“Macaques have a speech-ready vocal tract but lack a speech-ready brain to control it,” according to W. Tecumseh Fitch, Bart de Boer, Neil Mathur, and Asif A. Ghazanfar.* Using “x-ray videos to quantify the vocal tract dynamics in living macaques during vocalization, facial displays, and feeding,” the researchers demonstrated that we’ve been wrong all these years about why monkeys don’t talk as we do. Apparently, we have a brain that talks, that is, neurons specifically capable of using our vocal tract mechanisms. Monkeys don’t seem to have such a neural setup.
Obviously, we humans have our struggles mastering talking. We say a few syllables when we first begin the process of learning language, and all the adults around us jump for joy. “Did you hear that! She said ‘dada.’” Then, by our toddler years, we begin to run at the mouth, and we don’t stop. Over and over, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.” And about everything. Every subculture’s favorite topics; all the general stuff we share. “Blah.” Generation after generation ever since we, unlike the other primates, developed the neurons to control the mechanisms of speech, we’ve been talking.
Story told to me by a friend: Her friend’s toddler hadn’t spoken regardless of the mother’s efforts to get the little girl to talk. One day in frustration and in a desperate voice, the mother said to the toddler, “Why won’t you say anything?”
The little girl, never having spoken, looked up and said, “There’s nothing important to say.”
Imagine a world in which we all wait until we truly have something important to say.
*Science Advances 09 Dec 2016:
Vol. 2, no. 12, e1600723
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600723
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1600723.full
Obviously, we humans have our struggles mastering talking. We say a few syllables when we first begin the process of learning language, and all the adults around us jump for joy. “Did you hear that! She said ‘dada.’” Then, by our toddler years, we begin to run at the mouth, and we don’t stop. Over and over, “Blah, blah, blah, blah.” And about everything. Every subculture’s favorite topics; all the general stuff we share. “Blah.” Generation after generation ever since we, unlike the other primates, developed the neurons to control the mechanisms of speech, we’ve been talking.
Story told to me by a friend: Her friend’s toddler hadn’t spoken regardless of the mother’s efforts to get the little girl to talk. One day in frustration and in a desperate voice, the mother said to the toddler, “Why won’t you say anything?”
The little girl, never having spoken, looked up and said, “There’s nothing important to say.”
Imagine a world in which we all wait until we truly have something important to say.
*Science Advances 09 Dec 2016:
Vol. 2, no. 12, e1600723
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600723
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/12/e1600723.full
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