If someone is very good with language, it almost certainly has something to do with their excellent spatial awareness. Sounds far-fetched, but that’s how it is. A conversation with the neuroscientist and journalist Henning Beck.
SRF knowledge: Mr. Beck, there is a new one right now study appeared, showing that spatial thinking and language are related. You have to explain that!
So: Words don’t grow on trees, we don’t find them somewhere in nature, we make them up. We try to use it to describe things that are already in our heads, of which we first have an idea – and then we find a word for it.
If you look at how children build language, you see that understanding the world comes first. Children make pointing gestures, children touch things, children orientate themselves in space. Then comes the language.
That turns quite a lot of people’s worldview upside down, doesn’t it?
Yes, I don’t want to offend philosophy now, but the idea that thinking begins with language is wrong. The philosopher Wittgenstein once said “The limit of my language is the limit of my world”. Wittgenstein is next to it.
As a child, I built my own doll’s house and thought about what should go where. Did this help me develop my language better?
Clearly, the more one thinks spatially, the better these processes of understanding work in the brain, which are needed to find words, and the better it is to think with language.
How did the researchers find out?
The nice thing about this study is that you not only did experiments in the laboratory for a few days, but also trained students for a semester to think spatially and to solve problems in a spatial way.
Then you looked to see if that had an effect on the ability to process problems verbally and to think better verbally.
What tasks did the participants have to solve?
They had to represent complex issues using maps or other spatial systems. For example: You were given a map and looked at how streets should ideally be placed on this map. Or how cities should ideally be built.
The researchers told the participants: Hey, think about the solution of your task using a graphic, a spatial structure and thus create a picture in your head instead of just writing things down and then reading them again.
And this spatial thinking made the language better?
Yes! That’s fascinating, isn’t it? When people actually create images in their heads, for example think in the form of such mental maps, then their language skills improve.
Before the language comes the image in the head.
The researchers then tested it: After the training semester, how good were the participants at completing logical word chains, how good were they at association exercises or at finding synonyms? They were actually better. That means for me: Before the language comes the image in the head.
Katrin Zöfel conducted the interview.