Babel No More (26 page)

Tomorrow we’d see Krebs’s brain in a glass jar, trailing bits of tissue in some murky formaldehyde juice. I looked forward to peering at it, hoping it would simplify matters. To our delight and surprise, the next day had something else in store.

Chapter 13

I
’m really good at finding four-leaf clovers,” Loraine said from the backseat of the taxi, as we drove to the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Brain Research Institute. “It’s my only gift.” Anywhere she goes, she finds them, and after being in Germany for a few weeks, she had found quite a few. There are two possibilities, she says. Either Germany really has more four-leaf clovers, or she’s relaxed
and noticing them more. Maybe it’s genetic, I said. Well, my grandmother also could find a lot of them, she said.

At the institute, we sat at a conference table and drank coffee with the archivist, Peter Sillmann, who had brought out some articles about Krebs, a brief memoir, and the black-and-white photo you see here.

Emil Krebs. (
Courtesy of the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Brain Research Institute
)

I thought of Geschwind-Galaburda; Krebs was right-handed. Sillmann, who was
speaking to Loraine in German, kept saying “crepes.” Crepes? Loraine explained: in German, they devoice the final consonant. Ah.
Krebs
. I hadn’t tackled any German for this trip. Sillmann had other photos: Krebs sitting at a desk in his office
in China, his legs crossed, looking out the window, a potted palm by the wall; a photo of his headstone in Potsdam, near Berlin. There was also a photo of Krebs’s postmortem brain. The stroke that killed him had blown a dark hole in his brain’s right temporal lobe (on the brain-as-globe model, northern Mexico). The dark withered edges of the hemorrhage resembled a mushroom cap’s moist underside.
*

Our hosts arrived. The director of the institute, Karl Zilles, tall and thin, looked like a dashing financier, in a tan jacket and light blue shirt; Katrin Amunts, a professor of neurology at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, was petite, with dark curly hair and rimless glasses. Why were you looking at Krebs’s brain in the first place? I asked her when we settled down again with cups of coffee.
She said she had wanted to try out some brain-mapping techniques and chose to look at language functions because it’s more or less well known where they occur in the brain.

Does the brain collection have any linguistic geniuses?
†
she had asked Sillmann.

It did. Sillmann had brought Amunts the box of glass slides containing Krebs’s brain. After collecting the brain, Oskar Vogt had photographed
it, then removed the brain stem and the cerebellum. The four remaining lobes were cut into blocks, and these were soaked in a series of baths—formaldehyde, alcohol, chloroform—then hardened in paraffin. The waxy blocks of tissue were sliced with a microtome, which uses a spinning knife to carve off microscopically thin slices of tissue. These slices were mounted on glass slides and stained, then
stored. Which meant that the brain wasn’t stored in a jar.

Naturally, I was disappointed that about this, but the sliced brain might have been a bigger gift to Amunts, because she could locate slices
from the Broca’s area on the left and on the right. Others before her had looked at Krebs’s Broca’s area, notably Vogt himself; looking for cell densities to explain genius, as he had with Lenin’s
brain, Vogt had shown that Krebs had an unusual density of neurons in this area.

In even older exams, other scientists had associated a large number of accumulated languages with a visibly larger left Broca’s area. In the 1860s, British doctor Robert Scoresby-Jackson proposed that only the lower portion of Broca’s area was crucial for the mother tongue; the upper area could hold others. Eventually
this was disproven by Ludwig Stieda, a German anatomist, who performed an autopsy on the brain of German hyperpolyglot Georg Sauerwein (1831–1904). How Stieda got the brain and where it is now isn’t known, but he reported that Sauerwein’s brain had a normal-size Broca’s area. He examined other polyglot brains (without saying how many languages they spoke), which also contradicted Scoresby-Jackson,
and with that the pursuit of a large Broca’s area, at the level of gross anatomy, anyway, was abandoned.

Unlike his predecessors, Oskar Vogt and his wife and collaborator, Cécile (1875–1962), looked at brains in microscopic detail, particularly at the arrangement of cells and other brain tissues. They were still dividing the brain into its various territories, each lobe and nodule given its own
name and jobs. But they searched for the real differences under the microscope.

For decades, neuroscientists had bickered about the significance of comparing the density of neuronal cells to the amount of surrounding tissue, called “neuropil” (the interwoven nerve tissue that makes up the greatest amount of the brain’s gray matter). Vogt and others eyeballed the tissue landscape, each coming
to different conclusions about what they saw.

In the 1980s, Karl Zilles, with a colleague, frustrated by findings he found unscientific, developed a microscopic scanner for areas 20 by 20 microns square (about as much surface area as the thickness of a human hair). The scanner mapped the cells and the surrounding fluid. Then it turned their ratio into a curve. With a glance, one could see the
density
of cells at each of the six layers of the brain’s surface. This was the tool that Amunts used on Krebs’s brain slices.

Not only did Amunts take slices from Krebs’s Broca’s area on the left and right sides, she also took slices from an area related to vision. These areas were known by the labels given to them by Korbinian Brodmann, one of Vogt’s chief assistants, who subdivided Broca’s
area into what are now called Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45. Like the map of the American West, the territory of the brain is named by its explorers, who had a penchant for honoring each other with slices of cerebral territory. The vision sample came from Brodmann’s area 18. (On the brain-as-globe, this would be in the Pacific Ocean, at the back of the brain.)

Amunts found that in Krebs’s brain,
the neural cells in Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45 were layered in more heterogeneous patterns than in eleven other brains she’d sliced and stained for the purposes of comparison. This arrangement suggested that the cells had unusual ways of interacting with each other. What did this mean for the way his brain actually worked? It’s unclear. You’d need to scan a similar hyperpolyglot brain. But at that
microscopic scale, even modern scanning technologies may not pick up anything significant.

Another surprise was the pattern of development of Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45 in Krebs’s brain. An overdeveloped Broca’s area on the left wasn’t a huge surprise—since Krebs used it a lot, it had responded by building more connections between neurons. Rather, the biggest difference between Krebs’s brain
and the eleven comparison brains wasn’t in areas 44 and 45 on the left; it was in area 45
on the right
. Such symmetry in 44 and asymmetry of 45 across the hemispheres was unusual. How did it happen?

One answer is that both adults and children who are just starting out with another tongue engage more of their right hemisphere in verbal communication. Certain tasks (such as making sense of words)
need help from nonlinguistic cognitive processes whose networks run through the right side of the brain. Another answer is that the Geschwind-Galaburda hypothesis predicts that in talented language learners, language will be represented in both the left- and right-brain hemispheres. It’s known that the right hemisphere can even take over
some responsibility for language when the left Broca’s area
has been damaged by stroke. Also, in the dual stream model of language, the “what” stream (which is involved in the perception of speech sounds) spreads in both hemispheres of the brain (but doesn’t reach into Broca’s area).

Early on, it was thought that only the left hemisphere was responsible for language. Since then, the right hemisphere’s responsibility—even among healthy, right-handed people—has
been acknowledged for fixing incoherent sentences, storing pragmatic knowledge, and cogitating about language itself. “In this context,” Amunts wrote in her analysis, “E.K.’s language performance may be related to special meta-linguistic abilities far beyond automatic speech.” That is, the thinking about language that he did, he did with his right brain.

The overdevelopment of the right Broca’s
area may also have something to do with Krebs’s Chinese. In 2009, a team of British neuroscientists found that speakers of Chinese had denser gray and white matter in the right anterior temporal lobe (located on the east coast of China) and the left insula (a part of the brain folded within the cortex that lies somewhere deep under the Arabian Sea) than those who didn’t speak Chinese. This effect
was found even among non-Chinese people who learned Chinese. This makes sense: tonal languages such as Chinese seem to require the right hemisphere to assign pitch to the meanings of words. But it’s unlikely that a single language would have been solely responsible for the right brain’s overdevelopment.

All this means that Krebs probably did possess the talents attributed to him: he could process
language structure differently from others; he was more sensitive to intonation and prosody (which would have been crucial for Chinese); and he was generally more sensitive to speech sounds.

I’d like to know something else about Krebs’s brain. We know that you can match neural signatures of language proficiency with language biographies, as an Italian research team revealed in 2009. People who’d
been multilingual for a long time, including children, had most language-related brain activity consolidated more or less in one spot. But people with languages they’d learned later had more diffuse activity, including activity on the right side. Was it possible for a brain to be an ultraconsolidator,
to put all of its languages on an efficient central circuit, even if they’d been learned later?
To answer a question like that, you’d need a living hyperpolyglot brain. Ideally, you’d need more than one.

The Vogt archive contains a transcript of an interview with Amande Heyne, Krebs’s wife, from the year of his death. How many languages did he speak? Sixty-eight, she said. How many could he read but not speak? He had knowledge of more than one hundred languages—when he learned languages,
he wanted to read, write, and speak them. Did he have a good memory? Yes, an extremely good one. For names? Yes. For numbers. Yes. For everyday things? As long as they interested him, she replied. Did he read? He read all the time, and he read everything. His favorite author was a cartoonist.

“He was a very strange personality,” Zilles said.

“He wasn’t talkative,” Amunts said.

“He learned all
these languages, but he wasn’t talkative,” Loraine marveled. (Amanda Heyne had said that he could be socially engaged, “if the people interested him.”)

When Zilles told me that he thought Krebs might have had a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome, I groaned inwardly. I didn’t want to think about a link between Asperger’s and hyperpolyglottism. I hoped language talent was its own thing, not something
you’d only find in savants like Christopher. I couldn’t very well go back to Alexander or Helen and inform them that they were autistic.

Outside, rain pounded on the windows—a typical German summer day, the secretary joked. But I was intent upon this question, and unprepared for what happened next.

Chapter 14

B
efore meeting Loraine Obler in Düsseldorf, I had interviewed the Greatest Living Linguist, according to
The
Guinness Book of World Records,
an American named Gregg Cox, who lived about 170 miles away in the city of Bremen. Though Cox was credited with speaking sixty-four languages, fourteen of them fluently, it is not clear to me what Cox, now in his late forties, had ever been able
to do in the various languages he claimed. I did, however, learn that he was the product of a broken home in Los Angeles, and that his teenage fascination with languages brought him, in the 1980s, to the Russian school at the Defense Language Institute, where the US military provides most of its recruits with language training.

While serving in the US Air Force, based in Europe, Cox accumulated
certificates and test results from dozens of language courses. He sent sheaves of paper to
The
Guinness Book of World Records,
which was impressed enough in 1999 to crown him the “Greatest Living Linguist,” ousting Ziad Fazah from the title. I figured that the
Guinness
title didn’t deserve that much credence (they’d once crowned Fazah, after all), but I wanted to meet Cox all the same. When I
had sent out a note looking for highly talented language learners in a DLI alumni newsletter, Cox had called me within minutes of its online release. I expected to find
him struggling to make a living, as Alexander had been. Contrary to type, he’d built a cozy bourgeois life, working as an executive at a dental implant company, a job he’d gotten because the company’s founder was impressed by his
polyglottery. His certificates were packed away in his house, and he pled that he was too busy to retrieve them for my visit.