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IMAGINE AN ALIEN SPECIES THAT could pass thoughts from one head to another merely by pulsating air molecules in the space between them. Perhaps these weird creatures could inhabit a future science fiction movie?

Actually, we are those creatures. When we speak, our brain and voice apparatus conjure up air pressure waves that we send banging against another’s eardrum—enabling us to transfer thoughts from our brain into theirs. As cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (1998) has noted, we sometimes sit for hours “listening to other people make noise as they exhale, because those hisses and squeaks contain information.” And thanks to all those funny sounds created in our heads from the air pressure waves, we get people’s attention. We get them to do things. We maintain relationships (Guerin, 2003). Depending on how you vibrate the air after opening your mouth, you may get a scowl or a kiss.

But language is more than vibrating air. As I [DM] create this paragraph, my fingers on a keyboard generate electronic binary numbers that are translated into the squiggles in front of you. When transmitted by reflected light rays into your retina, those squiggles trigger formless nerve impulses that project to several areas of your brain, which integrate the information, compare it to stored information, and decode meaning. Thanks to language, information is moving from my mind to yours. Monkeys mostly know what they see. Thanks to language (spoken, written, or signed), we comprehend much that we’ve never seen and that our distant ancestors never knew. Today, notes Daniel Gilbert (2006), the average taxi driver in Pittsburgh “knows more about the universe than did Galileo, Aristotle, Leonardo, or any of those other guys who were so smart they only needed one name.”

To Pinker (1990), language is “the jewel in the crown of cognition.” If you were able to retain only one cognitive ability, make it language, suggests researcher Lera Boroditsky (2009). Without sight or hearing, you could still have friends, family, and a job. But without language, could you have these things? “Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it’s hard to imagine life without it.”