As an “aspiring linguist”, I was immediately drawn to Radio Lab’s Words.

This is a story about a woman, who, in waking up one morning, discovered that she had no chatter in her brain; no thoughts; no language ; no memories; just pure, 100% unadulterated sensory intake. She was experiencing the world entirely in the present, entirely through her senses. Can you imagine what that would be like? Can you imagine just experiencing the softness of a blanket on your skin, and the warmth provided by it, rather than knowing it was called a blanket, and thinking ‘damn it, I have to wake up now, and get ready for work/school/etc’?

These are some of the same questions raised by the storytellers (Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich)– making good use of the raising a question aspect of telling a good story as mentioned by Glass in my previous article (see here). They also make good use of sound effects, and sound layering to introduce the story; they layer the audio of the story told by the woman herself in the background while they continue to ask the listener questions, before finally letting you hear what the woman has to tell. And they use sound effects and effective pausing to enhance the story that she is telling.

The question that this whole story raises, for me, is one of ancient philosophical talk–have any of you ever read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave? You should if you haven’t (or at least read about it on wikipedia). Plato talks about a group of people that have lived their entire lives chained to a wall of a cave that was completely blank except for shadows that dance on the walls. The people begin to give meaning to the shapes, and create a sort of reality from it. I bring this up, because what if language is the essence of our true being? Or, conversely, what if we can’t ever know the true essence of our being without the undoing of our language? The woman who experienced the world without brain chatter, said she experienced a peace, a connectedness to the world, that she had never experienced before. She felt organic, and wholesome. What if that is the state we would naturally be in sans language; the state we would be in if we were chained to the wall unknowing that the forms we were looking at weren’t really reality? Is that not reality though, if it’s all you ever know? Or does knowledge of the forms, ascribing meaning to them, constitute real knowledge, and likewise, reality?

This is an argument that I can not come to conclusion about. I agree with Plato, and I agree with this woman on different levels. The la-la land that this woman drifts off too sounds equally as lovely and terrible as the brain chatter, or real knowledge that Plato speaks of, and that you and I already possess. Perhaps this is where the saying “ignorance is bliss” comes from.