Yes, My Mind Is Deaf

 

I will present a philosophical approach to the question whether my mind is deaf. Studying in detail about the mind that is deaf is enormously important for our society. Our knowledge of deaf people and ASL has changed dramatically in the past 50 years, and we all need to know as much as we can about ourselves. It is critical that we understand as much as we can about our brain.

I am reading Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, and there is a paragraph on page 95 about the physiology of what I would dub as a Deaf brain. Let me quote it for your readership and discourse:

"With deafness ... one of the senses is taking over the controls suitable circuitry, rather than just moving into any old unoccupied territory. Laura Petitto and her colleagues found that deaf people use the superior gyrus of the temporal lobe (a region near the primary auditory cortex) to recognize the elements of signs in sign languages. They also found that the deaf use the lateral prefrontal cortex to retreive signs from memory, just as hearing people use it to retrieve words from memory. This should come as no surprise. As linguists have long known, sign languages are organized much like spoken languages. They use words, a grammar, and even phonological rules that combine meaningless gestures into meaningful signs, just as phonological rules on spoken languages combine meaningless sounds into meaningful words. Spoken language, moreover, are partly modular: the representations for words and rules can be distinguished from the input-output systems that connect them to the ears and the mouth. The simplest interpretation, endorsed by Petitto and her colleagues, is that the cortical areas recruited in signers are specialized for language (words and rules), not for speech per se. What the areas are doing in deaf people is the same as what they are doing in hearing people

My own nerdiness about my being Deaf and use of ASL is hard won. I am the worst writer you could ever imagine. Fortunately for me, my mother still believes that I'm smart. To sum up, to figure out whether there is a deaf mind, we need to "pick the brain apart" in the hope that we will have a sneak preview of it. Actually scientists usually picked apart the brains of animals for clues as to how the human brain worked. As a dog's man guy myself, I'd opt for observing deaf people who use ASL for important breakthroughs.