One of the benefits of being blind
is not being distracted by a person's physical appearance,
but instead developing a more genuine impression
based off of how they speak and the words they use.
How a person uses their body can be incredibly eloquent.
The layers that are there within sign language,
including emotion, meaning,
and how they convey their connection to the world.
My name is Hayden Dahmm.
I'm studying engineering and I also happen to be blind.
My name is Louise Stern, I'm a writer, I'm an artist,
I'm an American, I'm the fourth generation of deafness in my family,
and my native language is American Sign Language.
I can hear if someone is speaking directly at me
or if they're facing at an angle just based on how the voice is projected.
Eye contact is a beautiful thing to me as a deaf person.
And I think I'm more sensitive to that.
So, when somebody does make eye contact with me,
in that moment, it makes me feel like...
...it makes me feel like they see me.
The voice isn't just a vehicle for communicating written words out loud.
It has an extra layer of meaning.
My name is Matt Davis, I'm a neuroscientist
working for the Medical Research Council.
I study what's going on in the brain
when you're processing language.
Language is the most unique skill that humans possess.
It's the thing that sets us apart from all other animals.
It's the foundation for our intelligence,
for our communication, and for all of the things
that we do in our lives.
The earliest attempts to understand
how language is processed in the brain started from neurology,
started from observing the impact of damage on the brain.
So if you have damage in a part of the frontal lobe
here on the left called Broca's area,
that leads to an impairment in speaking.
If you have damage to Wernicke's area,
the part of the brain in the temporal lobe here on the left,
you appear to have problems with comprehending language.
And what we've discovered in the decades of research that followed
is that this view of Broca's and Wernicke's areas
as involved in speaking and understanding
is far too simplistic.
They both contribute to different aspects
of both processes.
But also that language has spread out
to colonize most of the brain.
If you're listening to a radio program
or watching someone signing, those different parts
of the brain are involved, different parts of the brain
will be receiving information.
Auditory cortex here on the top of the temporal lobe involved in hearing,
visual cortex at the back of the brain on the occipital lobe involved in seeing.
Parts of the brain that are involved
in making sense of what someone is saying,
accessing the meanings of the words
that someone's trying to communicate,
are largely shared between sign language and spoken language.
I think as a blind person I'm far more attuned
to an individual's voice.
That's really the only--
That's my main source of interaction with people.
My name is Víctor Acedo-Matellán, and I'm a junior research fellow
in linguistics at Queens College, University of Cambridge.
When we communicate using language
we take some sort of internal representation
and we transform it into a perceptible signal
that people can understand.
It is important to distinguish between this abstract
linguistic expression that we have in our mind
and the actual externalized output.
The difference in the amount of information
that we can convey with each modality
has to do basically with the organs that we use.
For the oral-auditory modality, in oral languages,
we have this channel, which is the mouth.
So we can only convey these units one at a time.
Whereas in the manual-visual modality of sign languages
we have different organs that may act independently.
So basically we use the hands to convey the basic information,
but on top of that we may add information with the brow,
with the facial expression, with the position
of the head, et cetera.
So there is one fundamental difference
between oral languages and sign languages.
In oral languages things have to be expressed in a linear order,
whereas in sign languages
they can be expressed simultaneously.
So in English when you want to convey aspect
you have to use an individual word or phrase
to express how long or short something takes place.
But in sign language we can use space to convey that.
An example of this would be:
"I've been cooking for a very long time."
Or you could say: "I cooked."
Or you could say: "I've been writing for a really long time."
Or: "I wrote something up very quickly."
Another unique aspect of sign languages
is that you can produce a word with one hand,
keep it there, while signing with the other hand
to add more information.
So in my refrigerator I must have olives,
I must have lemons, I must have herbs, and I must have cheese.
Sometimes I like to eat cheese with all the other items,
perhaps mixed into a salad.
This is the reason why we can't always translate signs
into a spoken language.
So I guess poetry, isn't that defined as
the things that cannot be translated?
Poetry in the spoken word is obviously
a combination of both the word choice
and how you enunciate those words,
the rhythm that you give to them.
But how do you achieve those in a physical language?
I think for languages like sign language
how it feels to produce the sign is how other people feel
when they see it.
What denotes a beautiful signer for me
has to do with fluency and simplicity.
Somebody who conveys emotion with every ounce of who they are,
their facial expressions are on point,
it has to look natural, it has to be pure.
I would say that having a sensory disability
is not having a lack of ability,
it's having a lack of access to information.
And being able to make your situation equal to your peers
depends on finding ways of accessing
that same information.
I understand sound conceptually.
So I understand it on an intellectual level.
But in terms of my everyday life it doesn't really impact me.
Sometimes I'm curious about it, just the way you'd be curious
about a place you've never visited
that you'd like to go and see.
The assistant who was escorting me out of the tube station
kept saying, oh come over here.
I said, what do you mean by here?
Left or right, left or right, what do you mean?
So when deaf people are signing sometimes
their signs create sound.
There might be a clap of the hands in this movement.
It's a common assumption that you can translate signs
into spoken language, but you can't.
Duck.
No, no, we're good.
But we should practice the sign for that.
(laughter)