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When Anxiety Takes Away Your Words: The Science of Language & Communication · Radiant Voices

• Jeremy de Tolly: Maybe at some point in our evolution as a species, l we just had something like pure experience, like maybe some animals do, non-linguisti animals. But then once we acquired language, it actually rewired our brains and restructured the way that we perceive things then. And so now it's got this interconnected feedback loop where our experiences are perceived and language both allows us to express them and filters them in particular ways. So I know that if I'm speaking Japanese or if I'm speaking English, the language is going to force me to construct reality in slightly different ways. Welcome everybody. I'm really excited to be with Ryan Neft, who's a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town and also at the University of Bristol. And he's also a member of the UCT Neuroscience Institute. And his focus is the philosophy of cognitive science and linguistics. Have I got any of that wrong? No. Sounds good. Okay, perfect. So good to have you here. We're gonna have a really interesting conversation today and we're gonna f kind of go free range and just explore together. And I think it's unusual for me be able to sit with someone like you who really looks at and concentrates at the nature of language. So I'm gonna ask you a really basic question. We all use language all the time, apparently, but like what is a language? Yeah, well you say that's a basic question, but to us philosophers that's like one of the deepest questions you can ask. So from a linguistic perspective, many linguists f following Noam Chomsky in the mid nineteen fifties have taken a language to be some sort of steady state that your brain is in when it's processing language. So it's something we all have this blueprint for acquiring languages as human beings. And then as we interact with people in our environments, that that substrate that part of our brain just gets fine tuned in different directions based on the input that we're getting. And by the time we have our mature mature language, usually after puberty, we now have a steady state, like a little machine in our brains that just allows us to take our thoughts and then translate it through this this mechanism. But to many philosophers language is more about a convention that we have as speakers in a community for how to communicate with each other. So it's a it's a deep question. That's super interesting. Like you say, there's almost like a blueprint inside us, this kind of framework. Do you think that language is almost the framework of our experience? Or do we just have experiences and then when we want to put them into words or thoughts, then we use language. In other words, do we experience reality through the language or is it just a framework for expressing what it's like? I think it's both. So I think maybe at some point in our evolution as a species, l we just had something like pure experience, like maybe some animals do, non-linguistic animals. But then once we acquired language, it actually rewired our brains and restructured the way that we perceived things then. And so now it's got this interconnected feedback loop where our experiences are perceived and language both allows us to express them and filters them in particular ways. So I know that if I'm speaking Japanese or if I'm speaking English, the language is going to force me to construct reality in slightly different ways because of the grammar of the language. So I think both are playing an important role in how experience is generated and expressed. That's really interesting. Do you think then, like in in many wisdom traditions, meditative wisdom traditions, there's a A movement away or from labeling experience. In other words, to return to a more raw experience of perception. So we look at a flower, we have an experience, and usually what our minds will do is label it flower, pretty flower, interpret. And so there's a movement in in contemplative traditions to move back towards raw experience. First of all, do you does that sound possible to you from the perspective of linguistics? Yeah, it's a tricky one. So d what your example makes me think of things like like tomatoes. At some point everybody you grow up you think a tomato is a vegetable, and then somebody tells you actually a tomato is a fruit. But depending on how you categorize that in your brain as a vegetable or fruit, the idea of putting a tomato in a fruit salad might seem completely strange to you. But if it's categorized as a fruit, then it makes sense. It would be in a fruit salad with the other fruit. So I think language does provide those labels and then the grammatical categories that structure the way we think. In terms of whether we can escape language, whether we can get to pure perception without language, I think it's it's a tricky question because so much of our reality is constructed through language. But I don't think it's impossible. So for instance, recent research suggests that not everyone has an inner monologue. Some people actually report not having a voice that's sort of like narrating their lives and their thoughts to themselves. And I think to many of us who do, that seems completely impossible, right? So I think in that way I think the contemplative traditions in in philosophy and in in religion have potentially tracked a a way of perceiving reality, kind of like getting o outside of this grammatical trap that that we find ourselves in in in linguistic communities and societies. I'll be honest with you. Actually I'm one of those people that rather learnt how to how to disengage from my inner narrative and make it stop at will and then to experience more of raw reality. And really the framing though of our conversation is to talk about communication and the the use of language and what it's like for people. A huge proportion of the people who Watch this particular podcast are really interested in optimizing their ability to communicate and the ability to move out of suboptimal, highly anxious states where even their access to language processing and and and expression becomes severely compromised. Can you maybe just if a brain is working well, where does the language get come from? Like as I'm speaking right now. What's lighting up inside here? What's firing to make this possible? That's another complex question, and less of a philosophical one and more of a neurolinguistic one. And some of my colleagues might be able to answer that better. So there are there are a few designated regions that have been associated with language in the brain, like the the brokers area, and the Vinick area, named after famous neuroscientists or early neuroscientists. And we know this, how we s how we get there, because you can't operate on people that's very unethical. You can't just say, Let me look into your brain, and we have to use sort of like non-invasive techniques, which give you give you little lighting patterns, but they're all correlations. They they don't tell you this is definitely the spot. so so it's tricky. I'll I'll say one extra thing about about neuroscience here. Everybody's Conglomeration or structure of language is very different. Every single person. And that's why, and when you hopefully never in the position to be operated on in a neurosurgical procedure, you have to be semi-awake for part of it. Because while you're doing that, what the neurosurgeon is doing is mapping where your lights are for language and vision, and vision's a little bit more stable, but language especially. So that when they operating, removing a tumor, you know, it's lowering pressure in a particular part, they don't mess with the language. Because we don't have a textbook sort of that's where everybody's language is. It's actually a network that sort of lights up a region and it moves around in its activation patterns. So there are there are specific parts that we know if those are impaired, then people have particular issues with language, like with this this condition called aphasia that generally happens when people have a particular part, like the brokers area in the brain, impaired. But the rest of the language network is quite distributed and and slightly different for everybody, which makes neuroscience and neurosurgery such a complex endeavor. That's so interesting what you're saying. Are you I are you inferring that the way that we that language inhabits us and structures our experience or interfaces with our experience of reality is not consistently exactly the same between all of us. And I just want to throw in an extra question while we're at it. What happens when between different languages and people of different cultures? And now I'm just gonna throw in a third question. Good luck kind of being coherent with this one. The third question is what is it like when people are bilingual and then they've got different sets of language all in one brain? Okay, there's a lot of questions. I'm wishing you luck with this one. I can't even remember what the first question was. I think the first one was whether I'm I'm inferring that language is slightly differently structured for for all of us in our brains. And I think that is that's a a core finding of of neuroscience and neurolinguistics that it is. but that doesn't mean that it's sort of like in my temporal lobe, in my brain, and you in your neocortex and things like that. It's not it's not distributed in that way, it's just the Patterns of activation are slightly different, and the region, the specific regions need to be, need to be found. So there's a lot of commonality. We know general areas in which things are happening. Syntax, for instance, people have located in an area called the BA44. It's a specific little region where where your grammar is sort of generated. And we know that again from impairment, impairment data. in terms of bilingualism, so neuroscientists and neurolinguists love. the the phenomenon of bilingualism. There was a new paper, I think, in Nature that actually sort of turned the previous wisdom on its head. So people are still debating this. If from a classic Chomskyan perspective, we've got this universal grammar that all human beings have. And then you said can you go can you because I don't think you've explained that necessarily a universal grammar that all people have got, what on earth is that? So to be To be a bird, you have this sort of biological inheritance, this blueprint that allows you now you might be a bird that's injured or something like that and you wouldn't be able to fly, or you might be a flightless bird, but you've got the structure, you're born with a structure, you don't have to learn it to be able to fly. And the analogy with language and humans has been that it's a similar situation with us. It's it's to the extent of bird flight, we are born with the the equipment. To learn any language that's out there in the world. and then our specific linguistic environments start fine-tuning. They they're called parameters in the the classic sort of it was a a theory called principles and parameters. The principles are universal, we're born with them. And the parameters are like settings that we get as we learn a particular language. So we know that that in English, for instance, you need to have these like Dummy pronouns very often. If you want to say it's raining, you have to say it is raining. What is it? But in Spanish you can just say raining. And that that setting that says every time I have a sentence, I need to have a subject of that sentence, no matter what. I can't just put a verb, I can't just generate a a gerund of or something. I have to put a a subject to that sentence. That's an English parameter that you learn as an English child. Now to your other questions, what happens when you're Spanish and English? Or when you speak an Inguni language and English, as many people in South Africa do? What's happening inside your brain? Do you is your universal grammar being split across and now you have two different modules? Are they using the same resources and just sort of like you have a different filter to put thoughts into to one language or then or the other? The the jury is honestly still out on on the different possibilities here. like I said, recent research has suggested that there is actually just one sort of resource. It's not that you you have a split brain where you have your your compartment for for Isi Zulu and your compartment for English or Afrikaans or something. It's that they they actually you have this one place where language is being generated and then it's a later process that's changing it into something else. And you might there's a a phenomenon called code switching which is super interesting for among bio We all do it very often in South Africa is a very bilingual and multilingual society. We will say certain things because they just feel right in a different language. So some people when they bilingual English Afrikaans, they feel like making a joke is just makes more sense in Afrikaans than in English. English is more formal, it's more for those kinds of settings. Whereas being funny and informal, that's where I'll do my Afrikaans. And I think a lot of these things play out in in our everyday Society. I don't know if I've answered all three of your questions, but I've at least I've heard of them. Well, it was great though. It's so interesting that you're talking about this kind of substrate structure that somehow we inherit. Is it the notion that this comes through our DNA, or wh how on earth do you pass on a s a structure this complex, you know, through a sperm cell in an ovar? So that's been the the trick of of linguistics for 50 years and the and the The difficulty of explaining it. So initially it started out with the idea that this universal grammar is quite complex. It has a lot of features in it from birth. But and the reason that you would say that, this is the possibly the most powerful argument for universal grammar that I've encountered. It's called the poverty of stimulus. It says, at no point does a young child encounter all the possible grammatical structures of their language. It just doesn't happen. No matter how much Parents think that they are teaching their language to the the children. They just can't give them every possible grammatical construction. Yet around twelve or thirteen young children start to perfect language, they start to master language, they start to use constructions that their parents have never used. And there's some interesting historical studies on this. So, for instance, in communities where sign language is used now, previously Sign language was actually banned by a lot of governments, like in the Paraguayan government, I believe. So young deaf children were forced to either do lip reading and and sound out the spoken speech. And what started what people started noticing was they would develop independently. Their parents would be either second language signers, so ungrammatical, or they wouldn't know sign language, yet the children would just learn perfect sign language, which seems to go along with this idea that they've already got all the equipment for language. They just needed some interaction to light that up. And so that that notion is called the poverty of stimulus. It's the idea that we never get enough information to be this good at language so quickly. And young children are not good at a lot of things when they're young. Cognitive tasks are difficult. You d study arithmetic and maths and all of that and it's tricky. But language is so complex and we almost All of us just master it very quickly. So that's a powerful explanation for why there must be something we must bring something to the party. But but you're correct that over the years people have said that thing we're bringing to the party is less and less full. You know, nowadays most linguists would say universal grammar is actually a much more simplified system because that's the way it could have evolved. As you say genetically like give an entire computer program to your your offspring. So you're probably just giving them a few kernels for how to get the whole system from that. Yes, yes. And so so does does this structure then also account for all the languages of the world? How do people from Papua New Guinea, like the deep in the forest or Brazilian rainforest, people who are encountered for the first time and they've got a f a kind of a full structure of language? Is their language system inherently simplified because the i it's it's just they live in a forest? Or do we find that languages all around the world have a similar amount of complexity and they might not have the you know, as you said, those same kind of units like English has that extra prefix or subject or I don't know what it was. But are are you know, do languages inherently show the same kind of basics? pre word structure and do they have some kind of symbolic underpinning? Like what what are the what's common? That's that's the essence of of a sixty year search for universal grammar. What is that thing that connects all of us? So some people have gone. So the the linguist Daniel Everett for instance went into the Amazon rain forest and he studied a a group of people were isol quite isolated called the Piraha. And he came back and he said after studying their language for many years, that their language actually doesn't have the the the structures that Chomsky and others have said are universal. That they la they can't count beyond a certain sort of very small finite language, a finite number because they don't need that in their environment. They don't have complex words for for various kinds of things. Their language is more staccato than than structured hierarchically. So he actually came with big claims and a lot of people have have followed that tradition to say, well maybe the environment structures that you're you the needs of your language in certain ways. So that some languages would be more complex and others would be less complex. It's been a controversial issue in linguistics specifically. The the general consensus is that languages, rather than creating scenarios in which one language is much more complex than another, trade complexity. So English, for instance, has a longer history, it's got a huge vocabulary. You know, outnumbers most other languages in terms of the vocabulary that you have to learn. But certain other languages are extremely complex in their sort of structure. So for with like you pick languages that's spoken in northern Siberia and some parts of Alaska, you can create what looks to us like one word, but it's an entire sentence. Because they don't separate the words in the same way. They just sort of start from a core and then just add to that and then it just looks like one unit to us or sounds like one unit, but it's actually a very complex idea. So you'd think those languages would be less maybe complex in terms of the vocabulary, but very complex in terms of what's called morphology, which is the study of how you join things together to get meaningful units in a language. Wow. So As you were speaking there, there was words pouring out of your mouth and really complex, interesting stories about language around the world. Of course, the stuff that you were speaking about was unplanned. I know you have knowledge about it. You know, you've got these kind of you've got hard drives spinning back there with all kinds of interesting knowledge and and anecdotes and stuff. But how on earth did all of that stuff just pour out of you? Like like like where does how does it work? How's it even have how where's it coming from in me right now? I've got no like I'm not thinking about what I'm saying before I say it. There's not some kind of like and then I think you should say that. It's it's to you in the moment. How is this conversation happening? yeah, I can give you some some conjectures more than anything precise and and fine tuned at this point. I think this is maybe a one of those moments that that modern AI has kind of given us a little bit of insight. so a lot of these pre-trained language models, they can do pretty complex things. But all they've done is all all they're doing is looking at a huge they've studied the whole internet for the most part, studied in the sense of just being trained on the tokens that's generated by a language on the internet, and then they just predict the next word in a sequence. So one word leads them to another one. And we can do that right now. We can start doing like a yes and game where I will say something, the you know of the next word has to be a noun of some sort. We have to put a verb off that. We have to have perhaps a definite article and another noun. And that template actually this is one possibility that the template actually gives us a lot of the illusion of creativity and spontaneity, but we're actually getting these like constructions and th and one thing in support for this is the fact that you speak as eloquently as you do and hopefully I don't fumble too much because I've practiced. I think if this was my first ever video chat about linguistics, I'd fumble much more because now I actually do have to think about things a little bit more. But given that I've I've I've spoken about this topic many times and I've been in this format a few times, I'm a little bit that's why my confidence helps me a little bit because I know okay I can just go to that set, you know, template in my brain. So take the language model again. There's this sort of meta parameter called temperature that if you fiddle with it in the right way, then it can tell the language model make riskier choices for the next word. Don't just go with what you've seen before and the most likely next word. Make a riskier choice. When you do that, you start getting Shakespearean sonnets. Because now the I in essence when we're doing this, when we're sort of producing language, the riskier our choices are, the more creative we sound. The more we go with the patterns that we're familiar with, the more perhaps polished we sound because everything sounds good. And to the hero who's heard those similar patterns before, they can they can appreciate it. And if at any point I'm sounding a little bit too complex or abstract or something for for your listeners, part of the reason might be because they unfamiliar with the way in which I'm putting these words together because I'm I'm talking about particular disciplines that maybe they are unfamiliar with. Or if they're not unfamiliar, then I might sound very, you know, run of them all to a certain I hope not. I hope I'm a little bit more interesting than that. But you know, it's sort of like which patterns you've set up in a particular thing. So if I go and listen to to mechanics talk when when I send my car in for a service, I I might be lost because the patterns that they're used to communicating with each other are very complex, but they are familiar with it and I'm not. So I have to sort of learn them until I get to a point where I'm I'm used to it. It's so interesting this description of this temperature. You know, I I work with as as I mentioned and there are a lot of anxious speakers. And one of the common complaints that I have from them, they might be subject matter experts working in a a large multinational tech company And they're maybe a software engineer or or whatever job they have, or working in finance. And they're smart, they know what they're doing. But the moment they become anxious, they've got an amygdala that scans and sees and fears danger and feels danger when they're in a group setting. So they're in a meeting, they've got to do a presentation. And since they were at school and or they were a kid, these kind of group situations where there's pressure and potential authority surrounding them. People in positions of authority triggers the sphere response. And something happens to their hormone system, where they start to go into fight or flight, or even a freeze response. And but they lose language and their options diminish. I you could say, like what in in the terms of the temperature model, that they maybe the temperature cools and they cling to bullet points. They are already struggling to remember what they needed to say, but all of the creativity leaves the building. And what happens is as we work on safety, as they come back into a sense of safety, or what might be called a ventral vagal nervous system style response, which is a sense of safety and connectedness, then the humor, spontaneity, and creativity return. Any thoughts? Does that make sense from a neuroscience point of view? I I think it makes sense from from a cognitive science point of view as well. So we we what it sounds like if you think about it, th I have this phenomenon that that annoys me because I generally you know, you get into these situations where you interact with people. Sometimes it's not them the nicest interaction. I find that very often after such interactions, I think of that zinger that I couldn't think of at the moment. I think I should have said that. That would have been a good retort. And the reason that I can't is because I'm so flooded with emotions in that situation where there's shame, anger, fear, that I'm I'm shutting off my my language center. I'm going into a much more like primal setting and language doesn't permeate there. In fact, language then seems think of people in a fight. Language seems more like a signal. I'm saying something to scare you. I'm saying something to get you to back off. I'm not thinking about a creative sonnet at that point. I'm not thinking about anything because it's not necessary for the the action that's happening. So I I see a a lot of what you're saying, this ability or this need to go back to a safe place and when we're in foreign environments or when we're giving presentations to important people in our lives, then we that's what happens. That that sort of language shutdown happens. But it I think as much as there is a a neuroscientific explanation of why particular areas of your brain are being shut up. I think anxiety and emotion can affect almost any activity in the same way. If you think of of a concert, you're getting out there, you're a flautist or you're guitarist or pianist and you're nervous. And you have this ability. It's not necessarily linked to language, although some people do link music and language in the brain. But but you don't have access to to these skills that you know you usually have because the setting is is blocking it. So you need to find this a safe space. You need to find some sort of center where you can move from and and get back to some sort of fluency in whichever task you're doing. So as much as there's a language specific explanation, there's also sort of a general performance anxiety that that we might get at across various kinds of media. Yeah, that sounds that really connects with my experience working with clients. So I'm so curious, just from a a brain science point of view, you you describe parts of the brain shutting down. Now, I'd I'd be curious to see whether this tracks correctly as a description of what happens when people's language centers shut down. Let's just say someone does get up to do public speaking. Many people describe sweating and shaking. They start to experience anxiety about the anxiety. People can see, they can hear my voice shaking. And the way I might have described it is a loss really of the prefrontal cortex. So really a loss of the perspective and ability to plan. To plan, exactly, to to put coherent sentences together, to access working memory. And would it be correct to say that one would become more amygdale dominant or you said primal, I think you used the phrase earlier, like primal centers of the brain. How would you describe that shift? in language processing and communication processing ability from a neuroscience or brain point of view? If you can. Firstly, I should my disclaimer should be my work is adjacent. It's much more theoretical than than the the sort of like anatomy and and functional anatomy of of the brain when it's processing certain kinds of information. So as much as a There's sort of a field called cognitive neuroscience. And the cognitive part brings the sort of the theoretical lens to it. And then what happens is we we then look for explanations at the neurological level to see if if they map onto this. So what you were describing now is is sort of a cognitive classic cognitive neuroscience perspective. You've got this high-level explanation of what's going on, and then you're looking for brain regions to say, well, okay, blood is flowing and and exciting a particular reason region, whether it's your your amygdala and it's taking energy away from from your prefrontal cortex and that's what's generating the sort of like inability to get the words out in a particular way. So so I think there's in in in the brain, in language and society, in the universe there's this principle of sort of like conservation of energy and that no energy is lost. But also there's there's an element of using resources and using that energy in a a sort of prioritized manner. So maybe when you're getting up to to do a public speaking engagement and you're seeing this the environment, there are too many people there, you're nervous, all of these other sort of processes are happening, language and planning and you know, eloquence, all of these things are no longer a priority. Your body needs to get back to what's called homeostasis. You need to get back to a a a state where where you feel like you can function at an optimal level, but these other things are interfering. and I mean it's it's an it's a profound exercise in therapy, in speech therapy, in in the kind of work that you do to get people to sort of take control of these processes that are happening automatically. so There's this this theory in cognitive neuroscience again, called the du dual systems theory. And it's the idea that we've got system one happening and this is all automatic things just going on in the background constantly. It's super fast. We don't think about it, it's not in a spotlight. Then we've got these system two processes that are deliberative and we're thinking about it. And I'm slowing down my words so that I can sound a little bit more convincing and eloquent or something. And these things are in constant sort of conflict with one another. So sometimes situations are going to ask me to to let system two take over. and system one is going to take a back seat. But if depends if you if you are an adherent of this particular theory, but the the data has amassed over time that system two is doing a lot of work. People often think that you need to get back to system one, but I think there there is some evidence that if you can train your system two, your sort of background forces to to be a little bit more more deliberative, then you don't actually always need to get back to the sort of creative thing. So in in terms of what we were talking about earlier, let's say somebody's planning a speech and they know, listen, I'm quite prone to to being nervous or anxious or something like that. I might actually train myself to have a few statements or or memorized chunks of of knowledge that I can fall back on. If I know My words are going to any sort of creative output is going to give out on me right now. What I should do is go back to the script that my my system one has sort of written for me. So I think there are interesting ways to to try to to overcome those instances where it seems like our brain is trying to do more than one thing at a time and and it's maybe shutting off in a way, public speaking, podcasts, studying linguistics. These are not very natural things to do in the world. Running from danger, you know, sweating to cool yourself down, all of these things are much more like our animal base. So as humans we have this amazing ability to sort of switch to to a cerebral level. And I think in these moments I I like to think of these moments as me getting back to my my roots. I'm realizing actually I'm an animal. I'm in danger. All these people are going to ask me questions after this talk. So you know I better get into to shape for that. But yeah. Yeah, it's so it is amazing that when people get up in front of a crowd or they need to present to a board at work, that their body moves into a state that resembles that they're in mortal danger. You know, the fact that someone might enter into a quasi-freeze response In other words, pain relieving endorphins flooding the body and becoming incoherent and dis dissociated just because they're people that slightly resemble their family of origin and their authoritative angry dad. you know, I say that with with with a bit of humor, but but with empathy too, because often the people that I work with, literally it's a one for one relationship between their early family life and then what happened at school and then what transpires in their system. As an adult. Yeah, so I just yeah, it's just to go a little bit sideways though, what is the function of language then? For all of us using language, how did it w what does it do in society? W w what can we do with it? Where does do we have any idea why we have it even? why language might have evolved in our species and I I think it's such a complex topic that in the eighteenth century the Academy the French Academy just banned all talk and writing about language evolution. They said enough. There's just too many plausible sounding stories and we're getting nowhere because the the evidence doesn't support all the the the theories we can generate. So I think we've moved past that and we have a little bit more evidence, both paleontological and you know neuro atomical anatomical but we don't we still don't know for sure what the the the actual reason language evolved. I think from my perspective and this would I have to flag it as my perspective because it's it's a debatable point, I think the it is plausible to me that language evolved for the sake of complex communication. There so this this linguist Derek Bickerton He I think he's at the university. It might have been re he's might have been retired now, but at the University of Hawaii. He had a a a very interesting theory. He said human beings have this ability that might have just you know arisen as a mutation to to dissociate, to take arbitrary sounds or signs and associate them with with objects in the world. So the word dog doesn't look like a dog, doesn't sound like a dog. you know, it's just a word we use and in many other languages will use different la words, inja or or hunto or something like that. And so we can use these symbols to then pick out things in the world. And that's interesting, but why would that that ability really have taken shape in the particular way than it did if human societies didn't require some sort of important level of communication? He suggested that it was actually foraging behavior. It was the the fact that we needed to to report on prey or on food sources that are in that are quite distant from us and then report back so that other people could go to the exact same location. That sort of precision of of the the symbolic communication, that was what what created the languages that we have now. So I think that's that's a plausible story. There's some aspect of of an ability that humans have that might be shared with some very few other kinds of animals. And then this need that was created to to you know interact with those in our conspecifics as they call it in in evolutionary biology, people or creatures around us. So I'm I'm leaning towards in my own work the idea that language did develop for the for communication purposes. But there there must have been another ingredient that meant that because other animals need to communicate too, but something about our brains or the niche that we found ourselves in that took that and supercharged it into a way that now we can talk about things that are really this is a property called stimulus independence. We can talk about things we we can write sci fi novels. Sci fi novels are very interesting linguistically because they're not about anything around us. They have no immediate relevance to to the world around us. They create worlds that we don't think right now exists or could exist or something like that. And that's the ability of language that seems to go in in the words of of of Wallace, who was the sort of co discoverer of evolution with Darwin, it goes beyond what nature needs. So it might have started in a communicative practice, but it sh it very quickly due to the nature of our brains or something, that our societies it moved to a place where where it's just much more abundant and complex than you would expect a communication system to be in if it was just doing that job. And for cand and create. No, I love it. Thank you. That that's really, really interesting. Is there any way to look at language and and the evolution of language through the internet and the effect global communication is having through social media? on the coherence or in or incoherence of society. Like you describe it it as possibly a way of coordinating the species or at least communicating between members of a society. Is our language changing through the internet? I think the internet changed our language quite a bit. I think it had changes is a neutral term because it you can interpret it positively and negatively. Obviously the internet is is a very English based source. Other languages are are generally relegated. English has been a a a dominant medium. So just the introduction of non first language English speakers with English speakers on the internet already changed things in a way that hundreds of years ago where English was isolated in a particular part of the world, it wouldn't have changed in the same kinds of ways. Then more recently with social media and this is a topic of of a book Called Algo Speak by a young linguist, Adam Alexic, Alexic, I think. He argues that social media algorithms have actually forced us to fault our languages in particular ways, partly because they sense it. There are certain things you can say and you can't say. So you need to create new words, new ways of saying things, symbols for things. To be able to evade the censorship. And when the censorship gets smarter and finds that, then you need to find another way. And that's accelerated language change. So the internet and eventually social media, now AI as well. I think language is is changing faster than it ever has before. And I don't think it's necessarily with a particular endpoint in mind, but but it is rapidly changing. What changes are you observing with the real arrival of L LMs in our lives, in our daily lives. Is is there a shift happening already in terms of how language is experienced by us and used? Yeah, there there are quite a few studies trying to investigate this. I mean on the sort of trivial, maybe not trivial because it's quite even for my my livelihood quite an important aspect, sort of the ability to to plagiarize with L LMs has become a a major issue the fact that we didn't really have artificial systems that were this good at language before. So that's that's a conundrum. Also good at language. By good at language I mean trained to sound like us. And that's the the interesting part. I mean if you look back at some of these old movies where they have like an artificial whether it was hell or something like that from from 2001 Space Odyssey. The language that that the the artificial system, the AI would have, it's very s sort of bland, neutral staccato, like too matter of fact. I don't think that's our experience with LLMs at all. It's extremely natural. It flows. People find it almost indistinguishable very often. So I think that inability to sort of distinguish between when are you interacting with a human and when you're interacting with an AI, it's To a certain extent I think robbed us of our feeling that that we are quite original in this way. We've heard recently of Nobel Prize winners in literature saying they use LLMs and they enjoy it. And you'd think, well, that's surely something that needs to be like a a human domain and nothing else. So I think there's sort of that high level of making us start to question what is uniquely human for a long for the longest time. Scientists have thought language was something that was uniquely human. it's a question mark now around that. In terms of like the specifics, like the algo speak, how LLMs are are going to change language, I think the jury's still out on that. We have to get more data on on what's happening there because right now they they sort of parroting the structures that they already see in writing. But the second they start to generate their own text and then learn from themselves. I think we'll start seeing more dramatic changes. And we're already seeing a shift on the internet between human-generated text and AI generated text. AI is going to outnumber human generated text. and and it's one of the the sort of milestones of AI was when they trained a neural network to beat the best Go player. And Go is this the sport game that's more complex than chess. And How they did that, it wasn't by training the the system on previous human games. Initially it was, but it was starting to train the system on games with itself. So leaving the humans out of it completely got to a point where it was just better than the Grand Master. I think his name was Lee Sedang. so yeah, I think we're we're going to see some massive changes in the nature of of language and communication the more. the sort of front runners in in next generation in the coming years. Yeah, it's so interesting. I noticed with myself that in a small way, one thing that happens is when I'm typing and typing emails, for example, I'm having my grammar corrected and improved the whole time. And it's really interesting just, you know, seeing that my grammar is suboptimal and and how often there are better choices being suggested by the LLM. But at the same time, and I return back to that notion of temperature that you were talking about earlier, that I think the thing that's gonna be wanna be the most important for us as humans is our ability to find our personal humor, our lyric, our poetry, our individuality, our funny, our quirky, and to be able to express our individuality, to move out of the kind of boxes of simply fact-oriented speech to really express our humanity and to let our humanity come through when we're speaking, because at this point the the bots are probably going to do a lot better than we can at the facts. But when we can tell our own stories and share them and in a really expressive and human way. I I I think that's the one thing that humans are gonna continue to crave for is genuine connection with other humans. I hope so. That's a that's an excellent point and I I think one aspect of it that that's sometimes neglected and maybe this is relevant to to your work as well, is that LLMs no matter how good they get at at creating grammatical strings or logical arguments, which they're not that great at at the moment, but they're getting better, I think they can't be anxious. They don't have a McDillas. And I think if if I'm if I would speak to a younger audience of high school students doing sort of public speaking or something, I might tell them now, own that. Own that anxiety and that nerves. Because that's something that can never be replicated in another system. At least not right now, at least not in the sort of disembodied AI that we have now. And that is uniquely human. When I'm nervous, when I'm actually Getting my grammar a little bit mixed up, that's uniquely human. I'll even an an anecdote in this way, when I see my students writing and I see grammatical errors and issues, I see that as a mark of their humanity and I am more likely to reward that than somebody else's assignment that is so polished that I think it's likely that this went through multiple large language models and isn't their own work. So maybe that those aspects that we we want to dismiss and those things we constantly are fighting against or the things that at some point we should actually consider to be uniquely us and and embrace them to a certain extent. Ryan, I love that. 'Cause that that's really what I left out of that that list of poetry and enthusiasm and and lyric and creativity was our vulnerable our vulnerable humanity. And that includes our anxiety and our shame and our embarrassment and and to t I love the fact that you celebrate the grammatical errors in and in the essays that you mark. And I think that's really ideally the way we should approach speaking too, which is a total embracing of our humanity. You know, they say that people fear public speaking more than than death itself. I mean th th these are I I I mean, it's not exactly how the study goes, but it's pretty close. It's one of the the the greatest fears on the planet. And so you would think that it would be the kind of thing that we shouldn't shame ourselves about if er if everybody or many people or most of us feel like this. Perhaps we could stop sh self shaming and feeling like there's something wrong with us and just, as you say, embrace this kind of fragile, beautiful human being that we are. And still allow it to speak and share its story and its uniqueness with the world. I totally agree. I think that there's a sort of scientific theor s story here too. So linguistics in the the twentieth century did something very interesting. It's so it came from a sort of like old school, especially in the English tradition, grammar school idea of what language should be. Don't split your infinitives, you know. chastised for if you deviated from. And linguists started saying, well actually the deviations are the interesting things. If you look at the development of English over time, you see that okay, English doesn't have what's called negative concord. You you it the second you have two nos in a sentence, they sort of like cancel each other out. And it's like double negation. But In in particular dialects spoken in in America, for instance, in particular populations, especially the African American population, you started thing hearing things like I ain't got no. And instead of treating that as some sort of aberration or some mistake, people studied it and realized there's a rule there, a rule that's being applied just as it is in what we call standard English. And by understanding that it's in what we previously thought were mistakes that we see just how language really operates. I think that liberated the field and actually made the field one of the most exciting fields in the twentieth century. Linguistics said, forget all the grammar rules. Let's study how people actually use language. And it's interesting that this conversation has made me think about the fact that we seem to be coming back to that reliance with with AI now, to realize maybe it's in the imperfections that we find our own humanity and our own linguistic essence as opposed to sort of all trying to become robots. Yeah, I hear the kids are leaving their phones at home and going to go play cards in cafes. And I think there'll be a pushback against LLMs even as there's mass adoption. And yeah, a a a a walk towards our humanity and maybe a a lessening of our perfectionism and rigidity and and just an allowance back to the that dual system theory Of maybe a harmony between our intuitive, playful, emotional sides and the more structured, coherent, thoughtful cognitive sides. A kind of a weaving of the two where we flow but we have structure, something like that. Because the the cognitive side, the system two stuff, to a certain extent we're realizing that that is programmable. It's computable in a large sense. But the system stuff is not try to tea you can teach an L how to s sound like an English speaker, or even potentially in the future and near future, how to reason logically through a particular kind of puzzle, but you can't teach it how to have the appropriate emotion to a sad scene or to you know it can generate the pattern of humor, but not necessarily the the sort of social aspect of humour. There's a point that when I'm making a joke, even if it's a bad joke that it connects us in some important way. That's beautiful. Ryan, that is, I think, just such a full meal. I I you know, when I when I I looked at your work it and I looked at a bunch of your papers. I I honestly haven't read them. I was more looked at the titles and some of the abstracts and and I was I I was unsure that I'd be able to understand how to have a convo with you just because your work is is really rich and complex and and above my pay grade, but it's been such a wonderful conversation and I'm so glad you spent this time and thank you for sharing your wisdom and your experience and your skills. Well thank you for this wonderful conversation. I've honestly thought of things in in different ways just by the way you've framed the questions and the debate and the the discussion. So thank you for that. Thank you so much. And for all of you, look in the show notes. You can Have a look at Ryan's work and please do look him up and find him on social media and so on. Thank you so much, Ryan. That's been wonderful.