No one escapes life going wrong. The Human Being: The User Manual gives scientific as well as spiritual techniques to successfully negotiate the ills of modern life, such as chronic pain, emotional rejection, and adverse childhood experiences.
I don’t know about you, but I wish I had been born with the user manual for the human being or at least received instruction in school about the basic equipment every human being possesses. In my youth, I was incredibly ignorant about my senses, emotions, memory, imagination, intellect, and will. For me, it was like waking up alone, finding myself on board the space shuttle, and then through trial and error, trying to figure out how to fly the machine without much success. After a series of personal disasters that are irrelevant to report here, I was forced to write a user manual to help guide me through life. I began with what makes us human.
Wild Boy of Aveyron
In the history of science, the only event remotely akin to the philosophical concept of a person living in a state of nature, untainted by civilization was the discovery, in 1801, of the feral boy of Aveyron, an eleven-year-old found running naked and wild in a forest.[i] Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, a French surgeon, thought the wild boy of Aveyron was the Rosetta stone for deciphering human nature. He spent five years trying to train and educate the boy, before concluding that the boy’s prolonged isolation from humanity rendered him incapable of language and consequently incapable of living a genuine human life. Itard’s answer to “What makes us human?” — language.
Helen Keller
Helen Keller gives us a glimpse of how the world is experienced without language. When she was 19 months old, an acute disease, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, left her blind and deaf. She soon “felt the need of some communication with others and began to make crude signs. A shake of the head meant ‘No’ and a nod, ‘Yes,’ a pull meant ‘Come’ and a push ‘Go.’ Was it bread [she] wanted? Then [she] would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering them.”[ii]
Without language, Helen’s interior life was limited to sense perception, motor skills, tactile memory, and associations. She exercised neither will nor intellect and was “carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus.” She felt anger, desire, and satisfaction; however, she never “loved or cared for anything.” She describes her inner life then as “a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy.”[iii]
Ms. Keller recounted that the sign language she learned from Anne Sullivan “made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.”[iv] She no longer lived an animal life; language freed her to be human.
Through language, humans bring out the full potentiality hidden in matter, advance the building of bird nests and beaver dams to architecture and engineering, the gathering of nuts to farming, squawks and barks to music, sexual reproduction to love and compassion, and limited animal perception to the intellectual jewels of modern Western culture, Newtonian physics, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, and the biology of the physical basis of life, including the deciphering of the genetic code.
Project Nim
R. Allen Gardner and Beatrix Gardner, two University of Nevada psychologists, hit upon a brilliant idea — teach chimpanzees American Sign Language. The Gardners claimed their chimpanzee, Washoe, a female, used more than eighty-five signs after three years’ training[v] and even coined new words; she signed “water bird,” after seeing a swan.[vi] Francine Patterson followed this sign language approach with Koko, a female gorilla.[vii] Skeptics, however, were unconvinced.
To investigate if chimpanzees can truly learn sign language, psychologist Herbert Terrace organized an elaborate project.[viii] At the cost of over $250,000, with four years' labor, Terrace and sixty other teachers attempted to teach American Sign Language to an infant male chimpanzee, nicknamed Nim Chimpsky, a playful taunt of Noam Chomsky, the founder of modern linguists, who insisted that language is innate and uniquely human. This project, the best documented of its kind to date, produced over forty video-tape hours of Nim signing and more than 2,000 teachers' reports.[ix] Analyzing the 19,000 recorded signs produced by Nim, Terrace found “no evidence of lexical regularities,” no sentences, no grammar.[x] Nim’s numerous long strings of signs had no syntax, not even linking an adjective to a noun. Nim always combined signs in a series of repetitions with little new information and much redundancy. After his extensive analysis of Nim's signing, Terrace concluded, “Each instance of presumed grammatical competence could be explained adequately by simple nonlinguistic processes.”[xi]
In the 1960s, astrophysicist Carl Sagan and many other scientists hoped to read the diary of a chimpanzee to discover the interior life of one of our fellow creatures. What they would have read were pages and pages of Nim’s longest combination of signs, for example, “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you,” and such like “sentences,” repeated again and again. Figure 2 shows a chimpanzee supposedly meditating upon such profound thoughts.
Terrace also analyzed the signing of Washoe and Koko and concluded that neither of them had learned sign language. The signing of both lacked syntax, and their lengthy strings of signs did not convey more meaning. Terrace pointed out that “Washoe may have simply been answering the question, what that?, by identifying correctly a body of water and a bird, in that order. Before concluding that Washoe was relating the sign water to the sign bird, one must know whether she regularly placed an adjective (water) before, or after, a noun (bird). That cannot be decided on the basis of a single anecdote, no matter how compelling that anecdote may seem to an English-speaking observer.”[xii] One hundred percent of Koko’s signs were prompted or asked for by her teachers, in marked contrast with young children’s speech, which is more than eighty percent spontaneous and increases steadily in length, richness, and complexity.
The work of Terrace convinced linguists that animal communication lacks syntax and thus is not a truncated version of human language. After a thorough survey of the evidence that chimpanzees possess the ability to learn sign language, linguists Thomas Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok concluded, “Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are still the stuff of fiction.”[xiii] And Chomsky added, “It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for human beings to teach them to fly.”[xiv] After Terrace’s exhaustive, critical analysis, the entire field of teaching sign language to nonhuman primates collapsed.[xv]
Robert Sapolsky, a primatologist and neuroscientist, explains why nonhuman primates cannot speak. Only the brain of Homo sapiens has Broca and Wernicke areas, the regions needed for language production and comprehension, respectively. The brains of the other primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, orangutans, and rhesus monkeys, have only the beginning of these structures, a mere cortical thickening.[xvi]
We Are Social by Nature
Our connections to others make us human. Without language, without others to learn language from, the mental capacities that Ms. Keller, you, and I were born with would not have developed, and our lives would not have been much higher than that of an animal. The language my children learned at home was not unique to our family or neighborhood. Learning English in the home connected them to a larger community with much in common. Conservative estimates place the number of native speakers of English at 365 million; an additional 510 million use English as a second language; and, if a lower level of language fluency is included, then over one billion persons, an eighth of the world’s population, speak English. The number of persons my children can easily communicate with is staggering.
We need things that are impossible to get if we live alone; thus, by nature, we are part of a group that helps us live well. Even a recluse who retires to a remote region of Alaska to live alone brings with him knowledge and skills acquired from prior group living. In our highly technological society, no person knows how to produce everything that he or she consumes or uses in a single day. What person knows how to grow broccoli, make eyeglasses, weave cloth, generate electricity, and fabricate a microchip? The community of humans supplies all our needs. The farmer is given the fruits of ten thousand years of experimentation with the growing of crops; the poet, a language and the poetry of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare; the physicist, the understanding of Newton, Einstein, and Bohr. No farmer, poet, or physicist could ever pay for all the gifts he or she receives gratuitously.
Part I: Language
[i] See Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) and François Truffaut, director, Wild Child, Les Artistes Associés, film.
[ii] Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1996 [1903]).
[iii] Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: The Century Co., 1904,1908).
[iv] Ibid.
[v] R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice T. Gardner, “Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee,” Science 165 (15 August 1969): 664-672.
[vi] Roger S. Fouts, Deborah H. Fouts, and Thomas E. Van Cantfort, “The Infant Loulis Learns Signs from Cross-Fostered Chimpanzees,” in Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees, ed. R. Allen Gardner, Beatrix T. Gardner, and Thomas E. Van Cantfort (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 281.
[vii] Francine G. Patterson, “Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla,” in Language Intervention from Ape to Child, ed. Richard L. Schiefelbush and John H. Hollis (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1979), pp. 325-356.
[viii] See the documentary Project Nim, director James Marsh, (BBC Films, 2011).
[ix] See Herbert S. Terrace, Nim (New York: Knopf, 1979) and also the documentary Project Nim.
[x] Herbert S. Terrace, L. A. Petitto, R. J. Sanders, and T. G. Bever, “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science 206 (23 November 1979): 900.
[xi] Ibid., p. 891.
[xii] Ibid., pp. 895-896.
[xiii] Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, “Performing Animals: Secrets of the Trade,” Psychology Today 13 (November 1979): 91.
[xiv] Noam Chomsky, quoted in Time (10 March 1980), p. 57.
[xv] For a witty, short history of the efforts to teach American Sign Language to nonhuman primates, view the last twenty-five minutes of Robert Sapolsky, Human Behavioral Biology, Lecture 23 On Language.
[xvi] Ibid. Human speech also requires the correct anatomy, see Philip Lieberman, Why Human Speech Is Special, The Scientist (July 1, 2018).