Rumination

I’m reading a book called “The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind” by Elkhonon Goldberg. It’s an interesting read about brain science. I wonder what my frontal lobes react each time I ponder on something, especially the one concerning highly intellectual activities.

Frontal lobes are regarded as CEO in our brain, the ones that control intention, insight, and strategy. They were called a “silent organ” for many decades in the neuroscience field; and neurologists and scientists didn’t recognize their importance related to cognition and mind until recent years.

Now, I get to read various studies and researches about brain and I have to admit it’s not an easy task to understand everything. However, it’s always refreshing being able to challenge myself for I like to ponder on complex issues and try all I can to come up with solutions.

Again I would like to see how people’s frontal lobes work when they are doing certain things. For instance, I saw a group of ABCs (American Born Chinese) last Saturday after work. I was on the bus when I heard them speaking English. I could tell they’re native speakers by their accents. Then suddenly they did code switching talking about going to some sort of concert in Mandarin. I was mesmerized by the way they did the code switching, exactly the way I can manage too. Now, obviously those teens were raised bilingually and their language proficiency is no doubt great.

Although we are geared toward the specific language areas in brain when it comes to studying brain and language, I wonder what kind of influence the frontal lopes have on the brain activities. When a person’s frontal lobes are damaged, he might lose the ability in cognitive integration albeit the normal capability in moving, speaking, or even retaining new information.
The point is how much impaired frontal lobes will influence an individual’s language acquisition. And does that mean if the individual has already acquired his first or second language well and he will not be affected by the frontal-lobe impairment when applying fundamental linguistic skills save the skills associated with cognition? Are we able to devise solid and reliable tools to do experiments so as to find out answers? It will be awesome to conduct research based on these speculations…