SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE K A
They wanted him to declare in German
that he was fluent in 23 languages, recite
a tongue twister in Chinese and say
goodbye in Turkish, all before the com-
mercial break.
“I kind of got pigeonholed into the
category of the dancing bear, the boy
wonder,” says Doner, who today works as
a national security researcher. “It’s exag-
gerated, it’s sensationalized.”
Michael Erard, who surveyed more
than 400 people who said they can speak
at least six languages for his book, “Babel
No More,” says he’s often more inclined
to believe in someone’s language abilities
when they don’t seek out chances to
perform or monetize their skills.
Vaughn never sought me out. He
agreed to let me spend time with him
after one of his friends mentioned him to
another Washington Post reporter. Over
two months, I verified the scope of
Vaughn’s abilities by interviewing 10
people who have seen him use his
language skills for years and by watching
him engage in conversations in 17 of his
languages. When I introduced him to
Richard Simcott, who organizes an inter-
national conference for polyglots,
Vaughn switched between 10 languages
as they spoke, telling stories in Welsh,
Bulgarian, Serbian, Norwegian and
more.
Because for Vaughn, every language is
really a story about the people it connect-
ed him to.
He learned American Sign Language
from Gallaudet University students at a
club called Tracks, which had a dance
floor known for its vibrations.
He picked up some Japanese from the
staff at a restaurant where he volun-
teered to clean the fish tank once a week.
When his niece liked the way the word
chicken sounded in Salish, they started
studying it together, befriended leaders
of the language school on the Flathead
Indian Reservation and road-tripped to
Arlee, Mont., twice.
Vance Home Gun, who worked at the
school, was stunned to hear an East
Coaster speaking his language — and
even more stunned that Vaughn could
actually pronounce it.
“You got to remember, there are very
few people left, even in our tribe, who
can talk Salish,” Home Gun said. “For
him to know how much he does without
actually being taught in our classrooms
and schools or spending time with the
older people who still speak it is pretty
amazing.”
Vaughn makes an effort to get to know
people in the language that shaped their
lives. In return, they shape his. Welcom-
ing him. Accepting him. Appreciating
him.
“We’ll be walking along, and we’ll see
two people sitting, and he’ll be like, ‘I
hear you have an accent, do you speak
any other languages?’ And boom,” says
his friend Ryan Harding, “we’re invited
to their house for dinner.”
This was how Vaughn met a Paraguay-
an special needs teacher, who, along with
taking him to her family’s New York
home to learn some Guarani, talked to
him about the children in her classroom
who were autistic.
“I thought she was applying a New
York accent to the word artistic,” Vaughn
says. But when she explained the traits
associated with being on the autism
spectrum, they felt entirely familiar to
Vaughn.
Maybe this, he thought, was why he
hadn’t understood his teachers. Why
some adults thought he was rude. Why
people tell him he could be using his
talents for all kinds of careers, but he
doesn’t really know where to look or the
steps he would need to take to get a more
formal, professional job.
“Of course, I have tried,” he says. “But
nothing has worked out.”
Some days, he doesn’t necessarily
want it to. He likes dressing casually,
wearing one of the same 10 T-shirts from
his favorite vacation spot, Bar Harbor,
Maine. He likes being able to make his
own schedule, where he can spend the
day talking on the phone with his
girlfriend who lives in Mexico. Or paint-
ing landscapes. Or working on his model
train set. Or developing film photogra-
phy. Or making brisket for his friends. He
wants to be free to take his mom, whom
he lives with, to the doctors treating her
Parkinson’s disease. He wants to sit in
coffee shops, drinking quad espressos
and listening for accents that might lead
to a connection with someone new.
And some days, he lugs the carpet-
cleaning machine into the homes of the
nation’s capital, a city that places so
much value on degrees and titles and
statuses that have never been a part of
Vaughn’s life. He feels the way some
customers look at him and his brother,
who owns the carpet-cleaning company.
Sometimes they yell at Vaughn about the
stains they made. One couple spent the
whole time complaining to each other in
Portuguese, saying Vaughn looked un-
professional and predicting he wouldn’t
do a good job.
And just like that, Vaughn is back to
feeling like the kid disappointing his
teachers. The depressed 20-something
getting the word “revenge” in Armenian
tattooed on his arm. The 46-year-old not
reaching his potential.
“Where are you from?” Vaughn’s
brother asked the rude couple after
they’d made the curtains spotless.
“Portugal,” the husband answered.
“Acabamos de fazer uma limpeza para
a embaixada Portuguesa na semana pas-
sada,” Vaughn replied with a smile. We
just did a cleaning for the Portuguese
Embassy last week.
He liked the look that put on that
man’s face.I
am hoping it’s just the effects of
another quad espresso, but I think
Vaughn is nervous. He’s quiet as the
doors open, and we’re ushered into a
building with a sculpture of a brain
hanging from the ceiling. He takes a
picture of a sign on the wall: “MIT Brain
+ Cognitive Sciences.”
In the years Vaughn spent amassing
languages, a Russian-born neuroscien-
tist named Evelina Fedorenko was here
at one of the world’s most renowned
universities, studying people like him.
Much of the research on how our brains
process language focuses on people with
developmental disorders or strokes that
have impaired their speech. One interest
of Fedorenko’s has been trying to discov-
er the secret of the other end of the
spectrum: people with advanced lan-
guage skills. What distinguishes poly-
glots and hyperpolyglots from the rest of
us?
When I called Fedorenko, I told her
how amazed I was watching Vaughn
befriending Dutch travelers in a Star-
bucks who couldn’t believe he’d never
been to the Netherlands and spending
his free time poring over books like
“Finnish for Swedish Speakers.” It made
me question my own brain, and why,
even though I spend so much time
thinking about words for my work, I’ve
always found it incredibly difficult to
retain any other language I’d ever tried
to learn.
To a neuroscientist constantly looking
for more data, the next step was obvious:
Would Vaughn and I like to come to
Boston to get our brains scanned?
“Vaughn,” says one of the PhD candi-
dates leading us to the scanning room
now, “I was very excited to see Catalan onyour list. I’m from Girona.”
Vaughn’s nervousness seems to evapo-
rate in an instant.
“Tenia un amic que és de Palma de
Mallorca!” Vaughn says, thrilled to tell
her about the friend who taught him
Catalan 15 years before.
Saima Malik-Moraleda keeps banter-
ing with him, noticing the precision of
his accent. She, too, is a polyglot. But like
most of the world’s multilingual people,
she became one by necessity, rather than
choice. She learned Spanish from her
mother, Kashmiri and Hindi-Urdu
from her father, English from them both
and Catalan from school. Only her
French and Arabic classes were extracur-
ricular.
Though their reasons for learning
were different, the question this lab is
asking about them is the same: are their
brains fundamentally different from
monolingual brains like mine?
Malik-Moraleda shows Vaughn the
machine that will help answer that
question, with functional magnetic reso-
nance imaging, or fMRI. It looks like a
diving board surrounded by a massive
plastic doughnut. Soon, Vaughn has
changed from his Bar Harbor, Maine
T-shirt into blue scrubs. He has head-
phones in his ears, foam on the side of his
head, a shield over his face and a remote
control in his hands.
“Can you hear us?” Malik-Moraleda
asks from the other side of a glass
window. “Perfect, we’re going to start.”
For two hours, Vaughn works through
a series of tests, reading English words,
watching blue squares move around and
listening to languages, some he knows
and some he doesn’t. All the while, the
machine is whirring, buzzing and bang-
ing, taking three-dimensional images of
Vaughn’s brain every two seconds.
Each image essentially breaks down
his entire brain into two-centimeter
cubes and monitors the amount of blood
oxygen in each one. Every time the
language-processing areas are activated,
those cells use oxygen, and blood flows in
to replenish them.
By watching where those changes
happen, the researchers can pinpoint
exactly which parts of Vaughn’s brain are
used for language.
On the screen Malik-Moraleda is
watching, it all looks like unchanging
shades of gray. After I overcome my
unexpected claustrophobia inside the
machine (“Just pretend you’re in a Japa-
nese pod hotel!” the students soothed),
my brain scan looks the same.
But after a week, the scans have been
analyzed to produce two colorful maps of
our brains.
I’d assumed that Vaughn’s language
areas would be massive and highly
active, and mine pathetically puny. But
the scans showed the opposite: the parts
of Vaughn’s brain used to comprehend
language are far smaller and quieter
than mine. Even when we are reading the
same words in English, I am using more
of my brain and working harder than he
ever has to.
This matches what the researchers
have found in other hyperpolyglots
they’ve scanned.
“Vaughn needs less oxygen to be sent
to those regions of his brain that proc-
ess language when he is speaking in his
native language,” Malik-Moraleda ex-
plains. “He uses language so much, he’s
become really efficient in using those
areas for the production of language.”
It’s possible that Vaughn was born
with his language areas being smaller
and more efficient. It’s possible that his
brain started out like mine, but because
he learned so many languages while it
was still developing, his dedication
transformed his anatomy. It could be
both. Until researchers can scan lan-
guage learners as they grow, there’s no
way to know for sure.
But even without that answer, even
before we had the scan results back,
Vaughn had what he came to MIT for.
“I got to practice Lithuanian today,” he
says to a friend on the phone as we
navigate Boston’s airport. “Catalan,
Spanish, Russian and a little bit of
Korean!”
He’s bouncing as he talks about all the
connections he made in a single day
with the researchers and the strangers
he’d introduced himself to in a coffee
shop. All the people who were, as he
would say, “hit with a splash of happi-
ness.” This is what I’d discovered getting
to know Vaughn: By putting in the effort
to learn someone’s language, you’re
showing them that you value who they
truly are.
I’m wondering if Vaughn will ever see
that same value in himself.
And at that very moment, he tells his
friend on the phone, “I just feel like, work
wise, I gotta do something else. I need to
figure out how and what to do. It’s not
going to get better unless I do some-
thing.”
I’ve never heard him talk like that
before. At our gate, I ask how he is
feeling. He is thinking about the way the
Harvard and MIT neuroscientists spent
the day asking him q uestions. Not just
for their research, but because they want
to understand how, in their own lan-
guage learning, they could be more like
him.
“It’s really comforting,” Vaughn says.
“I always wonder, it’s like, how do I
compare on the larger scale? What if this
is really nothing to be excited about?”
But they’d been excited, and now, he
could be too.
“I’m not some worthless person,” he
says.
Then he pulls out his phone and opens
his Duolingo app. He is on a 330-day
streak of practicing Welsh, and he isn’t
going to break it.Devlin Barrett, Michael Birnbaum, Lynh Bui,
Petula Dvorak, Terrence McCoy, Dayana
Sarkisova, Felicia Sonmez, Craig Timberg and
William Wan contributed to this report.PHOTOS BY ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTBrains on language
When reading English, the brain’s
language areas are activatedVaughn Smith’s brain: smaller,
more efficient language areasReporter Jessica Contrera’s
brain: larger language areasMITFROM TOP: Vaughn Smith
converses with other
multilingual people at the
District Language Exchange
meetup in February.S mith prepares the grill for
dinner with a group of friends
and Washington Post
journalists in the backyard of
his home in Gaithersburg, Md.,
where he lives with his mother.Smith shares a meal with his
friend Trevor Davis, right, and
Washington Post audio
producer Bishop Sand, left.