I always had this weird idea that I had to know lots of different things, says a faintly uncomfortable Marty Sereno. He shifts in his chair, turning his back to a Post-it-fringed computer screen and a table so deep in open journals that it looks like the cross-bedded planes of a geologic formation. Sereno is sitting in his office at the University of California at San Diego, where drawn miniblinds shut out the distracting southern California sunshine. When you’re trying to do interdisciplinary stuff, he continues, it’s no good putting two specialists together in a room, because they can’t talk to each other. You’ve got to pretend you’re in the other field; you have to go and live with the natives. It has to be all in one head.
To understate the case considerably, the 40-year-old Sereno has a lot of things in one head. There is his primary research interest, of course, which is the neurological architecture of vision in primates and rodents. Then there are the new techniques in brain imaging that he has helped pioneer, and the computer programs he and his collaborators have conceived to display the results. There is, as well, a wealth of information on subjects as various as linguistics, communication systems in animals, philosophy, and modern jazz (he’s an avid guitarist).
And then there is his unconventional theory about brain evolution and the origins of human language, which has been simmering on a back burner of his mind since graduate school. The theory appears flamboyantly interdisciplinary and complex. But Sereno merely shrugs at that characterization. Some things just have a lot of parts, he says. Not an impossible number, but enough that ten won’t do. Sometimes it just has to be a hundred.
Reduced to almost haiku proportions, Sereno’s idea is this: language ability arose in the human brain not through the development of a new, uniquely human language organ, as most accounts have it, but by a relatively minor rewiring of a neural system that was already there. And that neural wiring belonged largely to the visual system, a part of the brain that recent research--including Sereno’s own--has shown to be almost unimaginably complex.
These are statements slightly less heretical than those an earlier Martin nailed to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church, but not by much. Language is often regarded as a cognitive boundary, one of the last things that separate us from our primate cousins. But if Sereno is right, and language rode into our brains on the coattails, so to speak, of vision, we humans are once again a little less special than we thought.
