A few years ago, my mother had a brain aneurysm, which left her partially handicapped. It had a few effects physically, but the main effect is cognitive. Where she used to have 5 synonyms for a word, now, only two are left. This is extremely frustrating of course, because she knows what she wants to say, it only doesn’t come out.
So what we do is, we talk a lot to each other and we have patience when she is searching for her words. We try to find other ways to get to the word she is looking for. We talk about what word it is, in what context it is used and find other roads to it.
But, tech and innovation geek that I am, I was thinking about the future of language and communications. We know that there is so much going on with brain implants and such. So the question arose: when, in time, the whole population will have technical implants that make us telepathic, will we transmit words or concepts? Because when I think “oven”, it might mean something different to me than to you. It might differ in color or technology, but might also have different context or connotations. So when we “speak” to each other, it might just be thoughts, like “hungry, food, warm, tasty, you?”. That was a fun thought experiment.
And to top it off, at the end of the evening, she started to text my sisters. The fact is, since the words aren’t coming through that easily these days, she uses mostly emoticons to react. Which is, of course, a solid way of communicating without actually using written language. But everyone knows what you mean when you react with a lovely red heart to a picture. So in a way, we are already communicating feelings without language, which gives me hope for the future.