Spend Time in India. Rewire Your Brain

This is part one of a dialogue between Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language [2], and Katherine Russell Rich, author of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language [3].

Hey Kathy,

Congratulations on Dreaming in Hindi [4]! I loved it, but I’ve been trying to work out what genre it fits into. It reads part travelogue, part memoir, part personal survivor story, and part popular science. Just to catch up our readers on some background: You were 37, you'd had two harrowing bouts with breast cancer, and you'd reached critical levels of ennui in your magazine editor's job (the constant promotional parties, the fancy shoes, and the endless supply of giveaway moisturizers). Then, you were fired and you took a major left turn. You went to India for a year to learn Hindi.

This is where the story really starts. You sincerely gave yourself over to a new place, and you came out of it a different person. But this isn't a book about being different because you feel different, it's about actually becoming different. “Transformation” is one of these words we use loosely these days, but you doggedly track down the mechanisms of transformation. What happens to our brains when we take on another language? Do they change in fundamental, physical, and verifiable ways? Your book is an exploration of new findings in cognitive science as well.

You talk, for example, about a baffling silence that befell you early in your journey. You just couldn't find words, English or Hindi. This reads like a personal watershed, and clearly it was, but it was also, you discover, a predictable stage in acquiring a new language. You mention kids who are dropped into another language and go through a period of not talking before they suddenly open their mouths one day and, voila, they speak fluently. Like a virus, the new language has been quietly colonizing their brains. Who knew that for both one's character and one's neurons, silence is golden?

Other feelings and metaphors of your daily experiences turn out to have origins in neural connections as well. You write about how fragile you felt in this new world, how your English seemed to fall away. As one cognitive scientist tells you, the problem is that it was never your English to begin with. Language is constantly animated and reinforced by the world around us. If we give up that world, it's remarkable how fast our language dissolves. This dismantling of your self even affected how you looked—one day you glanced in the mirror and your face had changed. Again, you explain that this wasn't just a shift in self-regard. You looked different because the resting point of your face was different—the basic vowel in Hindi, the place to which your lips and everything else around them repeatedly returned—is different from the basic vowel in English.

On the other side of transformation, you talk about studies showing that the English of someone who also speaks Hindi, or any other foreign language,  is a different English than that of someone who only speaks English. Does this apply to someone like you, who took up Hindi later in life? I wonder—what does it feel like to have fashioned this new portmanteau language and self? Does it really change the core of your identity, your ideas about things you’ve known all your life—your friends, family, surroundings, your sense of time? You note that in India, "time is circular ... people go through rebirth after rebirth and always end up back in the same place." What about you? You're back in New York, the place you were before India and Hindi. How are you different now, or, to put it another way, who would you be now if you hadn't gone at all?

All the best,
Chris

Read the response from Katherine Russell Rich [5].