Edited for brevity, bolded (mine) for emphasis.
"So, how many languages do you speak?"
"Oh goodness," Vaughn says. "Eight, fluently."
"Eight?" Kelly marvels.
"Eight," Vaughn confirms.
English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak.
"But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation," he explains, "I know about 25 more."
Vaughn glances at me.
He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He's teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico's Nahuatl to Montana's Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain.
How did he get this way? And what was going on in his brain? But also: why was he cleaning carpets for a living?
His teachers and his parents, meanwhile, so often looked at him with disappointment. He'd chosen the wrong sentence when it was his turn to read aloud in class, again. His teacher called his mother to say he wasn't paying attention, again. His dad was sending him back to his mom's house, again. Always, it felt to Vaughn like there was something wrong with him.
"I feel like I didn't know how to guide him to do better," his mom, Sandra Vargas, says now.
She was in her early 20s, in the midst of a divorce, raising Vaughn and his brother in a country entirely new to her. When she first realized her son wasn't connecting with other kids the way he should, she took him to a psychologist, who told her only that Vaughn was just "muy, muy intellegente."
By 14, Vaughn was living with his dad again, in a basement apartment in Tenleytown, not far from D.C.'s many embassies. He no longer needed to fear looking different than his classmates because the student body at Wilson High School included kids from around the world. Kids who spoke other languages. Immediately, Vaughn had an in.
There was a clique of Brazilian students, so he started to learn Portuguese. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in Romanian, and watch as Vaughn memorized them all. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic.
But by 17, his mom had moved him back to Maryland. Vaughn tested into the highest-level Russian class at his new school, despite never taking classes before.
And so began an adulthood marked by jobs that came and went. Vaughn has been a painter, a bouncer, a punk rock roadie and a Kombucha delivery man. His friends encouraged him to start a YouTube channel, but after a bout of depression, he stopped filming. On days when there aren't carpets to clean, he helps a friend tint office building windows. He was once a dog walker for the Czech art collector Meda Mládková, the widow of an International Monetary Fund governor. She kept him on as a caretaker of her Georgetown home, which was the closest he ever came to having a career that utilized his languages.
Visitors to the house spoke nearly every Eastern European dialect, and before long, so did Vaughn.
Vaughn never sought me out. He agreed to let me spend time with him after one of his friends mentioned him to another Washington Post reporter.
Over two months, I verified the scope of Vaughn's abilities by interviewing 10 people who have seen him use his language skills for years and by watching him engage in conversations in 17 of his languages. When I introduced him to Richard Simcott, who organizes an international conference for polyglots, Vaughn switched between 10 languages as they spoke, telling stories in Welsh, Bulgarian, Serbian, Norwegian and more.
I am hoping it's just the effects of another quad espresso, but I think Vaughn is nervous. He's quiet as the doors open, and we're ushered into a building with a sculpture of a brain hanging from the ceiling. He takes a picture of a sign on the wall: "MIT Brain + Cognitive Sciences."
When I called Fedorenko, I told her how amazed I was watching Vaughn befriending Dutch travelers in a Starbucks who couldn't believe he'd never been to the Netherlands and spending his free time poring over books like "Finnish for Swedish Speakers." It made me question my own brain, and why, even though I spend so much time thinking about words for my work, I've always found it incredibly difficult to retain any other language I'd ever tried to learn.
"Vaughn," says one of the PhD candidates leading us to the scanning room now, "I was very excited to see Catalan on your list. I'm from Girona."
Vaughn's nervousness seems to evaporate in an instant.
"Tenia un amic que és de Palma de Mallorca!" Vaughn says, thrilled to tell her about the friend who taught him Catalan 15 years before.
It's possible that Vaughn was born with his language areas being smaller and more efficient. It's possible that his brain started out like mine, but because he learned so many languages while it was still developing, his dedication transformed his anatomy. It could be both. Until researchers can scan language learners as they grow, there's no way to know for sure.
But even without that answer, even before we had the scan results back, Vaughn had what he came to MIT for.
"
I got to practice Lithuanian today," he says to a friend on the phone as we navigate Boston's airport. "Catalan, Spanish, Russian and a little bit of Korean!"
And at that very moment, he tells his friend on the phone, "
I just feel like, work wise, I gotta do something else. I need to figure out how and what to do. It's not going to get better unless I do something."
I've never heard him talk like that before. At our gate, I ask how he is feeling.
He is thinking about the way the Harvard and MIT neuroscientists spent the day asking him questions. Not just for their research, but because they want to understand how, in their own language learning, they could be more like him.
I'm not some worthless person," he says.
Then he pulls out his phone and opens his Duolingo app.
He is on a 330-day streak of practicing Welsh, and he isn't going to break it.
The carpet cleaner heaves his machine up the stairs, untangles its hoses and promises to...
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