Dialogue on the book “Dreaming in Hindi,” by Katherine Russell Rich, part 3.

This is part three of a dialogue about the book Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language between the author, Katherine Russell Rich, and Christine Kenneally, author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Read part one here and part two here.

Hi Kathy,

So you underwent an inadvertent metamorphosis? That is the exact opposite of losing the last five pounds. What’s the construction for “changing shape without improvement”? I may need that one.

The accidental changes you describe make me even more curious about how learning a different language affected you physically. Traditionally, we thought of a new language as a purely mental acquisition, one that changed our brain in a fairly mechanistic way—you laboriously packed all that new information in on top of everything that was already there (and with enough effort, it stayed). Of course, the more we learn about the plasticity of the brain, the more we know it’s not that straightforward. When something massively complicated, like language, is absorbed, circuits develop different patterns of activation, and it’s not unreasonable to say that the brain has physically changed. One cognitive scientist you interviewed even told you that your second language could cannibalize your first.

Still, we don’t think of language as something that changes the body. Which, if you consider gesture for just a second, is kind of shortsighted. I see that you looked at the gesture research of Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues at the University of Chicago. Her work is so fascinating, isn’t it? She has shown that not only are gestures shaped by our mental states, but that our thoughts can be shaped by our gestures. In one experiment, the way children gestured when they explained a math problem reliably predicted how close they were to the correct solution, even when their words did not. What about you—did your gestures change a lot as well? Did other parts of your body start to look different to you, start to behave differently?

All this talk about changing one’s body while accepting one’s fate has made me think about exercise, as well. Even putting aside the glossy magazine fitness-as-makeover version, exercising inevitably involves changing one’s body, and I would argue that it necessarily changes one’s fate in a positive direction. If you jog, for example, you usually end up wanting to go further, to move faster, or at least to breathe easier. And barring injury, you’ll probably feel better, look better, live longer. After all, not exercising doesn’t mean one doesn’t change. We are all battling the forces of entropy here, particularly in the thigh region. Is there a word for “working-out” in Hindi? Early in your trip you tried to track down a stairmaster but had no luck. (The local gym was run by a gangster? Did I read that right?) So did you end up exercising at all? Can anyone exercise when she’s dressed like a beekeeper?

Tags: Dreaming in Hindi, katherine russell rich

Christine Kenneally has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate and New Scientist. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

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Changing My Shape by Learning Hindi

How learning the language transformed my mind and body.

Katherine Russell Rich
|
July 20, 2009

Get a Sex Change in Iran

But don’t say you’re gay.

Hanna Rosin
|
June 24, 2009

Islam’s Bluntest Critic

Nawal El Saadawi on the orgasm of writing, death threats, and hating God.

Meghan O'Rourke
|
June 16, 2009

Arts

Dressing Like a Beekeeper