't even develop language?

And up to 50% have very serious language difficulties.

There are people who say that autism is not a language disorder, but rather a disorder of the way of communicating.

If you affirm this, you have to separate communication on the one hand and language on the other.

That's a very strange distinction, because humans communicate linguistically from the first day of life.

Even the first noises that the baby makes are a kind of communication that is established with her mother.

I am gesturing when speaking, but the movement of my hands is coordinated with the linguistic content I am producing.

It is difficult to imagine a communication problem that is not a language problem.

You can follow

MATERIA

on

Facebook

,

X

and

Instagram

, or sign up here to receive

our weekly newsletter

.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_