Wolfram Hinzen, especialista en Llenguatge i Ciència Cognitiva, professor d'investigació ICREA del Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, és el comissari de l'exposició"Talking Brains. Programats per parlar", inaugurada el 31 de març i que es podrà veure fins el 5 de febrer del 2018 a CosmoCaixa. L'exposició presenta i explica el cervell des del punt de vista del llenguatge, en un fascinant viatge a través de la neurociència, la biologia i l'evolució.

Wolfram Hinzen, specialist in language and cognitive science, ICREA research professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences of Pompeu Fabra University, is the curator of the exhibition “Talking Brains: Programmed to Speak”, which opened on 31 March and can be seen until 5 February 2018 at CosmoCaixa. The exhibition presents and explains the brain from the viewpoint of language, in a fascinating journey through neuroscience, biology and evolution.

- How did the project for the CosmoCaixa exhibition arise, and what did it entail to get it up and running?

One thing I personally like about this exhibition is that it has a nice human story behind it. It arose pretty much out of the blue, when a friend of mine and postdoc in my group, Txuss Martin, talked to me about his idea of creating a ‘Museum of Language’. This was at the very beginning of my time in Barcelona, about four years ago. After a short while, two other linguist friends, Oriol Borrega and Celia Alba, joined the project and we started meeting weekly. None of us had any experience whatsoever in museography. Then two architects joined, and a production company called Indissoluble, all working for free for several years. We also had very significant help from ICREA, where Jaume Bertranpetit and Emilia Pola took a personal interest in this project. Then, with the first renders in hand, we marketed our product worldwide and got a lot of interest in Asia. Finally we convinced the laCaixa foundation, and last week the first-ever exhibition on language as an object of science opened its doors. If there has to be a proof of the important fact that everything is possible, then this exhibition provides it: a good idea can move mountains, as we say in German.

- What museographic project have you followed in the CosmoCaixa exhibition, what technologies does it incorporate, and what new developments will the general public find in this exhibition?

We wanted to make people think about what language is. In ordinary life, language is omnipresent. Almost no human interaction occurs without words, and language structures our thinking even when we do not talk. Language is one of the first things we hear in utero, it is the main medium through which we learn or gain knowledge, and it is the one cognitive system we have in which knowledge can be shared, thus creating a shared space of ideas and human understanding. How is a science of such an object even possible? Facing up to this challenge is the novelty of this exhibition: it is neither simply an exhibition about the brain, of which there probably exist hundreds, nor simply an exhibition about linguistics. Rather, we systematically link language to physical parameters in nature such as space (e.g. localizing functional activity in the brain related to language through brain imaging techniques), and time.

This includes the evolutionary time in which language evolved (less than 200.000 years), the historical time in which language diversified (5-10 thousand years), the developmental time it takes for a child to acquire language (a few years), and the processing time it takes the brain to unravel a noise as a linguistic stimulus with a meaning (half a second). We also sought to erase the boundaries between lab-space and exhibition-space: visitors can not only do some simple online psycholinguistic experiments, whose data we will collect, but also do a real electroencephalogram (EEG), which links mental events of language processing with fluctuations of voltage picked up on the surface of the scalp by electrodes. While your brain is busy doing such an experiment, your friend can watch a visualization of your brain activity. We have also personalized the visitor’s experience through a radiofrequency identification system, through which visitors are individually recognized in each interaction. Finally, we have created many special spaces in which you can reflect on what language is: e.g. a brain dome 6 meters tall in which you can watch a 3-D virtual reality movie, and a train compartment in which you will meet people in the form of holograms who have language disturbances.   

- Is it true that babies cry in their own language?

What some groups of scientists have shown is that the first natural sounds that babies make, including crying, are an inherent aspect of their language development and reflect properties of the ambient language that they have perceived. Auditory learning starts in utero and there is no developmental time in which we are not inherently linguistic creatures.

- How far back is there evidence of language in humans? Is this ability exclusive to humankind?

A word is a symbol: it stands for a meaning, e.g. a particular object, which it does not resemble in any way (the word ‘dog’, say, doesn’t resemble a dog). It has always seemed plausible to me that without evidence for symbolism, we cannot assume that there is such a thing as language in a given species. The oldest such objects are around 80.000 years old. So while language might be a bit older, probably that’s not a lot. This means that for most of the 6 million years that passed since our split from the chimpanzee, language did not exist in anything like the current sense. So it is a very recent accomplishment indeed. In this exhibition, one object you will find is the ‘lion man’, which is one of the oldest -known examples of figurative art, about 40.000 years old. What is the essence of this object? That a lion-man does not exist: nothing is both a lion and a man. Thinking about what does not exist, but could exist, is the essence of language! No creature before us thought in this way. Chimpanzees and bonobos have some symbolic understanding, but the symbols they can learn to use are not the same as words.

- What meaning does language have in biological terms? What evolutionary advantages does it bring?

Here we are mainly interested in which forms of cognition or thought go together with language, and how language is implemented in our brain. Questions about biological functions are often quite speculative and very hard, if not impossible, to answer. Clearly, language is very useful, and it defines most human interactions. But in evolution, the utility of a given structure is not the reason why it comes to exist. It would have been very useful for the Neanderthal to have language, too. But as far as he know, if he talked at all, his language must have been rather different. Even in humans, language is not useful in absolute terms. In my view it is the reason why we can think about what does not exist, why we can have a vision of who we are and want to be, and why we have certain emotions such as sadness or frustration that can arise from clashes between this and what the reality is. I can’t see why it is useful, in absolute terms, to be in this constant predicament, and we might be happier overall without it. It’s just the way we are built. 

- Do the 7000 languages that exist come from a common stock? How have they diverged to the point of reaching the diversity we see today? What is the legacy left by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza?

Unfortunately this is not my area, but if you take any two languages, say Catalan and Italian, then it is clear that they both arose from Latin. In a sense, they simply are Latin, at different stages of its historical evolution. Arguably – though this is not uncontroversial and has to be qualified in various ways – this point generalizes: take any two languages, trace them back in time, and eventually you will find a common ancestor from which they both diverged. So to put it very simply, all current human languages are the same language, Human, which arose with our species and then diversified into various language families. Cavalli-Sforza made a huge contribution in showing that linguistic diversification and human genetic variation are linked. While some aspects of his empirical claims about language families are controversial, this basic idea seems to be his legacy.

- What significant progress has been made in the field of the neurosciences of language? How does our brain process language?

I think that most researchers in language sciences will likely answer this question in a different way, so please take my answer as a personal one. In my view, we have learned two things: first, the human brain is specialized for processing language: it has machinery in it dedicated to this particular task and the structural peculiarities of language, which it processes in specific pathways. At the same time, and this is the second point, language is not a cognitive domain in the brain separate from any other. Language transforms cognition, and defines a human-specific cognitive type, integrating various subsystems into a single, unified system of thought.  

- As far as your activity is concerned, what research lines are you working on at the moment at the University?

If what I just said in response to the previous question is right, then there is a prediction: if one sees fundamental changes in the human cognitive type – i.e. in major cognitive disorders – then language should be implicated in this. My research is about this: it turns out that in all major cognitive disorders, from autism to schizophrenia to dementia, language is a fundamental factor. This supports the idea that one has to think about human-specific cognition in linguistic terms. This is what all research in my group, the Grammar & Cognition group, is really about: we are seeking to document clinical language patterns that can illuminate the cognitive disorders in question. We do this in cooperation with FIDMAG, a neuroimaging unit in the Benito Menni hospital, but numerous other clinical partners are involved in this as well, creating a real and unique platform for raising these novel questions.

- What challenges does your specialty face in the future?

We need to translate our findings into concrete interventions and clinical tools that are of some actual use to the patients, their families, and the doctors that care for them. While schizophrenia is a huge challenge in this regard, we have reasonably concrete ideas in the cases of autism and dementia. For example, it has been shown that toddlers who will develop autistic symptoms later show anomalous responses to language, long before they can be formally tested. This is an incredibly important idea that needs to be much more widely known and implemented. I also think that the role of language in our current diagnostic schemes for what autism is needs to be re-assessed. But these are projects of very large dimensions, which will keep me busy for the next 20 years for sure, and require large amounts of external funding.