My iPhone had a software glitch yesterday, so I took it to the Apple store in Pentagon City for expert care. While I was waiting, a young and quite cute Asian woman sat down next to me. Her iPhone’s screen was shattered.
“You dropped it?” I asked her, sympathetically.
“No,” she confessed. “I threw it.”
This weekend I saw two plays, Frost/Nixon at the Kennedy Center and Fences at Gallaudet’s Elstad Auditorium.
Frost/Nixon was a one-note play. It chronicled how David Frost, a lightweight talk-show host, got Nixon to confess to wrongdoing in a TV interview three years after he resigned. (Yes, this actually happened.) The play was an obvious fantasy of Bush someday doing the same and letting the country have some kind of catharsis and closure. I’m not holding my breath.
But seeing Fences, in American Sign Language — now that was an amazing experience. It followed the travails of a black family in the late 1950s as they struggled with racism, money, and infidelity. The actors were first-rate, and in ASL, the dialogue seemed filled with lightning. It had that extraordinary combination of motion and meaning. It was dazzling to watch. Now that I’ve seen it in ASL, I can’t help feeling that the play would seem tepid and one-dimensional in the original English. To talk only with your mouth!
I’m grateful to the director, Ethan Sinnott, and the lead actors, Rian Gayle, April Jackson, and Daniel Ilaire, for bringing us that gift. It made me feel privileged to have a life where I get to see such things.
In that blessed future when civilization has thrown away its keyboards and people can just think what they want to do, I’ll say to the young ‘uns, “Oh, yes, I first did it that way back in 2008, when you had to wear funny caps and do it one letter at a time.”
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This was at the Society for Neuroscience’s conference here in Washington DC (for those of you just getting on this blog, I’m spending the year here as a visiting professor.) I’d seen g.tec demonstrate the technology the night before, and I was eager to try it myself.
The cap has sockets for some two dozen electrodes, as you can see. “I’ve got electrodes and chips in my head already,” I said to Stefan Schaffelhofer, one of g.tec’s developers, who looked barely old enough to be out of college. “Is that going to interfere with your electrodes?”
“Oh, no, they’re passive,” Stefan cheerfully assured me. He didn’t see any problem with my wearing my processors under the cap, either.
I confess I was a little nervous when I sat down and he tugged the cap over my head. Electrical fields here, electrical fields there, who knew how they would interact? I was sure that if I called Advanced Bionics for advice, they’d say, eyeing their lawyers, “Heck no. Get out of there.”
I didn’t call Advanced Bionics.
What, I asked Stefan, was I actually supposed to do? How does one type by thinking?
He brought up a screen in which all the letters of the alphabet were arranged, in order. Look at the letter you want to type, Stefan told me. At any given instant, only one letter will appear to be illuminated. When the letter you’re looking at is illuminated, you’ll have a startle reaction that the electrodes will pick up.
“A startle reaction?” I said.
Not actually a startle, Stefan told me. My brain would generate a P300 wave, which is associated with visual recognition. Like the brain saying, “Oh! The letter I was looking at just lit up!”
So all I had to do was look at each letter I wanted until the system finally decided I was looking at it, then move on to the next. The system cycles through the letters so rapidly that “your” letter flashes several times a second.
Stefan started up the system, and letters started flashing. I looked steadily at the H. Every time it lit up, I couldn’t help thinking, “H!” And since it lit up over and over again during the next ten seconds or so, I found myself thinking, “H! H! H! H!”
And then an “H” appeared on the screen.
That was hair-raising. (Not that my hair could go up very far under the cap.)
My goodness, it worked! Quick, find the E and stare at it!
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After a few seconds, an E silently appeared next to the H.
I moved on to the L. “L! L! L! L!”
Now the screen said, H E L.
Okay, another L…I guess I just keep looking at it, right?
Right.
By now, it was feeling less and less surprising. Something very specific and concrete happened in my mind every time “my” letter lit up. A zing, a pluck, a swish, a beep. A cotillion of neurons did their bob-and-whirl in my parietal lobe, and that created an electrical whoosh that the electrodes could easily pick up. The P300 event-related potential, as real as aggie marbles. Simple! Keep going…
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“Not bad,” I said to Stefan, with a grin. “It worked. On the first try.”
I’d guess it took me about two minutes to do that. Experienced users, I’d learned the night before, could go about as fast as hunt-and-peck typers.
Was the system reading my mind? Yes and no.
Yes, in the sense that I was typing with mental activity alone.
But I think the deeper and righter answer would have to be “no.” All the system was looking for was that signature of visual recognition, the P300 event-related potential. When it saw it, it simply noted the last letter it had flashed. It had no understanding of the neurological difference beween intending an H versus an E, much less the neural activity of expressing the idea Hello out there.
I heard some scuttlebutt, however, about newer (and also noninvasive) devices that actually do decode neural activity. I’ll be looking into those.
Mindreading or not, the experience was a hoot. When I got back to Gallaudet, I proudly showed the pictures of me wearing the cap to a couple of students in the cafeteria.
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I still think they think I’m interesting but a little crazy.
Today I told my first joke in ASL. It was around the dinner table, and the students were discussing Homecoming Weekend’s closing party, called the “Bash.” I didn’t go to the Bash, because I figured my students might not want Mike the Professor around while they got drunk and fooled around in the mosh pit. (I hope they fooled around in the mosh pit.) But I did go watch for a few minutes while the DJ was warming up. The party was in a concrete garage next to my dorm, and I immediately saw why: they wanted to make the most of the reverb. For deaf students, Strauss waltzes don’t do it. What does it is shockwaves coming from sound bouncing off walls and colliding with itself.
They got shockwaves. World’s Biggest Amps, Cranked Up To Eleven. I could feel my esophagus vibrating. I bet for women, it did a great job of vibrating certain exquisitely sensitive body parts. For me it was strangely soothing, like having a giant cat purring against my entire body.
So at the dinner table, I signed, “I stood and watched the music. I think it helped my sinus problems.” And I got a chuckle around the table.
So I’m feeling proud of myself tonight.
The class I’m co-teaching with Josh has been going extremely well. The students are an exceptionally smart bunch. They write such good weekly essays that Josh and I argue with each other over who gets to read them this week. It’s great to have interpreters voicing what the students are signing, because it means that for the first time in my teaching career, I have full auditory access to classroom discussions.
Students we don’t know keep showing up to visit our class – we had five or six visitors last week – and Josh and I haven’t the heart to kick them out. It dawned on me last week that I’m having the best teaching experience of my life.
Also last week, I gave a talk titled “Cochlear Implants and the Future of the Deaf World.” I started with some worrisome numbers: Gallaudet’s enrollment is dropping, and more parents and students are opting for oral modes of education. “But I’m not going where you think I’m going with this,” I said, and picked up on something that James Tucker, the superintendent of the Maryland School for the Deaf, had said at a talk the day before. He’d pointed out that even oral deaf childen using cochlear implants had been interested in being part of the deaf community. “It’s human to want a sense of belonging,” he’d said. I suggested that deaf people could use emerging technologies to create new forms of communication and community, and in so doing, become innovators and pathbreakers in such a way that hearing people would look to them for inspiration.
What technologies? Here’s where I got radical: I showed some fascinating videos of computers picking up neural signals and using them to control machines such as prosthetic limbs. Perhaps, someday, I suggested, implanted technologies might enable people to exchange thoughts in a way that can barely be imagined today. Who better to take advantage of such technologies, I suggested, than deaf people, who are already familiar with implanted technologies and already innovators in creating languages like ASL?
As Josh said later, “It was like you threw a bomb into the audience, but in a good way.”
I suspect that people here think I’m crazy but interesting. That’s okay.
Elvis seems happy enough with life in the dorm, though I think he gets bored with spending so much time in my room. I’ve been letting him visit my neighbors now and then. One of my students lives next door and she and her roommate give him bits of ham. So Elvis is always meowing to be let out to make the rounds. “You want to go visit Aunt Kelley and Aunt Stephanie?” I say to him. “Okay, go on. Just be back by nine.”
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I didn’t go to the Bash, but I did put on my good suit and go to a party the night before, called the Ball, at a local club. I’d thought it was an all-university party, teachers and students alike. Wrong. I was the only teacher at the party, and the oldest person there by 20 years. But my students seemed to get a kick out of me being there. One signed to me, using grand, theatrical movements, “Sign is totally different from English. Forget English. Throw it in the trash.” I was struggling to follow him, but in a burst of inspiration, I took off my processors. It let me focus on the visual, and that helped.
Another of my students asked me whether I was enjoying my time at Gallaudet, and I said I was, specially now that I was feeling better after having been sick. “You complain too much,” she signed to me.
“I like complaining,” I signed back to her. “Complaining is fun.”
And then I explained, in slow, careful signs that sometimes I complain just because a large percentage of the signs I know are good for complaining. I want to say something, so I use the words I have.
“You’re lying,” she signed, pointing her finger emphatically at my chest. And that was that.
Josh Swiller arrived this afternoon, and a bunch of other people did too, so now the dorm feels like an actual place instead of a deserted jail. I was here all by myself for ten days.
Slips of the hand: when I told someone that “my roommate” Josh was arriving, I used the sign for together: my together Josh. I walked away vaguely feeling that I had implied my companion Josh. I may be from San Francisco, but I’m not that kind of San Francisco.
And when a woman in my class signed Pleased to meet you, instead of signing meet by holding two fingers up vertically relative to each other, she held them horizontally: Pleased to have sex with you. I don’t know what the sign for “have sex” is yet, but the class took it that way and everyone broke up.
I’m studying for my final exam, and somehow I forgot the sign for forget. If you don’t know the sign for forgetting, does that mean you have to remember everything? I hope so.
I’ve finished my first week of intensive American Sign Language (ASL) classes: six hours a day in class, an hour or two doing homework, and of course seeing people signing all over campus. So where have I got? I can say things like My name is (and fingerspell my name), Where do you come from, and How did you get here?
How did I get here?
I still have no idea, none at all, how tenses work, and I find it all but impossible to read fingerspelling. It just goes by too fast. After videotaping myself, I discovered to my chagrin that I couldn’t read my own fingerspelling. Did I really make that second o in my last name? I had to slow down the video to see that, yes, I had.
When they say “immersion” they mean it: no spoken English is used at all. There’s occasional writing on the board, and that’s it. It’s like figuring out a giant logic puzzle. Fortunately, I’ve got a good teacher: he’s funny, expressive, patient.
On the first day of class he showed a picture of a drill on the board, and made the sign for drill: the right index finger going through two fingers of the left hand. I was puzzled. Why teach us the sign for drill on the first day? Did woodworking hold a special place in deaf culture? Then he did a few signs we already knew, like name, and then drill again. Drill, I thought. Drill wood. Huh? Then he did a new sign, the right fist sliding against the left index finger, thumb pointing toward the body. Drill. New sign. Drill. New sign. I got that light-bulb aha moment — the new sign must mean a language drill. The sign means practice!
And then there’s the textbook, which almost never gives the definitions of individual signs, along with its CD-ROM, whose videos aren’t translated into English. You get an outline of the meaning of the conversation, and that’s it. You have to figure out what the signs mean on your own.
Of course, I cheated. I bought a dictionary. But often I can figure out the meaning on my own.
“ASL evolves,” my instructor sometimes says when explaining variants of a sign. The numbers 1 through 20 are all signed on one hand. But he signed the numbers 16 through 20 differently than the video. “Old people do it that way,” he signed to us, when we looked puzzled. (The sign for old is the fist descending from the chin, as if stroking a beard.) The video was done in 1993. “ASL evolves.”
ASL may evolve in a much more protean way than spoken languages, because it has no written form to fix it. A language unmoored from the page, busily reinvented by each new generation.
The first three days of class were a delight, a hummingbird whirl of puzzle-solving. The last two I’ve felt slower, stupider, not getting signs I would have gotten before, my hands not being able to form letters they could before. I think my mind is overloaded. Overheated. Tired. Too many signs. Need the weekend to rest and let my subconscious unblock the channels.
I look around the cafeteria and think: Fifty or a hundred years ago, many of the people here would have received no meaningful education in any language, which would have condemned them to a marginalized life. People with IQs of 130 pushing brooms. To earlier eras Gallaudet would seem like a paradise: bright clean buildings, classrooms full of students, and people conversing endlessly about whatever they want.
It’s not a paradise. Descend below the surface and you see a community trying to raise its academic standards, improve its graduation rate, and – most of all – groping for a new mission in a world where more and more deaf kids are getting cochlear implants and going to mainstream high schools and colleges. That puts the language, the culture, the university – in short, everything I see around me – at risk of vanishing.
But as David Crystal says in his book Language Death, which I’m reading now, each human language carries with it a unique and valuable way of looking at the world: a fresh set of perspectives for describing and meeting human needs. ASL is a visual language in a society dominated by the image, the icon, the picture. And, to turn the parallelism around, it’s a community-oriented language in a society where communities are falling apart.
Can ASL do something for the world that is unique, fresh, new, necessary?
It already has, of course. It’s had a profound impact on linguistics. Parents use it to communicate with their infants, whose motor skills mature sooner than their vocal skills. But these are niche impacts. Can ASL change English itself? Or find a new home in the technological infrastructure of our society, guaranteeing not only its own survival but also that of the culture that created it?
I don’t know. My working hypothesis is that it can.
How, I don’t know yet.
I think of the Jews, who prospered despite medieval repression by developing skills – such as banking – that were forbidden to their Christian neighbors. I think of Apple, which prospered not by playing the PC market better, but by creating entirely new markets.
I’m hoping that in the next ten months, new ideas will emerge.
Sometimes when a blogger goes offline for three months – my last post was April 18th – it’s because not much is going on. And sometimes it’s because a whole lot is going on.
Two weeks ago, my agent finalized a contract for me to write my second book, whose working title is World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humans and Machines. The publisher is The Free Press, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It took me three years to reach this point. I’m incredibly grateful to my agent, who shepherded me through half a dozen drafts of the book proposal, and to my family, who supported me in all sorts of ways. The book’ll come out in 2010 or 2011.
I’m writing this entry in Washington D.C., where I’ll be living for the next 10 months. I moved here three days ago. I’ll be a visiting professor at Gallaudet University, along with Josh Swiller. Together we’ll teach a course on how minority groups have adapted and survived in challenging times. The idea is to foster creative thinking on how Gallaudet can re-imagine itself in a time when technology is transforming deafness.
We’ll look at several ethnic minorities, but we’ll also discuss the survival of companies like Apple, languages like Welsh, and biological species such as black peppered moths. Josh and I are putting the syllabus together now, and we’re both very excited about it.
My life’s changed so fast that it’s been like jumping out of a plane with my shoes untied. I look out the window of my sixth-floor dorm suite, which has a beautiful view of the football field, and I ask myself, “What just happened?”
And, “What have I gotten myself into?” I’ve also committed myself to learning a new language – American Sign Language. I can fingerspell slowly, and I know a few dozen signs (day, week, month, and Thank you have proven especially helpful.) I’ll be starting an intensive ASL course on Monday.
I’m acutely aware that I’ve stepped into a whole different culture. I’m sure I’ll feel confused a good part of each day, and I apologize in advance for all the different subtle ways in which I’ll probably offend people (I understand that a certain sign for lunch, which I learned years ago, is out of favor; I have to unlearn even the little that I know!) But I’ve found that collisions with the new are the best way to keep myself alive and creative, and I’m very grateful to Gallaudet for welcoming me.
I gave a talk at Google just before I left, and you can see it on YouTube here. It’s a good preview of the themes of World Wide Mind. I’m well aware that the subtitle of my book is likely to perplex some people at Gallaudet, to say the least. But writing it here, where the integration of humans and machines is seen by some as a mortal threat, will keep me honest – and humane.
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