STUDY LANGUAGES

“Now there's a practical consideration as well, which is the Catholic church is kind of like Starbucks. It's ubiquitous and has a uniform high quality product. The great thing about being part of the universal Catholic Church is literally its ubiquitousness. The fact I go to mass every single morning and I travel forty eight weeks a year, and the fact is there's one every place is what it comes down to.”

“AI is a magnificent extension of the left hemisphere of your brain. It's a how to and what engine, but it's not a why engine. Any real why question that matters, you can't put into chat g p t and get something meaningful to you. To say, why am I alive? For what would I be willing to give my life? You put that into chat GBT, it'll start by buttering you up and telling you what a smart question it is. Then it'll tell you how five different people have answered that question, and you're left completely unsatisfied as a result of that.”

“So we actually, accidentally came across stuttering in songbirds and we've published several papers on this to try to figure out the neurobiological basis. The first study we had was a brain area, called the basal ganglia, the, what's the, the striatum part of the basal ganglia involved in coordinating movements, learning how to make movements. When it was damaged in these in this in the speech like pathway in these birds, what we found is that they started to stutter as the brain region recovered.”

“I think that the brain pathways that control speech evolved out of the brain pathways that control body movement. Alright. And, that's, when you talk about Italian, French, English, and so forth, each one of those languages come with a learned set of gestures that you can communicate with.”

“What I am is called the spiral, which is a series of mini careers of your own design that lasts between seven and twelve years. Sometimes it's for profit, sometimes it's nonprofit, sometimes it's making more money, sometimes it's making less money, But it's your career is an adventure where you're impelled to go learn a big new thing.”

“There's some species of hummingbirds, that actually will, Doug Ashler showed this, that will flap, their wings and create a slapping sound with their wings that's in unison with their song. And, oh, and you would not know it, but it sounds like a particular syllable in their songs, even though it's their wings and their voice at the same time.”

“But if the speech pathways is next to the movement pathways, what I discover is by dancing, it is helping me think. It is helping keeping my brain fresh. It's not just moving my muscles. I'm moving or using the circuitry in my brain to do control a whole big body. You need a lot of brain tissue to do that. And so I argue, if you wanna stay cognitively intact until your old age, you better be moving and you better be doing it consistently, whether it's dancing, walking, running, and also practicing speech, oratory speech and so forth, or singing.”

“My favorite president in my lifetime is George w Bush. And how do I know? Because all the mistakes he made, I probably would have made too. And this is actually how you see somebody that you you really admire. You don't look at what they've done that's successful. Look at the things that they did that were unsuccessful and say, honestly, would I have made the same mistake? And if the answer is yes, then that's somebody who's in a way admirable in their view.”

“So if you bring people from two separate populations together that have been in their separate populations evolutionarily, at least, for hundreds of generations. So someone's speaking Chinese, someone's speaking English, and that child, then's learning from both of them. Yes. That child's gonna be able to pick up and merge, phonemes and words together in a way that an adult wouldn't. Because why they're experiencing both languages at the same time during their critical period, years in a way that, adults would not be able to experience. And so you get a hybrid.”

“What do they do every day? And the the answer is they pay attention fundamentally to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy, they think deeply about the why questions, and and also they stand in awe of something bigger than themselves so they're not stuck in the looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. And they're certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the Internet. And last but not least, they're doing something productive where they feel like they're earning their success through their merit and hard work, and they're serving other people.”

“It absolutely is teaching. And that's actually according to the research and according to not just my personal experience. It's very clear that the best teachers are 40, ideally over 60, and many even over 70, as a matter of fact. That's when you actually have the best ability to synthesize information, to recognize patterns, and to express ideas with greatest acuity in the language that nonspecialists can understand.”

“People get to acceptance pretty fast, and they're happier during the acceptance phase than they were before they were told they were gonna die. Now this is important. Right? This is an important thing because what that says is I mean, if you're taking it at its face and and, again, I mean, the data or the the research is the research, and it could be updated and everything's contested. But it what this suggests is that if you're doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful your life is going to be and the more you'll actually savor it.”

“Happiness isn't a feeling at all. Happiness has feelings associated with it like the smell of the turkey is associated with your Thanksgiving dinner. But the the smell of the turkey isn't the same thing as the turkey dinner. The turkey dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat, which are the macronutrients. And and similarly, you can define and, you know, I think the most compelling definition of happiness is the combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.”

“One of the things that I'm really interested in is this new field of applied philosophy. Have you heard about this where you you study a philosopher and you try to live according to their precepts strictly for two one or two or three weeks at a time. I tried to live like a Kantian and tell exactly zero lies, and it's a miracle that my marriage survived. That's all I can say. And I'm not a Kantian, it turns out.”

“Here's actually how you learn something and make it permanently part of your repertoire. Number one, you understand it. Number two, you practice it. And then number three, you share it. So it's an interesting thing. My father used to say this. My father was a PhD biostatistician, a lifelong mathematics and statistics professor. And I one time I saw him giving a graduate seminar in advanced calculus, a ninety minute lecture with no notes, and it was like watching Jascha Heifetz playing the violin.”

“And when we look at the genetic data from these ancestral hominids that, you know, where we can look at genes that are involved in learned vocal communication, they have the same sequence as we humans do for genes that function in speech circuits. So I think Neanderthals had spoken language. I'm not gonna say it's as advanced as what it is in humans. I don't know. But I think it's been there for at least between five hundred thousand to a million years.”

“You read something on a paper. The signal from the paper goes through your eyes. It goes to the back of your brain to your visual cortical regions, eventually. That visual signal then goes to your speech pathway in the motor cortex in front here in Broca's area. And you silently speak what you read in your brain without moving your muscles. And sometimes, actually, if you put electrodes, EMG electrodes, on your laryngeal muscles, even on birds, you can do this. You'll see activity there while reading or or or trying to speak silently, even though no sound's coming out.”

“But Tyler just said, hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunks and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers and and I guess I'm doomed to alcoholism. I'd say, Tyler, I have a new whiz bang technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50% to 0%. It's called not drinking. In other words, when you understand your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits and that's a beautiful thing.”

“That's Dennis Brain, of course. Dennis Brain, who was the wunderkind who picked up the French horn at age two. And by a very young man, was the principal hornist in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, was did the first major recordings of the Mozart concertos, of both Strauss concertos, died tragically at the age of 36, coming back from the Edinburgh Music Festival at night driving his high powered sports car, ran it into the base of a bridge, and died in a fiery accident, leaving the world without the world's greatest French horn player.”

“Most vertebrate species vocalize, but most of them are producing innate sounds that they're born with, that is babies crying, for example, or dogs barking. And only a few species have learned vocal communication, the ability to imitate sounds. And that is what makes spoken language special. When people think of what's special about language, it's the learned vocalizations. That is what's rare.”

“All vocal learning species use their learned sounds for this emotional, effective kind of communication. But only a few of them, like humans and some parrots and dolphins, use it for the semantic kind of communication we're calling speech. And and that has led a number of people to hypothesize that the evolution of spoken language of speech evolved first for singing, for this more, like, emotional kind of made attraction, like the Jennifer Lopez, the Ricky Martin kind of songs, and so forth. And then later on, it became used for abstract communication like we're doing now.”