Wada test implications
Manuel Delaflor
>The only case I can think of where language was first acquired at a
>later stage, when one might normally expect a more or less adult
>form of consciousness to be present, was Helen Keller. I haven't
>read her book. Can anyone tell us what she had to say about how
>language changed her consciousness?
It is really illuminating to read her, this is from her book, and also
appears in "Consciousness Explained", by Daniel Dennett:
"Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world
that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious,
yet conscious time of nothingness...Since I had no power of thought, I did
not compare one mental state with another".
Hellen Keller. 1908
I am That
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Manuel Delaflor
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John McCrone
> It is really illuminating to read her, this is from her book, and also
> appears in "Consciousness Explained", by Daniel Dennett:
> "Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a
world
> that was no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious,
> yet conscious time of nothingness...Since I had no power of thought, I did
> not compare one mental state with another".
er, yes...
The problem with Helen Keller is that she was born seeing and hearing and
lost these faculties at the age of two after an illness. So her brain had
plenty of exposure to speech and the habits of thought that speech enables.
The fact that so many people have seized on her as a parable proving the
innateness of the higher human faculties only shows how desperately people
want to believe this Romantic view of humans to be true. The fable of Helen
Keller can be knocked down in an afternoon's trip to the library. The
question is why so few really want to be bothered to challenge the
mythology.
For what it's worth, here is an excerpt from an earlier book of mine, The
Myth of Irrationality, by John McCrone, 1993. Details on my web site.
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from Chapter Six, The Myth of Irrationality
Helen Keller's story struck a chord with popular imagination precisely
because it seemed to match perfectly the romantic conception of the human
mind. Helen was seen as a sleeping beauty, locked away in a darkened and
sound-proofed cell, awaiting the kiss of that first awakening word. The
shock of understanding w-a-t-e-r spelt out on her hand at the garden pump,
sent out ripples that stirred her buried humanity to life. Once awakened,
her mind seemed to have a quality which was all the nobler and purer for
having to face such crippling handicaps. This was the public picture of the
deaf/blind promoted in magazine articles and popular books with titles such
as "Imprisoned Souls".
However the truth of Helen Keller's story is quite different. Helen did
not lose her sight and hearing until she was two, so for the first couple of
years of her life, she lived quite normally. She would even have begun to
talk. So when the shutters did come down, Helen carried with her memories
of the world and, more importantly, she had the stamp of language on the
speech centres of her brain. If after becoming deaf/blind, Helen had been
abandoned to an institution, she probably would have slipped away into a
mental limbo through lack of stimulation. However, Helen had a loving family
who encouraged her to reach out with her remaining senses of touch and
taste. Clinging to her mother's skirts, Helen was dragged from room to
room, so learning her way around the home. She had two constant companions
in the family dog and the daughter of the negro cook. Rather than being a
helpless bundle, Helen grew up able to dress and look after herself. She
even could help with household chores such as feeding the chickens and
kneading dough.
While Helen could not speak, her two years of normal childhood did give
her a strong feeling for language. She invented a private language of
gestures in which shakes of the head meant yes or no, pushes and pulls meant
to go and to come. Like d'Estrella, Helen developed 60 or more quite
sophisticated signs. To refer to her father, she would mime putting on a
pair of glasses; her mother was indicated by tying up her hair; and ice
cream became a shiver. Whether or not Helen could "think" in this
kinesthetic imagery - imagining the muscle movements of her private signs in
the same way that d'Estrella visualised his own private signs - there is no
doubt that language was something ingrained in her speech centres. When
Annie Sullivan took charge of a wild six-year-old and started spelling words
into her hand, the foundations of speech already were there to be built on.
Helen may have remembered her awakening to language as a sudden revelation
at the garden pump, but Annie Sullivan's diary tells that it took many weeks
of fingerspelling on Helen's hands before connections started to be made in
her mind. Even in Helen Keller's own autobiography, in which the incident
is recounted, her editor warns that her stories of her early memories should
not be taken too literally. But the famous awakening so fits the romantic
model of the mind that these qualifications rarely are mentioned.
While Helen's story has suffered from over-romanticisation, it is true
that once she had learnt to converse in fingerspelling, her progress for
someone doubly handicapped was stunning. Within a few years, she had learnt
to vocalise and could speak well enough to give public talks. Helen learnt
a whole variety of reading methods. With her finger-tips, she could read not
just braille but chalk letters scrawled on a blackboard and even the lips of
other people as they spoke. Yet despite her many achievements, there was
still something bookish and wooden about Helen. She wrote movingly about the
great events of the day, about poverty and war, but the more cynical felt
that she merely was parroting what she read in newspapers and magazines.
Without much direct experience of life herself, it seemed that hers must
indeed be: "a world of quotations, ideas and opinions."
The Russian writer, Maxim Gorky, met Helen in 1906 and afterwards wrote:
"[She] made an unpleasant, even grim, impression on me. She appeared to be
an affected, very temperamental and extremely spoilt girl. She talked about
God and how God disapproved of revolution. In general, she reminded me of
those blessed and holy nuns and 'pilgrim women' whom I have seen in our
villages and convents." Another telling incident was an embarrassing episode
when Helen wrote a fairy tale which so enthused her friends that they had it
published in a newspaper. The story (about King Frost painting the autumn
leaves in bright colours to console people for the coming of winter) seemed
especially touching coming from a woman who could not see. But it turned
out that Helen had unwittingly retold an old fairy tale she had heard as a
child. A sympathetic public was eager to see in Helen a noble mind
triumphing against the odds. But the reality was that Helen was so cut off
from the world that she found it hard to tell the difference between her
memories and her imagination. She had learnt to juggle words, but it is
questionable how much understanding lay behind the fine sentiments that so
pleased her audiences.
Helen Keller's story shows up the bifold model in an almost ironic light.
If we speak about the mind as being part hardware, part software, Helen
appeared to end up almost top-heavy with the software of culture. Blind and
deaf, her brain was starved of the normal traffic of sensations, images and
memories. Yet through language, she could furnish these spare surroundings
with all the varied richness of human culture. In the end, the combination
may have been un-balanced; where most saw a heroic triumph against the
odds,others saw too heavy a weight of ideas sitting uncomfortably on an
emaciated awareness. Whichever view is taken, the grip on Western culture
that the romantic model of the mind enjoys is clear in the general reaction
to Helen Keller's story. However, if we really want to understand the minds
of the deaf/blind, we have to look to the unfortunates who are born this way
rather that those, like Helen Keller, who become deaf/blind in childhood.
The child born deaf and blind exists in a most pitiful state. Unlike the
active Helen Keller, such a child may spend years slumped in one spot; an
inert vegetable, unable to feed itself or meet its most basic needs. A
child born deaf/blind does not even seem to be able to use its remaining
senses of touch and taste. At best, it will rock quietly on its haunches or,
occasionally, burst into a frenzied screaming fit. Without eyes and ears,
the deaf/blind child seems to have no conception that the outside world
exists, let alone an inner code with which to order that conception.
Again, traditional Western beliefs about the mind led many to make the
wrong diagnosis of children born deaf and blind, and to offer the wrong
treatment. The mistaken belief that fully formed minds lay trapped within
the slumped forms of deaf/blind children encouraged crude attempts to
"shake" these minds awake. Nursing staff would give the children rough
massages or force them into standing positions. When inevitably these
attempts failed, the doctors would nod their heads sagely and conclude - as
they did with feral children and deaf-mutes - that the child must not only
have damaged senses but be brain-damaged to boot.
In the Soviet Union - where the legacy of Vygotsky provided the
springboard for a better understanding of the deaf/blind - methods of
treatment have been pioneered by doctors like Ivan Sokolyansky and Alexander
Meshcheryakov. Soviet doctors have realised that not only do they need to
try and teach the deaf/blind child some sort of internal code such as
fingerspelling, but they also have to teach the child that the outside world
exists. Helen Keller at least had two years of experience of the sights and
sounds of life. These would have given her the mental backdrop against which
word-ordered thought could have some meaning. But a child born deaf and
blind exists in an empty limbo, aware only of internal spasms of hunger and
the occasional rough touch of hands. To build up an internal image of the
outside world, the deaf/blind have to be forced to explore their
surroundings through their sense of touch.
Soviet institutions do this by employing simple techniques such as
gradually making the deaf/blind child reach further and further for a spoon
of food. To start with, a spoon has to be placed in the child's mouth before
the reflex to swallow can be triggered. The next step is to touch the spoon
to the child's lips, then to its chin, then place the spoon in its hands,
making the child grope for the food until a feeling for space grows within
its mind. It is only after an internal world had been constructed that
therapy can move on to the learning of language. It may take months and even
years of painstaking training, but tremendous improvements in the condition
of the deaf/blind can be achieved. The deaf/blind child can be taught to
dress, to eat from a plate, to use a toilet, to welcome the warmth of human
company. The child will show some awareness of the outside world and will
respond to fingerspelt commands. However, it has to be said there is a
limit to how far such a child can progress for there is no intact mind
inside the child ready to blossom forth like a seed at the first sprinkle of
rain.
The Soviet homes for the deaf/blind do have their star pupils who can
not only fingerspell but speak and read braille, who can take up jobs and
raise families. But like Helen Keller, all these cases turn out to have gone
deaf and blind well after birth - usually at the ages of five or six. The
child born deaf and blind can be transformed from a senseless, gurgling and
sprawling heap into a dimly-aware and house-trained inmate of an
institution. But it is too much to expect that they can develop the
independent and self-aware mind of a sighted and hearing person. The deaf
and the deaf/blind tell us that there are two halves to the bifold mind and
both are equally important.
The deaf show the need for an inner language while the deaf/blind
demonstrate the need for a brain fully primed with the experiences of life.
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether
thought takes place in language or images. Psychologists, such as Hans
Furth, have taken the ability of the deaf to think as proof that thought
does not need words - entirely missing the point that an internal sign
language is serving the same role as the inner voice. Others have taken the
"awakening" of Helen Keller by language as proof that words, not images, are
the substance of thought. However, the deaf and the deaf/blind should make
it clear that thought is a marriage of words and images. Thought is how we
describe what takes place at the boundary of the bifold mind as words and
images spark off each other. Sometimes the orderly rhythms of speech take
the upper hand, at other times images flash through our heads, driven by
animal association. But thought is always a dual process, an interaction
between the software and the hardware of the mind.
The deaf also reveal something else about the bifold mind. In a sense,
while we have classed it as software, language does in fact become part of
the hardware of the brain. While the brain is young, the rhythms of speech
are etched on its still plastic surface. As the brain hardens, this
patterning is turned into a speech generator, a template with which language
can be produced.
refs
- Awakening to Life, Alexander Meshcheryakov, 1979 (includes the Gorky
letter).
- Imprisoned Souls, Louis Arnould, 1948.
- The Story of My Life, Helen Keller, 1966.
- Thinking Without Language, Hans Furth, 1966.
- The Education of Deaf Children, Stephen Quigley and Robert Kretschmer,
1982.
- When the Mind Hears, Harlan Lane, 1984.
- A Man Without Words, Susan Schaller, 1991.
Cheers
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from John McCrone
check out my consciousness web site
http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/
neuroscience, human evolution, Libet's half second, Vygotsky and more...