don't get me started wrote:Thanks for the link Coastal, I've copied the url into a word document that I have for collecting links. I'll definitely be referring to it in future.
I agree, there is probably a spectrum in the ways that people experience conscious thought. On reflection, I think the word 'outliers' was poorly chosen on my part. The ways in which people are neuro-diverse is only starting to be understood. It may be the case that we are all outliers and there are no 'inliers'.
So, to your question.
I think what I was trying to tease out of the original article was that there is a 'use it or lose it' aspect to our mind's processes.
Other sensory modes may intrude on the visual part of the brain and 'rewiring' may take place. I think that you are right to question whether the language faculty gets rewired...indeed, what would it be re-wired with?
But I think that atrophy of the language faculty can occur with lack of use. This happens most starkly with second or foreign languages. My own Japanese abilities ebb an flow over time, depending on use.
For example, at election times, I may bone up on vocabulary connected to politics and democracy etc. But then, I might not have any occasion to talk about these issues for another few years and...unsurprisingly, the words have faded away and need to be reacquired. Similarly, my students who return from overseas study report a sensation of loss after a few weeks back in a wholly Japanese environment.
The more challenging thing is the loss or atrophying of one's native language (L1 as it is referred to in the field).
I occasionally read of people who completely lose the ability to use the language they grew up speaking...as incredible as it may sound to some. The process is undoubtedly slower and more easily reversed than the case of L2, but I think that using the language and also thinking in the language help prevent loss over time.
One of the reasons I do the book challenge on this forum is to keep my L1 language up and running at a more sophisticated level than just daily, quotidian interactions. I am in an L1 poor environment and can go for long periods without speaking to a native English speaker. I gotta work at it to keep on top of my L1 proficiency.
There is another aspect to this that I think is specifically connected to the dialogic nature of inner thought. Keeping your inner dialogue civil and questioning, taking turns and imagining what 'the other' would say, helps you be a better interactant in the outside world. I sometimes meet teachers who have been in the job for a long time and treat every interaction as a lesson...they talk over people, have opinions on every field of human endeavour, take long turns and treat their interlocutors as wholly epistemically inferior and as a captive and unresisting audience. They seem to have lost the knack of social interaction and seem a bit 'off'. I can't imagine what their inner dialogue is like.
So, 'use it or lose it' seems, in my opinion, to be the case not only with the nuts and bolts of language (vocabulary and grammar) but also with the interactional aspect of language in use. Winning every argument in your head does not make you a smart person and losing an argument in your head and coming to the conclusion that you are going to have to rethink this is a healthy thing.
by 
I'm pretty sure they all out at that point, but the dream went very Daliesque at that point.
