false, ungrammatical or nonsense, and how the
brain’s electrical activity varies depending on
whether we are listening to nouns or verbs, words
about colors, or words about numbers. New infor-
mation about neurolinguistics is regularly covered
in national news sources.
“Brain activity is like the activity of a huge city.
A city is organized so that people who live in it can
get what they need to live on, but you can’t say
that a complex activity, like manufacturing a prod-
uct, is ‘in’ one place. Raw materials have to arrive,
subcontractors are needed, the product must be
shipped out in various directions. It’s the same with
our brains. We can’t say that all of language is ‘in’
a particular part of the brain; it’s not even true that
a particular word is ‘in’ just one spot in a person’s
brain. But we can say that listening, understand-
ing, talking, and reading each involve activities in
certain parts of the brain much more than other
parts.
“Most of these parts are in the left side of your
brain, the left hemisphere, regardless of what lan-
guage you read and how it is written. We know this
because aphasia (language loss due to brain dam-
age) is almost always due to left hemisphere injury
in people who speak and read Hebrew, English,
Chinese, or Japanese, and also in people who are
illiterate. But areas in the right side are essential for
communicating effectively and for understanding
the point of what people are saying. If you are
bilingual, your right hemisphere may be somewhat
more involved in your second language than it is in
your first language.
“The organization of your brain is similar to
other peoples’ because we almost all move, hear,
see, and so on, in essentially the same way. But our
individual experiences and training also affect the
organization of our brains—for example, deaf peo-
ple understand sign language using just about the
same parts of their brains that hearing people do
for spoken language.
“What is aphasia like? Is losing language the
reverse of learning it? People who have lost some
or most of their language because of brain damage
are not like children. Using language involves
many kinds of knowledge and skill; some can be
badly damaged while others remain in fair condi-
tion. People with aphasia have different combina-
tions of things they can still do in an adult-like way
plus things that they now do clumsily or not at all.
Therapy can help them to regain lost skills and
make the best use of remaining abilities. Adults
who have had brain damage and become aphasic
recover more slowly than children who have had
the same kind of damage, but they continue to
improve over decades if they have good language
stimulation.
“What about dyslexia, and children who have
trouble learning to talk even though they can hear
normally? There probably are brain differences that
account for their difficulties, and research in this
area is moving rapidly. Since brains can change
with training much more than we used to think,
there is renewed hope for effective therapy for peo-
ple with disorders of reading and language.”
(Menn, Lise, Obler, L.K., and Holland, Audrey L.,
Non-fluent aphasia in a multilingual world. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins, 1995), pp. xvii–212.Nightingale, Florence A British nurse and phil-
anthropist (1820–1910), who established the pro-
fession of secular nursing and revolutionized
hospital care and documentation of care as we
know it today. A proponent of public health, she
advocated in her writings and practice that the
whole person—body, mind, and spirit—be consid-
ered treatable, and that illness may be caused by
and affected by one’s state of mind. In her book
Notes on Nursing (London: Harrison and Sons,
1859), Nightingale wrote: “[H]ow much more
extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might
call the coxcombries of education—e.g., the ele-
ments of astronomy—are now taught to every
school-girl, neither mothers of families of any
class, nor school-mistresses of any class, nor
nurses of children, nor nurses of hospitals, are
taught anything about those laws which God has
assigned to the relations of our bodies with the
world in which He has put them. In other words,
the laws which make these bodies, into which He
has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs
of those minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that
these laws—the laws of life—are in a certain mea-
sure understood, but not even mothers think it
worth their while to study them—to study how to
give their children healthy existences. They call itNightingale, Florence 103