Sunday, February 7, 2010

Speaking in Tongues

A couple good blog posts on neurolinguistic research on the phenomenon of glossolalia (aka, speaking in tongues). The take away message seems to be that yes, there is some curious brain activity correlated with speaking in tongues, it's just not clear what it means and there's so little data that not much can be confirmed or denied. But as Brain Blogger put it, the studies point to "the act of speaking in tongues as a verifiable language phenomenon that invites further study."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it very easy to produce spontaneous random gibberish on demand, but when I do it there is nothing remotely spiritual going on. As far as I'm concerned, I'm doing pretty much the same thing that I do when I improvise music, except that I'm using phones instead of notes.

Chris said...

yeah, a lot of comedians do this kind of thing too. Sid Caesar was a master at it: http://www.sidcaesar.com/vidclips.html

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...