By Michael Balchunas
The authorities in France were baffled.
A young woman had been taken to the hospital after an automobile accident in which she suffered a head injury. In an encouraging sign, she was able to speak and respond to questions in fluent French after regaining consciousness. Officials already knew from papers found in the car that the woman was an American. She had received a Fulbright Fellowship and was to spend a year teaching at a lycée in Cherbourg.
But as the days turned to weeks, there remained a very troubling aspect to the case. The woman recovering from the accident was a native of Wisconsin and a resident of Phoenix. Yet she could not speak English.
What are the mechanisms in the brain that control language? Does the part of the brain that contains a person's ability to speak another language reside in a different area from native language ability? And just how does the brain, a mere three pounds of matter, 78 percent water, produce the intangible elements we call language, thoughts and ideas--not to mention consciousness itself? These are questions that scientists and philosophers have long pursued, but answers, aside from tantalizing glimpses, have remained elusive.
As part of the effort to find those answers, Pomona this fall will offer a new major in the emerging discipline of cognitive science, designed as a track within the newly organized Department of Linguistics. Other departments and programs, including psychology, neuroscience, computer science and philosophy, will provide integral coursework toward the major.
Cognitive science arose as a specific field of inquiry only two to three decades ago. Mind and brain researchers pursuing independent lines of study found that their work increasingly touched on other disciplines, and they began to explore a concerted approach. The time was right, says Jay David Atlas, professor of philosophy and linguistics, who will coordinate Pomona's new major.
"The neuroscientists were making great progress. The linguists had been making very great strides. The cognitive psychologists had been very successful in discovering all kinds of new ways to study the brain," he says. Public agencies, philanthropic groups such as the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and other private enterprises began appropriating money toward multidisciplinary studies of the mind and brain, Atlas says, "with some hope of success. And there have been considerable amounts of success."
This new science, he says, offers a fresh way to tackle "an old philosophical ambition: What are the capacities of the mind, by virtue of which we understand the world? For a philosopher who wants to have a reflective understanding of the human mind, this is a wonderfully enticing project."
René Coppieters, professor of Romance languages and literature, and of linguistics, oversaw development of the track as chair of the Linguistics Department.
"There is a sense that this is one of the great frontiers of learning," he says. "In the 21st century, this may be the area where the most intellectual excitement is to be had. What cognitive science is trying to do is find out how we construct the mental representations that are our reality. What systems yield them? What are their characteristics? And we are beginning to know a lot about them."
Modern science is accumulating a great deal of hard data on the brain. Studies using positron emission tomography, electroencephalograms and magnetic resonance imaging have exposed intricacies of the brain's operation as never before: its complex circuitry of neural connections; its ability, particularly in the young, to adapt to injury; its astonishing facility--as well as its lapses--in storing, recalling and combining short- and long-term memories.
"I think we've learned, since around 1980, as much about the brain as we'd learned through all of history before then," says William P. Banks, professor of psychology at Pomona and co-editor of the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Before, "Psychology treated the human head as a black box and wanted to talk about everything in terms of stimulus and response, and was mostly skipping the brain, probably for a good reason: We didn't know enough about it."
However, Banks says, there is still a great deal to be learned. Even now, it is unclear precisely how consciousness arises from within the brain's chemistry. Not enough is known, cognitive scientists say, about how brain areas, neural circuits and synapses actually affect people's ability to learn, think and remember.
"I think the most compelling question is: How can a bunch of goop be conscious?" says Banks. "There are some who believe it's an unanswerable question. I would say it's not a good question. It's like the question 'What is life?' The thing is, we know so much about life, we don't ask that kind of global question anymore. We have other questions that are better."
Nearly 400 years ago, the philosopher René Descartes investigated the mind-body question. Descartes posited a nearly complete independence of the two. The mind, he believed, was rational and reliable, fundamental to human existence, the innate source of ideas and the arbiter of truth. The body could be compared to an automaton. Although the extent to which Cartesian dualism is still tenable may be subject to debate, Descartes is considered a pioneer in exploring the essences of mind, man and machine.
The computer age has taken the exploration much further. In the 1930s, Alan M. Turing, a young English mathematician and logician, conceived of a simple machine capable of carrying out an indefinite number of calculations. It would consist of a limitless tape that could pass through the machine, and a scanner to read a simple code of blanks or slashes contained in squares on the tape. The machine could move left or right on the tape, erase the slash, or print the slash. By following a set of commands, it theoretically could carry out any program that could be expressed in binary code.
The work of Turing and others led, of course, to the modern computer, which many scientists consider essential in representing how the mind works. Some regard computers as a proxy for the process of human thought itself. "There are ideological artificial-intelligence types who just flat out say the mind is a computer, it works exactly the same way, it just does it with protoplasm," says Atlas. "Others think that important features of the mind can be modeled by programs, and that the effort to do so will allow us to learn more about how the mind really works."
Earlier generations of computers were no match for chess grandmasters; machines now can defeat even the most adept protoplasmic players. But research has shown that not all mental processes are Turing-computable. Humans don't always apply logic the way it's done by machine. "There is a danger," says Banks, "of people just ignoring the problems and plunging ahead with a very restrictive view of the mind as being a natural computer."
No computer has yet mastered a process that comes bundled with the operating system of nearly every child: the ability to use human language. Insights into language already have catalyzed new theories on learning. In 1957, Noam Chomsky, as a newly minted Ph.D., published "Syntactic Structures," in which he analyzed the syntax of natural language through a rule system formalized with mathematical precision. Chomsky's monograph, a reworking of his dissertation, was soon recognized as groundbreaking.
Chomsky also disputed the conclusions of psychologist B.F. Skinner after Skinner sought to apply the behavioral theory of negative and positive reinforcement in learning--successfully demonstrated in animals--to children's acquisition of their native language.
"Chomsky destroyed the behaviorist account," says Atlas. "He showed that the entire theoretical apparatus that Skinner was proposing for the acquisition of language was completely inadequate. He beat the pants off him."
The Chomskyan approach to linguistics helped blaze a new trail for studying the mind.
Now, says Karen C. Kossuth, professor of linguistics at Pomona and a specialist in bilingualism, "Mind and language are so intertwined that if you're going to study language, you have to study the mind. It's a linchpin--linguistics has to be there."
Psychology, cognitive scientists agree, has to be a central curricular component as well. So do neuroscience and computer science. Some add anthropology. A few raise doubts about granting philosophy significant status in a cognitive science curriculum, but Jay Atlas is not one of them. Philosophers, he says, fill a crucial role in helping to frame the questions and interpret the answers. Banks is among the scientists who strongly endorse that view. "I think maybe in the future the need will be less, but right now it is essential that we have input from philosophers," he says.
Atlas believes Pomona's new track in cognitive science stands apart from the offerings at peer institutions. "There's a strong case to be made that we have the best program of its sort," he says. "You have well-trained, talented people who realize that there are useful ways to cross-fertilize, and who have the appropriate personalities to engage each other productively."
Dean of the College Hans C. Palmer concurs. "Pomona is putting itself right on the edge of the curve with these mind-related studies," he says.
Atlas and others who will be guiding students through the rigors of cognitive science say they hope Pomona's approach will result in graduates who have a broad and deep understanding of the study of the mind and brain, and who will be equipped to apply that knowledge in service of society.
How this new knowledge will be received is another question. "There have been a number of significant discoveries that have not pervaded the cultural norms," says Coppieters. "Many are blissfully unaware, for example, that we acquire culturally developed stereotypes about language--as we do for lots of other things--that are demonstrably false."
One example is the notion of "good" or "bad" English, he says. "If you abide by the normal prescriptive rules of English, the idea is that you are speaking a logical, systematic, correct, sophisticated, intelligent language. And that there are those other people who speak 'bad' English and are illogical, can't think straight, are hampered by their 'unformed' and 'unstructured' language. And as far as we know, there is not a shred of evidence for this belief, not a shred. Whether your English is the worst slang version, or the most elegant, sophisticated, 'correct' English, it makes no difference in your capacity to think."
Although progress has been made in understanding how the mind works, it has come incrementally, says Kossuth, "in baby steps, painstaking baby steps."
More than 40 years have passed since the automobile crash that left the American woman unable to communicate in English, though she could speak French with a native's ease.
The woman, Kossuth says, was her late colleague Phyllis Anne Johnson '59. Kossuth says Johnson told her that it wasn't until about three weeks after the accident that she regained the use of English. The language returned over the course of several days, slowly at first, then with great speed. In the meantime, she had remained as fluent as ever in French.
What happened?
"The easy answer now is that the concussion was on the left side of her brain, where we keep our language, and that she was putting the French somewhere else," says Kossuth. "But it's not that simple."
Studies have found electrical activity occurring in different parts of the brain depending on which language is used by a multilingual speaker, but activity also has been noted at times in the same area. There also may be differences in where men and women store aspects of language. Some brain injuries have resulted in people losing only very specific elements of language, such as their knowledge of nouns, or their comprehension of the category of things to eat.
In Johnson's case, she finished her fellowship year in France, went on to postgraduate studies at UCLA, and returned to Pomona as a professor of Romance languages. She died of cancer at age 47 in 1985.
Kossuth says the mystery of Johnson's experience became part of her own inspiration for delving into the workings of the bilingual mind.
"The more we know, the more we understand, and the more our responsibility becomes clear to us," says Kossuth. "We're starting to understand how the brain works, we're starting to understand how people think. Cognitive science doesn't have a lot of easy answers. But it's opened wonderful doors."
