Quotes by Michael Erard

If you want big improvements, she said, chew gum. Gum? Sure enough, chewing gum has been shown to improve a persons immediate recall of learned words by some 24 percent. Long-term recall improves by a larger 36 percent. To get the benefit, you actually have to chew gum as you are studying; for some reason you cant merely move your jaw up and down. I also discovered that drinking sage tea increases ones recall of words modestly, as does the odor of rosemary. Something as mundane as coffee provides a benefit, too. Drinking two cups of coffee increases neuronal activity in the frontal lobe, where working memory is controlled, and in the anterior cingulum, where attention is controlled.

A related notion is that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesnt think in any language. What people refer to as thinking in a language comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if its closer to its source in the brain.

What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples — neat and discrete — and more like oatmeal. Its always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles.

Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she speaks or knows a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it.

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a persons sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You dont need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we cant explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation.

One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. Theres no motive, no separable will to plasticity thats distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglots pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community.

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that theyre more open to new experiences than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self thats bound up in our native language, a language ego, which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.

One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where Ive lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they dont speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: You dont think I speak English? This can be the case if youre Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such an scenario to Indians, they couldnt relate — to them, choosing the wrong language wasnt embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said.

The fact that early languages, no matter how many there are, utilize the same streams implies that the brain doesnt have a native language. The brain can only reflect the fact that a set of neural circuits was built and activated for a certain period of time. Nor does the brain care if those neural circuits map onto things that the rest of the world calls languages or dialects. It really cares only about what activates those circuits. Thus, the brain patters that typify language use across skill levels can be mapped.Brain imaging technology monitors the intensity of oxygen use around the brain - higher oxygen use represents higher energy use by cells burning glucose. The deeply engrained language circuits will create dim MRI images, because they are working efficiently, requiring less glucose overall. More recently acquired languages, as well as those used less frequently, would make neural circuits shine more brightly, because they require more brain cells, thus more glucose.