-Vaughn Smith can speak eight languages fluently,
and he can carry on conversations
in a total of 24 languages, by his count.
He's what's known as a hyperpolyglot.
-You can think of language kind of as a shortcut for telepathy.
Because we have thoughts in our heads,
and we use this common code,
which speakers of the same language have access to,
to basically share thoughts with each other.
-Vaughn grew up in and around Washington, DC,
where he learned as many languages as he could
from the multicultural community around him.
He loves meeting new people,
which is why we introduced him to Richard Simcott,
who organizes an international conference for polyglots.
They were able to switch seamlessly between 10 languages.
-So, you also speak Spanish at home?
-Yes, we speak Spanish here at home, Mexican Spanish.
I speak a little Icelandic.
My favorite language to speak is Bulgarian.
I have a friend from Munich.
-You can also speak Dutch?
-The last time I spoke Dutch was in Starbucks.
-As a reporter, I wanted to understand
what was going on in Vaughn's brain
that made it possible for him to do this.
I called a neuroscientist
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
who studies language.
She invited Vaughn to have his brain scanned
as a part of her research
on the brains of advanced language learners.
-There is basically a handful of regions
that comprise what we call the language network.
There is a big swath of activity that you would see
spanning the temporal lobe.
So, it goes from the tip of the temporal lobe
all the way to the back of
and a little bit into the parietal cortex.
And there is a few regions in the frontal cortex.
It's a very integrated system,
meaning that these regions work very closely together
to process language.
We've been studying for a while
diverse populations with communication disorders.
There's both developmental disorders, like autism,
and there's acquired disorders, like aphasia.
I've always been interested in what happens
on the other end of that spectrum of ability
because of course the vast majority of language research
is done on kind of neurotypical, usual users of language.
-They also scanned me.
By comparing the brain of a monolingual like me
to a hyperpolyglot like Vaughn, we could learn something
about what makes the brains of hyperpolyglots unique.
-But there's this long tail,
and there are these people who have really massive vocabularies
and there are people who can learn a lot of languages.
And it seemed clear that we can maybe learn
something about how language works
by looking at that end of kind of linguistic expertise.
-The research team later shared the results of our scans.
I had assumed that Vaughn's language areas
would be way bigger and more active than mine.
But the scans actually showed the opposite.
The parts of Vaughn's brain that are used to comprehend language
are far smaller and quieter than mine.
The brains of hyperpolyglots are simply more efficient.
-What I'm currently working on,
I try to see how your language network is recruited
across the different languages that you speak.
It seems to be that your language network
is recruited less.
You'd expect then for English to be, like, a smaller network.
I didn't know Spanish was your mother tongue.
So, I guess it would also --
You would expect to pattern it up with English
because these are the two languages
you've been speaking in since birth.
And then, for the other languages,
I would assume that then when he is, like, speaking Dutch,
because he's not as good as he is with English,
he'll still need more oxygen
in order to engage those language regions
in order to produce the language
because maybe it's a little harder for him.
-Yeah, I have to work --
It's like a logic puzzle,
trying to put words together to find out what one word means.
So, I'm using context and stuff.
I don't even have to look at a dictionary.
Usually I can just guess what it is
or I have a bracket of what it is.
It could mean seven different things.
-Some polyglots don't even say that it's really easy for them.
They say, no, they just work really hard
and spend a lot of time,
you know, kind of the whole "10,000 hours" idea.
-You can see I'm on a 434-day streak.
It's almost been a year.
30 minutes a day is what I aim for.