Wired for Words

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation. 

Yet millions of people around the world find themselves permanently in such a situation, cut off to varying degrees from family, friends, and society--even their livelihood--as a result of aphasia. Aphasia is a language disability caused by brain damage such as stroke, head injury, or neurodegeneration. It is not a hearing problem or a paralysis of the tongue. Sufferers cannot simply turn to reading and writing or learn sign language. Nor is it a problem of intelligence. Aphasia is a language problem.

It’s not a simple problem. Language turns out to be highly complex, composed of multiple nested hierarchies of processing routines structured into multi-component computational architectures. Consider, for example, that humans have only recently developed machines, computational architectures, and energy sources powerful enough to simulate the linguistic prowess that children master before they can make change for a $10. We are indeed “wired for words.” Researchers have been working for centuries trying to figure out exactly how the system works, how it is organized in the brain, how disease can attack different subsystems to produce different types of impairment, and how it might be repaired. And spectacular progress has been made, particularly in the last 25 years, as remarkable new investigative tools and fresh approaches have been applied to the problem. Wired for Words not only surveys the history and progress of this untold story but synthesizes it into a new understanding of the neural network, one that challenges many traditional assumptions and reveals some surprising insights about the human mind.