by Oliver Sacks
Joseph longed to communicate, but could not. Neither speaking nor writing nor signing was available to him, only gesture and pantomime, and a marked ability to draw. What has happened to him? I kept asking myself. What is going on inside, how has he come to such a pass? He looked alive and animated, but profoundly baffled: his eyes were attracted to speaking mouths and signing hands—they darted to our mouths and hands, inquisitively, uncomprehendingly, and, it seemed to me, yearningly. He perceived that something was ‘going on’ between us, but he could not comprehend what it was—he had, as yet, almost no idea of symbolic communication, of what it was to have a symbolic currency, to exchange meaming.
Previously deprived of opportunity—for he had never been exposed to Sign—and undermined in motive and affect (above all, the joy that play and language should give), Joseph was now just beginning to pick up a little Sign, beginning to have some communication with others. This, manifestly, gave him great joy; he wanted to stay at school all day, all night, all weekend, all the time. His distress at leaving school was painful to see, for going home meant, for him, return to the silence, return to a hopeless communicational vacuum, where he could have no converse, no commerce, with his parents, neighbors, friends; it meant being overlooked, becoming a nonperson, again.
This was very poignant, extraordinary—without any exact parallel in my experience. I was partly reminded of a two-year-old infant trembling on the verge of language—but Joseph was eleven, was like an eleven-year-old in most other ways. I was partly reminded in a way of a nonverbal animal, but no animal ever gave the feeling of yearning for language as Joseph did. Hughlings-Jackson, it came to me, once compared aphasics to dogs—but dogs seem complete and contented in their languagelessness, whereas the aphasic has a tormenting sense of loss. And Joseph, too: he clearly had an anguished sense of something missing, a sense of his own crippledness and deficit. He made me think of wild children, feral children, though clearly he was not ‘wild’ but a creature of our civilization and habits—but one who was nonetheless radically cut off.
Joseph was unable, for example, to communicate how he had spent the weekend—one could not really ask him, even in Sign: he could not even grasp the idea of a question, much less formulate an answer. It was not only language that was missing: there was not, it was evident, a clear sense of the past, of ‘a day ago’ as distinct from ‘a year ago.’ There was a strange lack of historical sense, the feeling of a life that lacked auto-biographical and historical dimension, the feeling of a life that only existed in the moment, in the present.
His visual intelligence—his ability to solve visual puzzles and problems—was good, in radical contrast to his profound difficulties with verbally based problems. He could draw and liked drawing: he did good diagrams of the room, he enjoyed drawing people; he ‘got’ cartoons, he ‘got’ visual concepts. It was this that above all gave me the feeling of intelligence, but an intelligence largely confined to the visual. He ‘picked up’ tic-tac-toe and was soon very good at it; I had the sense that he might readily learn checkers or chess.
Joseph saw, distinguished, categorized, used; he had no problems with perceptual categorization or generalization, but he could not, it seemed, go much beyond this, hold abstract ideas in mind, reflect, play, plan. He seemed completely literal—unable to judge images or hypotheses or possibilities, unable to enter an imaginative or figurative realm. And yet, one still felt, he was of normal intelligence, despite these manifest limitations of intellectual functioning. It was not that he lacked a mind, but that he was not using his mind fully.
It is clear that thought and language have quite separate (biological) origins, that the world is examined and mapped and responded to long before the advent of language, that there is a huge range of thinking—in animals, or infants—long before the emergence of language. (No one has examined this more beautifully than Piaget, but it is obvious to every parent or pet lover.) A human being is not mindless or mentally deficient without language, but he is severely restricted in the range of his thoughts, confined, in effect, to an immediate, small world. 47
47. Or is he? William James, always interested in the relation of thought to language, corresponded with Theophilus d’Estrella, a gifted deaf artist and photographer, and in 1893 published an autobiographical letter from d’Estrella to him, along with his own reflections on it (James, 1893). D’Estrella was born deaf, and did not start to acquire any formal sign language until he was nine (though he had devised a fluent ‘home-sign’ from earliest child hood). At first, he writes:
I thought in pictures and signs before I came to school. The pictures were not exact in detail, but were general. They were momentary and fleeting in my mind’s eyes. The [home] signs were not extensive but somewhat conventional [pictorial] after the Mexican style…not at all like the symbols of the deaf and dumb language.
Languageless though he was, d’Estrella was clearly inquisitive, imaginative, and thoughtful, even speculative, as a child: he thinks the briny sea is the urine of a great Sea-God, and the moon a goddess in the sky. All this he was able to relate when, in his tenth year, he started at the California School for the Deaf, and learned to sign and write. D’Estrella considered that he did think, that he thought widely, albeit in images and pictures, before he acquired formal language; that language served to ‘elaborate’ his thoughts without being necessary for thought in the first place. This too was James’ conclusion:
His cosmological and ethical reflections were the outbirth of his solitary thought…He surely had no conventional gestures for the casual and logical relations involved in his inductions about the moon, for example. So far as it goes then, his narrative tends to discountenance the notion that no abstract thought is possible without words. Abstract thought of a decidedly subtle kind, both scientific and moral, went on here in advance of the means of expressing it to others. [Emphasis added.]
James felt that the study of such deaf people could be of major importance in casting light on the relation of thought to language. (It should be added that doubt was expressed by some of James’s critics and correspondents about the reliability of d’Estrella’s autobiographic account.)
But is thought, all thought, dependent upon language? It would certainly seem, if introspective accounts can be trusted, that mathematical thought (perhaps a very special form of thought) can proceed in its absence. Roger Penrose, the mathematician, discusses this at some length (Penrose, 1989) and gives examples from his own introspection, as well as from autobiographical accounts by Poincare, Einstein, Galton, and others. Einstein, when asked about his own thinking, wrote:
The words or the language as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements of thought are certain signs, and more or less clear images…of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a second stage.
And Jacques Hadamard, in The Psychology of Mathematical Invention, writes:
I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think. [and] even after reading or hearing a question, every word disappears the moment that I am beginning to think it over; and I fully agree with Schopenhauer when he writes ‘thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words.’
Penrose, who is himself a geometer, concludes that words are almost useless for mathematical thinking, even though they might be well suited for other sorts of thinking. No doubt a chess player, or a computer programmer, or a musician, or an actor, or a visual artist, would come to somewhat similar conclusions. It is clear that language, as narrowly conceived, is not the only vehicle or tool for thought. Perhaps we need to enlarge the domain of ‘language,’ so that it embraces mathematics, music, acting, art…every form of representational system.
But does one actually think in these? Did Beethoven, late Beethoven, actually think in music? It seems unlikely, even though his thought was articulated, and issued, in music, and
cannot be glimpsed or grasped except through it. (He was at all times a great formalist, and by this time had been deaf, and auditorily deafferented, for twenty years.) Did Newton think in differential equations when he was ‘voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone’? This too seems unlikely, but his thought can scarcely be grasped except through the equations. One does not think, at the deepest level, in music or equations, nor, perhaps even for verbal artists, in language either. Schopenhauer and Vygotsky are both great verbal artists, whose thought, it might seem, is inseparable from their words; but both insist it is beyond words: ‘Thoughts die,’ Schopenhauer writes, ‘the moment they are embodied by words.’ ‘Words die,’ Vygotsky writes, ‘as they bring forth thought.’
But if thought transcends language, and all representational forms, nonetheless it creates these, and needs these, for its advancement. It did so in human history, and does so in each of us. Thought is not language, or symbolism, or imagery, or music—but without these it may die, stillborn, in the head. It is this which threatens a Joseph, a d’Estrella, a Massieu, an Ildefonso; which threatens any deaf child, or any child whatever, not given full access to language and other cultural tools and forms.
For Joseph, the beginnings of a communication, a language, had now started, and he was tremendously excited at this. The school had found that it was not just formal instruction that he needed, but playing with language, language games, as with a toddler learning language for the first time. In this, it was hoped, he might begin to acquire language and conceptual thinking, to acquire it in the act of intellectual play. I found myself thinking of the twins Luria described, who had been in a sense so ‘retarded’ because their language was so bad, and how they improved, immeasurably, when they acquired it. 48
48. A.R. Luria and F. la. Yudovich describe identical twins with a congenital language retardation (due to cerebral problems, not to deafness). These twins, although of normal intelligence, and even bright, functioned in a very primitive way—their play was repetitive and uncreative. They had extreme difficulty thinking out problems, conceiving complex actions or plans; there was, in Luria’s words, ‘a peculiar, insufficiently differentiated, structure of consciousness, [with inability] to detach word from action, to master orienting, to plan activity…to formulate the aims of activity with the aid of speech.’
When the twins were separated, and each acquired a normal language system, ‘the whole structure of the mental life of both twins was simultaneously and sharply changed…and after only three months we observed the beginnings of meaningful play…the possibility of productive, constructive activity in the light of formulated aims…intellectual operations which shortly before this were only in an embryonic state…‘
All of these ‘cardinal improvements’ (as Luria puts it), improvements not only in intellectual functioning but in the entire being of the children, ‘we could only attribute to the influence of the one changed factor—the acquisition of a language system.’
Luria and Yudovich also comment about the disabilities of the languageless deaf:
The deaf mute who has not been taught to speak…does not possess all those forms of reflection which are realized through speech…[He] indicates objects or actions with a gesture; he is unable to form abstract concepts, to systematize the phenomena of the external world with the aid of abstracted signals furnished by language but which are not natural to visual, practically acquired experience.
(See Luria and Yudovich, 1958, especially pp. 120-123.)
One must regret that Luria, apparently, had no experience with deaf people who had acquired fluent language, for he would have provided us with incomparable descriptions of the acquisition of conceptual and systematizing power with language.
Addendum (1990): I have recently learned that, although he never published on the subject, Luria did have a great deal to do during the 1950’s, with deaf (and deaf-blind) children, and the role of sign language in their education and development. This represented, in away, a return to the ‘defectology’ which he and Vygotsky had pioneered in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and which he was later to explore in his rehabilitative approaches to the neurologically injured (see footnote 55, pp. 50-51).
Would this too be possible for Joseph?
The very word ‘infant’ means nonspeaking, and there is much to suggest that the acquisition of language marks an absolute and qualitative development in human nature. Though a well-developed, active, bright eleven-year-old, Joseph was in this sense still an infant—denied the power, the world, that language opens up. In Joseph Church’s words: 49
49. Church, 1961, pp. 94-95.
Language opens up new orientations and new possibilities for learning and for action, dominating and transforming preverbal experiences…Language is not just one function among many…but an all-pervasive characteristic of the individual such that he becomes a verbal organism (all of whose experiences and actions and conceptions are now altered in accordance with a verbalized or symbolic experience).
Language transforms experience…Through language…one can induct the child into a purely symbolic realm of past and future, of remote places, of ideal relationships, of hypothetical events, of imaginative literature, of imaginary entities ranging from werewolves to pi-mesons…
At the same time the learning of language transforms the individual in such a way that he is enabled to do new things for himself, or to do old things in new ways. Language permits us to deal with things at a distance, to act on them without physically handling them. First, we can act on other people, or on objects through people…Second, we can manipulate symbols in ways impossible with the things they stand for, and so arrive at novel and even creative versions of reality…We can verbally rearrange situations which in themselves would resist rearrangement…we can isolate features which in fact cannot be isolated…we can juxtapose objects and events far separated in time and space…we can, if we will, turn the universe symbolically inside out.
We can do this, but Joseph could not. Joseph could not reach that symbolic plane which is the normal human birth-right from earliest childhood on. He seemed, like an animal, or an infant, to be stuck in the present, to be confined to literal and immediate perception, though made aware of this by a consciousness that no infant could have. 50
50. Note 1990: Recently, while in Italy, I encountered a nine-year-old gypsy boy, Manuel, who had been born deaf, but had never met other deaf people, and (with his roving gypsy life) had never received any education. He was quite languageless, with neither Sign nor Italian, but bright, affectionate, and emotionally normal—he was much loved by his parents and older siblings, and entrusted by them with all sorts of tasks. When he entered the via Nomentana school for the deaf, there was doubt as to whether he would acquire language fluently at his age. But he has done brilliantly, and in three months has already acquired fair Sign and fair Italian, loves both languages, loves communicating, and is full of questions and curiosity and intellectual vitality. He has done much better than poor Joseph, whose acquisition of language has been slow and laborious.
Why the difference? Manuel is clearly a very bright child indeed, and Joseph one of ordinary (though not subnormal) intelligence; but, perhaps more to the point, Manuel was always loved, always involved, always treated as normal—he was completely a part of his family and community, who saw him as different but never as alien—whereas Joseph was regarded, and often treated, as autistic or retarded. Manuel was never left out, never felt left out; he did not suffer, as Joseph did, from an annihilating sense of left-outness and isolation.
This emotional factor is probably of great importance in determining whether or not language acquisition will be successful near or after the ‘critical age.’ Thus Ildefonso (p. 55), was successful, but three other languageless deaf adults whom Susan Schaller encountered had been so damaged emotionally by isolation (and in one case institutionalization as well) that they had become withdrawn and inaccessible, had turned against communication, and were no long
er open to any attempts to establish formal language.
I began to wonder about other deaf people who had reached adolescence, adulthood perhaps, without language of any kind. They had existed, in considerable numbers, in the eighteenth century: Jean Massieu was one of the most famous of these. Languageless until the age of almost fourteen, Massieu then became a pupil of the Abbe Sicard and achieved a spectacular success, becoming eloquent both in Sign and written French. Massieu himself wrote a short autobiography, while Sicard wrote an entire book about him, of how it was possible to ‘ ‘liberate’ the languageless into a new form of being. 51 Massieu described his growing up on a farm with eight brothers and sisters, five of whom were, like himself, born deaf:
51. Massieu’s autobiography is reprinted in Lane, 1984b, pp. 76-80, and Sicard’s book is also excerpted here, pp. 83-126.
Until the age of thirteen and nine months I remained at home without ever receiving any education. I was totally unlettered. I expressed my ideas by manual signs and gestures…the signs I used to express my ideas to my family were quite different from the signs of educated deaf-mutes. Strangers did not understand us when we expressed our ideas with signs, but the neighbors did…Children my own age would not play with me, they looked down on me, I was like a dog. I passed the time alone playing with a top or a mallet and ball, or walking on stilts.
It is not entirely clear what Massieu’s mind was like, given the absence of a genuine language (though it is clear that he had plenty of communication of a primitive sort, using the ‘home signs’ that he and his deaf siblings had devised, which constituted a complex, but almost grammarless, gestural system). 52
52. In 1977 S. Goldin-Meadow and H. Feldman began videotaping a group of profoundly deaf preschool children who were isolated from other signers, because their parents preferred them to learn speech and lip-reading (Goldin-Meadow and Feldman, 1977). Despite this isolation, and their parents’ strong encouragement to use speech, the children began to create gestures—first single gestures, then strings of gestures—to represent people, objects, and actions. This is what happened with Massieu and others in the eighteenth century. The ‘home signs’ that Massieu developed, and that these isolated preschool children developed, are simple gestural systems that may have a rudimentary syntax and morphology of a very limited sort; but they do not make the transition, the leap into a full grammar and syntax, such as occurs when a child is exposed to Sign.
