“So, how many languages do you speak?”
“Oh, goodness,” [46 year old carpet cleaner Vaughn] Vaughn says. “Eight, fluently.”
“Eight?” [client Kelly Widelska] marvels.
“Eight,” Vaughn confirms. English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.
“But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation,” he explains, “I know about 25 more.”
[Researcher] Saima Malik-Moraleda, too, is a polyglot…. 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 resonance imaging, or fMRI.
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I’d assumed that Vaughn’s language areas would be massive and highly active, and mine pathetically puny. But the scans showed the opposite.
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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 process language when he is speaking in his native language,” Malik-Moraleda explains. “He uses language so much, he’s become really efficient in using those areas for the production of language.”
