I bet none of us have ever heard of this language.
The brains of people who speak this whistle language of Northern Turkey do something very surprising
Onur GüntürkünThis picture shows a person whistling in the Turkish style.
Nestled deep in the mountains of north-east Turkey, harmonious echoes fill the air as a group of people whistle to each other across deep valleys and long distances to communicate.
Locals call this method of speech "bird language" because it sounds more like birds chirping than humans sending their regards or inviting each other to dinner.
And, according to a recent report, the people who speak this musical language are using their entire brain while whistling instead of only the left hemisphere, which contradicts the common notion that language is dominated by the left half of our brains.
"Bird language" can be heard from over 3 miles away — according to New Scientist where we first learned about the language — which was a handy way of long-distance communication before the age of phones and computers.
Scientists have known for years that the left half of our brains are responsible for speech and understanding language whereas the right brain dominates how we process music, pitch, and tone.
So, which part of the brain would control a language based on music, wondered Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.
To find out, Güntürkün and his colleagues studied 31 volunteers who lived in a small, mountain town called Kuşköy. All of the volunteers were fluent in Turkish whistling and the native spoken language, Turkish.
Testing the organization of the human brain
Each whistler completed a psychological listening test: While wearing headphones, they sometimes heard the same syllable in both ears while other times they heard one syllable in one ear and a different syllable in the other. The test sometimes played spoken Turkish and other times Turkish whistling, though only one type of language was played at a single time.
During each test, the listeners were asked to identify which syllable they had heard. Here's one of the volunteers in the middle of a test:
Onur Güntürkün
Because the left half of our brain processes information that goes in our right ear and our right brain processes from the left ear, the researchers could determine which part of the brain was more active during the test by which syllable the listeners identified when the two sounds didn't match up.
Read more:
Ancient whistle language uses the whole brain - Business Insider
The brains of people who speak this whistle language of Northern Turkey do something very surprising
- Aug. 18, 2015, 5:05 PM
Nestled deep in the mountains of north-east Turkey, harmonious echoes fill the air as a group of people whistle to each other across deep valleys and long distances to communicate.
Locals call this method of speech "bird language" because it sounds more like birds chirping than humans sending their regards or inviting each other to dinner.
And, according to a recent report, the people who speak this musical language are using their entire brain while whistling instead of only the left hemisphere, which contradicts the common notion that language is dominated by the left half of our brains.
"Bird language" can be heard from over 3 miles away — according to New Scientist where we first learned about the language — which was a handy way of long-distance communication before the age of phones and computers.
Scientists have known for years that the left half of our brains are responsible for speech and understanding language whereas the right brain dominates how we process music, pitch, and tone.
So, which part of the brain would control a language based on music, wondered Onur Güntürkün of Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.
To find out, Güntürkün and his colleagues studied 31 volunteers who lived in a small, mountain town called Kuşköy. All of the volunteers were fluent in Turkish whistling and the native spoken language, Turkish.
Testing the organization of the human brain
Each whistler completed a psychological listening test: While wearing headphones, they sometimes heard the same syllable in both ears while other times they heard one syllable in one ear and a different syllable in the other. The test sometimes played spoken Turkish and other times Turkish whistling, though only one type of language was played at a single time.
During each test, the listeners were asked to identify which syllable they had heard. Here's one of the volunteers in the middle of a test:
Because the left half of our brain processes information that goes in our right ear and our right brain processes from the left ear, the researchers could determine which part of the brain was more active during the test by which syllable the listeners identified when the two sounds didn't match up.
Read more:
Ancient whistle language uses the whole brain - Business Insider
