I WILL make three attempts to divine your thoughts this morning. Guess 1: “I must get more done this week, else everyone will think I’m a slacker.” Guess 2: “I hope the person I’m about to topple on leaves at the next station so I can filch his seat.” Guess 3: “When is this writer going to get to the point?”
The point is that we seem to think in sentences. It is very hard to imagine thinking about anything without framing the thought in words. When I wonder whether I am having a bad hair day, my mind’s eye sees the phrase swimming in front of it. It almost comes to my lips. In fact, much of what I ponder slips into vocal form, an unfortunate trait that has occasionally led me to be less tactful than I would have wished. But this habit also seems to confirm Noam Chomsky’s thesis that we think in words and grammar. Indeed, there is evidence that the part of the brain that deals with language is roped in to assist with mathematical tasks, suggesting the overarching presence of linguistic ability in all things neural.
However, a trio of brain-damaged patients have cast doubt on this widely accepted theory. Rosemary Varley, from Sheffield University, studied three patients with severe aphasia, a type of brain damage that leaves its sufferers unable to handle grammatical rules and therefore unable to commmunicate verbally or through writing. For example, the patients cannot distinguish between “the boy chased the girl” and “the girl chased the boy”.
Dr Varley found that the patients could tell the difference between similar mathematical expressions. For example, they could distinguish between 30/90 and 90/30. They could also handle arithmetic inside brackets, such as (90 - ((3 + 17) x 3)), that resemble the clauses inside sentences. They could not, however, decipher the sentence, “the man who killed the lion was angry.” The patients could also read numerals, but not written numbers, such as “three”.
The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge the idea that language is the master ability required for all types of cognitive processing. The study also raises the possibility that aphasic patients could be taught a “words by numbers” language that would allow them to communicate with others.