While extinction has been the fate of many creative entrepreneurs of the late 60s and 70s and 80s, why has the INTERCONTINENTAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE PROGRAM – whose symbol is the living Phoenix bird, so familiar to people on the street through millions of language fliers over the years – flourished? In part, the answer lies in the way its founder, director, and principal instructor, Lee Riethmiller, honed his fluency in the 26 languages he currently speaks. Riethmiller’s unique septalingual course (where students learn to speak 7 languages simultaneously) drew interest from The Christian Science Monitor, The Brookline Tab, US Magazine, CBS Television, and National Public Radio.

carl made me aware of this guy. i would love to go to a class, just to see how the system works. and picking up 7 new languages, why not 🙂 my list would be:

• chinese (mandarin)
• spanish
• japanese
• portuguese
• sanskrit
• russian
• arabic

we’ll get perfect translation via AI before we get this sort of hyperfluency (16 languages!) from a large part of society.

12 years on, Fedorenko is confident of certain findings. All her subjects show less brain activity when working in their mother tongue; they don’t have to sweat it. As the language in the tests grows more challenging, it elicits more neural activity, until it becomes gibberish, at which point it elicits less—the brain seems to give up, quite sensibly, when a task is futile. Hyperpolyglots, too, work harder in an unfamiliar tongue. But their “harder” is relaxed compared with the efforts of average people. Their advantage seems to be not capacity but efficiency. No matter how difficult the task, they use a smaller area of their brain in processing language—less tissue, less energy.

All Fedorenko’s guinea pigs, including me, also took a daunting nonverbal memory test: squares on a grid flash on and off as you frantically try to recall their location. This trial engages a neural network separate from the language cortex—the executive-function system. “Its role is to support general fluid intelligence”. What kind of boost might it give to, say, a language prodigy? “People claim that language learning makes you smarter,” she replied. “Sadly, we don’t have evidence for it. But, if you play an unfamiliar language to ‘normal’ people, their executive-function systems don’t show much response. Those of polyglots do. Perhaps they’re striving to grasp a linguistic signal.” Or perhaps that’s where their genie resides.

Barring an infusion of Valproate, most of us will never acquire Rojas-Berscia’s 28 languages.

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