September 15, 2015 • 44 mins
The feral child occupies two worlds: that of lighthearted myth and depressing reality. We entertain ourselves with fantasies about wolf-reared infants, but most studies of feral children stem from cases of extreme child abuse and neglect. Join Robert and Christian as they explore human language acquisition and childhood without words.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Christian
what comes to mind when I mentioned far old children? Well,
I read a book when I was a young adult,
(00:24):
book called My Side of the Mountain. Have you ever
read that? It was one of my favorite books when
I was a kid, and it was about a kid
who was twelve years old, I think, and and he
just decided he lived in New York City, and he
decided the aid of the city, so he went to
the forest upstate where his grandparents had property, and proceeded
(00:45):
to live in a tree. And his best friends were
a hawk named Fearful and a weasel named the Baron.
And I thought that was just the best thing ever,
So I thought, Faraoh kid when I when I read that,
it sound like a good deal. Yeah, it's it turns
out not so much. Yeah. I had a similar experience
(01:05):
with this topic because because early on, of course, you know,
you're supposed to the Jungle Book, you know, and if
itures of Mogli or or of course another similar tale
um where the wild things are the little boy runs
off to live this animalistic existence with monsters in a
far away land. Um. And it's a it's an appealing
idea that plays into like the you know, the best
(01:26):
deal nature of children and the wildness of children, and
also you know, kind of the purity of them. But yeah,
when you actually start looking into the history and science
of feral children, it's a it's a far more depressing reality.
It's one of those things that we have had with us, uh,
(01:47):
at least mythologically for in human culture, for probably as
long as humans have been around, the idea of the
feral outsider that doesn't belong in civilization, but we try to.
We try to fix them and bring them back and
train teach them how to live, right. Yeah, And it
plays into just basic ruminations on what it means to
(02:10):
be human, like what if you remove culture and or
language from a human and what are they? Are they
truly human anymore? And and so yeah, it's an idea
that we've continued to come back to time and time again,
and we will continue to and both romantic and um,
darkly realistic manners. Yes, certainly, I think um. One of
(02:31):
the things that we discovered when we first started researching
feral children for this episode was that there's distinctly two
different types of feral children. There is the wild child,
which is what you and I were both thinking of,
the Mowgli type for the romantic idea even yeah, exactly,
which you know some some child who at a young
age gets lost or is abandoned and lives in the
(02:52):
wild and is probably raised by animals, right, uh, And
then this is not one that I had considered. But
this is the more realistic is instances of child abuse,
where there are children who have been confined or uh
possibly abused by their parents and isolated in such a
way that it has the same effect as if they
(03:13):
grew up in the wild, cases of severe neglect and
abuse that achieved the same ends of growing up without culture,
because there's just no culture, no language thrust upon them, exactly.
And those are the ones that we have definitive examples
of in the last thirty forty years. We have two
that we'll talk about in these episodes. But that's one
(03:35):
of the reasons that I had previously looked into doing
this topic and quickly got too depressed it to keep going.
So this is a this time we nailed it. I
think though, well, I mean, I do think it's probably
worth us mentioning up top that this is dark subject matter,
but I think it's worth visiting. And one of the
(03:58):
reasons why is because of exactly what you said that
the scientific and philosophical communities keep coming back to this
idea of what divides human beings from animals, and the
myth or the reality of a feral child is like
it seems to be their best way of conceiving that difference, right. Um.
(04:19):
In some of the early you know, sort of medieval
examples that we'll talk about today, there was an idea
that a feral child was humanity in a quote raw state, Uh.
In one example, they actually categorized feral children as an
entirely different species and Homo sapiens. Interesting. Yeah, I mean,
it's the idea of the the wild child, the feral child.
(04:41):
It just I mean, if you're just around children, you
you see it in them. Um. Yeah, So, as we
go through this episode, we're going to talk about some
of these specific cases that are generally rather depressing. We're gonna,
you know, so you're gonna have to roll with those
if you if you listen to it to the episode
but we're going to do our best to to obviously
not make fun, but to keep it light and to
(05:02):
engage in our usual interaction. Yeah. And uh, and there's
gonna be a lot of content just about the power
of language, how we acquire language. So you know, it's
also not going to be just you know, an hour
plus block of addressing abuse cases. So let's define up
top though, a feral child. Okay, So like probably like us,
(05:25):
many people listening out there have an idea of them
as a sort of you know, wild child type. The
sort of definition that is that a feral child is
one who from an early age has lived an extended
period of isolation from human contact. Doesn't have to be
in a forest. In some cases, it's they've been locked
in a room and never let out right. Um, Typically
(05:46):
what we see is that they are impaired, and they're
lacking the cognitive abilities and the communications skills and especially
the socialization that we come to expect from human beings. Uh.
And they almost always have an impaired language ability and
mental function. And that's why we're gonna focus. We're gonna
later in the episode, we're gonna really like hone in
on language how it develops. So some of the key
(06:10):
myths though that that most people were A lot of
people are gonna be familiar with um are as follows.
The first big one, of course, is Romulus and Remus.
You've probably seen statues of this, like the twin the
twin infants suckled by the she wolf, right uh And
and I'm not gonna blow through the whole myth here,
but basically you have twin brothers, uh, the sons of
(06:33):
the god Mars and the priestess Rahea Sylvia. They're bannon
at birth, which you know is essentially a form of infanticide.
You leave them out in the wilderness and let nature
take its course. I think in the myth there's something
it's some relative of the kings who's afraid that they're
going to usurp the king or something exactly. It's the
fear that like, basically, it's their destiny to rule, and
(06:55):
they try to to interfere with this destiny by just
throwing them away in the woods. But they're suckled by
a she wolf, they're fed by a woodpecker. Then they're
raised by shepherds and they eventually rise to power. They
learn of their origins, overthrow, there would be killer and
end up a founding Rome. So it's a tale of
destiny weaving its way through plots and circumstances, and it's
(07:15):
in in kind of a you know, an early examination
of nature and nurture. Like they have it is in
their nature to rule, to be the king, but they're
the nurturing environment has been taken from them. Are they
still the thing that they were born to be? Or
have they become something else? Yeah, there's probably that idea
in there too that since they're they're half God, that
(07:38):
that's why the animals helped raise them, right, is that
like they sensed the royal urgency of keeping these children alive.
Interesting side note, one of those statutes that you mentioned
is just outside of where we live here in Atlanta, Rome, Georgia,
you know, in allegiance with the city named after, constructed
(08:02):
such a statue. So I believe in downtown Rome there's
one of those I forget what the wolf's name, but
that that giant wolf, and there's a statue of the
two little infants kind of reaching up and trying to
drink from her. But Rome, Georgia not founded by feral children.
Unconfirmed There is another example sort of again, this is
(08:26):
one that we don't know if it's true or not,
but that's sort of a myth, the feral child. And
this is the more medieval one, Valentine and Orson, and
unlike Romulus and Remus, they're separated. So the deal was
was that they were European twins, so vague, we don't
even know where in Europe there just European. Uh, they
were lost in a forest. Valentine was found, however, and
brought back to civilization where Orson was not. So you
(08:49):
had that dichotomy, right, And Orson was supposedly raised by bears,
and he became this wild man who just terrorized all
the villages and abducted women and children. And so I
suppose that was, you know, a cautionary tale of the
difference between man and animal or or what would happen
to man without civilization. Yeah, I mean we see that
in so many beast man monster man myths throughout history
(09:11):
to just trying to figure out what is what's the
line between man and beast and and that's also exploring
in the idea of the feral child. And of course
there's Mowgli and Peter Pan. You know, I don't think
we really need to go into those too much because
you know, they're mostly known from those Disney movies. I'm
sure the the actual Mowgli and Peter Pan from the
literature that they're those movies are based on, are significantly different,
(09:34):
but the idea is essentially the same. Right. Yeah, if
you're like me and you've seen Jungle Book, you know,
thousand times in the last couple of years, you you
really don't need a lesson in what happens. But raised
by wolves, it winds up living with humans again and
everything's okay. So we've got a few examples of feral
children that I don't want to say that this is
(09:55):
well documented because some of these go back quite a
ways and there's a little bit of I think fictionalization
in some of the accounts. And the first one would be,
and this is sort of one of the most famous
of feral children is wild Peter and the idea, uh well,
at least the story goes is that it was July
(10:16):
of seventy four and outside of Hamlin, Germany, a naked
twelve year old boy stumbled out of the forest and
people saw him. He only ate grass and leaves, and
whenever people tried to approach him, he would run up
into the trees and hide. He totally couldn't speak, He
had no language capacity whatsoever. Um. People assumed that he
(10:38):
was a feral child who was raised in the woods
by animals. It was later speculated, like like much later
by a German anthropologist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, that Peter
was actually a mentally disabled child who had just been
abandoned by somebody within the village or somebody nearby, and
he'd only been out there for maybe less than a
(10:59):
week before he was discovered by other people. Um. Apparently,
some of the accounts indicate that Peter had a defect
with his tongue, which made it difficult for him to speak.
So the idea here being was that, like, you know,
potentially Peter wasn't what we think of as a wild
child ferald child at all. He might have just been,
(11:19):
you know, a mentally disabled child who was abandoned by
his parents, but then was was refound and his story
is remarkable but also somewhat sad, so brace yourselves. Um.
He somehow went from being discovered in Germany two living
with King George the first in England. The literature doesn't
(11:41):
really fill the gaps in on that one, so I'm
curious what goes on between that time. The idea was
that they treated him as a quote unquote guest, but
basically he was kind of like a court jester. They
made him dress and fancy clothes. He sat at the
dinner table. They thought it was very funny because he
couldn't talk and because he had bad manners. But what
happened was he ended up, you know, gorging on all
(12:02):
the food presented in front of him and not having
the you know, appropriate etiquette for for court life. So
he was taken away, uh, and he briefly escaped, then
he was brought back to London. They kept him around
as sort of like a humorous object for court life. Uh. Caroline,
the Princess of Wales, had him moved to her own
residence where he was basically kept as a pet. She
(12:24):
didn't refer to him as such as a pet from
what I understand, but the conditions he was kept in
were as such. Uh. He slept on the floor, he
was made to dress in a tailor made suit every morning.
But as you can imagine, you know, he didn't really
like that. Try to get out. Um, he was given
a tutor, and the tutor wasn't trying to teach him,
you know, how to be a civilized person, how to
(12:46):
how to acclimate to society. They taught him tricks that
he could do for the ladies in court. Uh. And
the only words he could say were his own name
and a garbled version of King George. So seventeen, this
tutor says, you know what, he is unable to receive
instruction from me any longer, and lots of Uh, I
(13:09):
don't want to see scientists, I want to say intellectuals.
Maybe it sort of assess him and write papers about
him and observe him over this period of time they're
trying to decide. It's that period of time where they're
trying to decide whether he has a soul or not.
That's the thing they're the most interested in. So this
gets back to that animal versus human. Yeah. So he's
(13:30):
basically kept along all this time at best as a curio,
if not just pure spectacle. Yeah, exactly. And after the
sort of spectacle war out and it was no longer
amusing to the royalty, they sent him to a farm
in Hurtfordshire. I believe it's how you pronounce it. I'm
sure there's a much better British pronunciation for that. Uh.
(13:51):
And basically they they've had a pension set aside for him,
a thirty five pounds a year to take care of him,
so they weren't, you know, entirely heartless. But he never
learned to speak. He escaped multiple times, there were incidents
where you know, he had run ins with villagers. Um.
They eventually fitted him with a leather collar that had
an inscription of his name and address on it, and
(14:13):
he died at age seventy two in sev That is
a depressing story, depressing life to try and imagine, Yeah,
I'm part of me. Wonders if given you know the
nature of how he how he ended up and outside
of this village in Germany, if he even understood somewhat
(14:34):
of the m hmm, the depressing nature of how he
was being treated. Um. But like I said, there were
many researchers who were studying him at the time, and
the idea was basically, at that period of time they
considered themselves going through a scientific revolution and that this
was a means of rational investigation. So by all means
(14:55):
we should we should study Peter. I mean, I guess
one could argue that he was he received better treatment
than he certainly could have given other circumstances. I think
that's true, Yeah, especially when we see some of these
other examples as we go through UM. One of the
intellectuals of the time, Daniel Defoe, defined Peter as this
was the guy who said he's an entirely separate species.
(15:16):
So he made up a species called homo for friends,
a species of wild men. And then this is important
to what we're gonna talk about later with language. Others
thought that Peter showed what is referred to sometimes as
a critical window for development and children. So there's this
period of time roughly between I think about six months
and four years old, where there's this window of development
(15:38):
where children are, you know, they're like sponge, your your
son is about that age, and they're absorbing everything around
them and they're learning language, and language subsequently leads to culture,
which you know, I think is a huge way of
how we define humanity. Yeah, pretty pretty much who we are.
Like the troupe we end up coming back to and
we'll come back to again again in this episode is
language as the software, the operating system for the human brain. Yeah,
(16:03):
and Peter didn't have that. He only had the survival
instincts to basically eat and sleep. Uh. And so you know,
there was a lot of speculation about what this all
meant and what it philosophically implied for humanity. And then,
like I said, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach came along and was like,
I actually think that this was a mentally disabled child.
(16:24):
And you're all, you know, speculating about nothing other than
that this poor child was abandoned by his parents. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Alright,
(16:45):
we're back now. The next one we're gonna mention here briefly,
Victor of Avron. Yeah, this one he was found just
uside of France and eighteen hundred. Yeah, he was. He
was studied by and written off by a physician, uh,
Jeanne Mark Gaspard Todd, and he eventually gave up and
asked his housekeeper to care for Victor. But some of
(17:08):
you maybe remember may remember Victor from Tropos nineteen seventy
film The Wild Child, which gives um, you know this
fictionalized account of their relationship and his work with the Victor. Yeah,
I haven't seen that, but from what I was reading
about the the case of Victor was basically that, you know,
and we see this in a lot of cases of
(17:29):
these Ferald children, that there's some intellectual curiosity at first
and then they just kind of give up. Yeah, because
once because ultimately you're left with the hard problem of
what do you do with somebody who you can't bring
them back. You can't just you can't turn them into
a fully functional, um, you know, member of society at
this point. Yeah, and the care is more difficult than
(17:50):
what they believe that they signed up for, right, I mean,
everybody wants to save today and then everyone wants to
figure out what's going on. But yeah, it's it's a lengthy,
lengthy proces this. But supposedly Victor, you know, did have
some progress at least compared to Peter, and he knew
how to read simple words and uh, he never really
eventually learned how to talk, but um, you know, he
(18:12):
had some capacity for understanding symbols. It seemed like, yeah,
and this is where we we see it to refer
to as quote the forbidden experiment, because that's the thing
about this. You could never create a language less child
to study. I mean you could, but it would be
the most heinous thing ever, like well beyond most, uh
(18:33):
most things that make lists of the evil experiment. And
so to find it you have to you just have
to have something fall into your lap. You have to
find a child that has been abandoned or neglected to
a severe level. And then of course you're dealing with
additional behavioral constraints. Yeah, And that's what's somewhat perverse about this, right,
(18:53):
is that it is always tragic when when a child
like this is found, and yet at the same time,
intellectuals jump at the opportunity to be able to define
the difference between humanity and and that other state, that
animalistic state, because it's so rarely comes along for them
to study. We've also got another example. These are just
(19:18):
a few. We didn't have much deep dive research on them,
but there was one one child named memy LeBlanc and
she was the Savage Girl of Champagne. She appeared in
France and seventeen thirty one. She's dressed in animal skins again,
was wild and resisted capture. Eventually she acclimated to society
and she was actually able to tell her story, and
(19:39):
what she said was that she had been sold into
slavery when she was a little girl, and she's survived
a shipwreck and then she and I'm assuming this girl
was also on the shipwreck with her. An African girl
of the same age survived in the wild together and
they parted ways. And that was when Memy I think,
eventually was found by civilization. Then there's sent humilia. Yeah,
(20:02):
I think that's right. Yeah, Ukrainian girls supposedly raised by
wild dogs and eight raw meat. Not a lot of
details here beyond that. And in six Ivan Mushakov was
found in Moscow. He was a four year old who
wandered away from his home and ended up living in
the streets with a pack of wild dogs. But eventually
(20:22):
the authorities captured him and you know, forced him back
into society. Well, I mean, I don't know about forced,
but it sounds like he was enjoying from what I
read that he enjoyed being with the dogs. Well, yeah,
I mean, little kids love the dog. This kind of
gets back and just the appeal of it, Like you see,
little boys want to take all their clothes off and
run around in pet dogs, you know. Yeah, and I
(20:44):
think that to a certain extent, the dogs allowed him
to be their pack leader to write, so that was
probably enjoyable for a four year old. There are always
some some interesting dogs toys coming out of Moscow. I
want to say, that's also where there were tales of
dogs using the subways wild dogs, Yeah, with board a
train and take it to their stopping. But I I
(21:05):
heard about that recently. Yeah, I can't remember if it
was in Moscow or not, but yeah, that's definitely a thing.
And sometimes maybe this explains that they have they were
taught by Ivan in how to read the public transportation system.
All right, so this is we're we're going to talk
now about Genie. All the examples before this were what
(21:26):
we think of as wild children, children who were raised
in the wild, either on their owner with animals. Right,
Genie is our first, uh, concrete example in the twenty
century of one of these children who was abused and
basically abandoned or at least isolated, uh, and subsequently was
(21:47):
thought of as a feral child. Yeah, and it's it's
a sad story and we're not gonna be able to
even cover all the angles on it because it involves,
you know, the media, it involves well meaning scientists, well
meaning caregivers, and just the the lifetime care of an individual.
There's an excellent documentary that came out years ago from Nova,
The Secret of the Wild Child, and uh I I
(22:09):
embedded a YouTube of it in in a cliff in
a in a post that I'll link to on the
landing page for this episode. So that's a great place
to go. That post is up on stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com right yesterday. Okay, So it's a
wonderful documentary that gets into you know, all the if
you really want, you know, a full deep dive into
the history of Genie, we're gonna we're gonna provide as
(22:29):
much information as we can here, but you know, we
need to cover the whole instance of feral children. Yeah.
So this takes place in Arcadia, California. Genie and that's
not her real name, of her case name, UM because
you know, it's like the mythical Genie, an emergent creature
without a human childhood, just born in ninety seven UM.
(22:51):
And she still resides in California as a ward of
the state, but she suffered from a a very traumatic childhood,
if you can even call it a childhood locked in
a room, tied for to a potty chair for most
of her life. Yeah. One instance I read was that
she was chained to it and that she slept there.
(23:12):
She sat and slept on this potty chair like she's
basically kept in an upstairs room for the first thirteen
years of her life. And and a lot of it
had to do, I mean, if not most of it
had to do with her father being a rather disturbed individual,
um who who thought that she was retarded and that
(23:33):
and that she would die before she reached the age
of twelve. Yeah. I think his idea was like he
would sort of hide her from society until she passed away. Yeah,
and then I suppose he would, you know, take her
body away in the middle of the night and bury
her somewhere. I'm not sure it was very deranged. It
seemed to be from by account that we're looking at,
(23:53):
um dominating abusive towards not only her but also the mother,
who was partially blind and suffered from some ailments as well. Yeah.
And her claim was that she didn't really have a
whole lot of say in it that that she could
there wasn't much that she could do, and that she
was as much of a victim as Genie was. Uh.
And then my other understanding here is that when when
(24:15):
Genie was found, uh, they did you know, obviously, they
did some tests right when they found her, and they
she had abnormal brain waves which suggested that she had
brain damage from birth. Uh. Not everybody agreed on this though,
because later on in life, Genie showed improvement when she
was taken to you know, some she had a long story,
(24:39):
but when she was taken care of by caring families, Uh,
she showed improvement. And in most cases of birth brain
damage like that, that's not the case. So there's some
dispute over this. Yeah that you know, there's so many
additional factors involved in this one, because again she was
she deprived of language, but deprived of love, deprived of
(25:00):
environmental stimuli. She was she was punished for making noise
of apparently, you know, beaten from making noise throughout her life.
It was it was a real effort to try and
get sounds out of her. And I believe it one
case later later on, she was in a foster home
environment and she was punished for vomiting, so she backtracked
(25:21):
after that. She basically was taught through punishment that opening
her mouth was wrong, and so she did everything that
she could to either not speak or open her mouth
at all. Or so not only was she mute because
she never learned language properly, but because she was basically
taught not to talk, she had a very They described
(25:43):
it as a bunny walk when they found her. Apparent,
you know, she was strapped to this, uh this this
potty chair. Apparently the way that she walked was sort
of like a rabbit, but with both feet she would
jump forward. Yeah. The footage of her in the documentary,
she she moves very mysteriously, you know, and you know,
(26:04):
and it all kind of plays into into the appeal
of her case is that she's she looks like a
normal child, you know, she looks there's there's something kind
of haunting about her though, because there's anotherness to her
as well and heart breaking. Yeah, exactly, it's that um right, exactly,
it's it seems alien instead of human, and so there's
(26:26):
something about it that that turns you off. But then
at the same time, it's such a heartbreaking story that
you just can't help but feel horrible for her. What
eventually happened was the father shot himself basically right after
they took her away. Yeah, the media really got involved
in this pretty quickly. And and and there's actually a
(26:48):
connection to Victor in this because that Tropoe movie we
mentioned debut exactly one week after Genie was discovered, So
in no time at all, just you know, full fledged
media circus and this guy's atrocities that have been revealed
to the world. Yeah. I wasn't alive then, but I
suspect that at this period of time in nineteen seventy,
(27:08):
that Ferald children were a hot topic in the media
at the time, probably in newspapers and television reports and such.
Uh So, Jeannie, you know, like like we said, she
went on to have a lot, She was researched a lot,
but that she also was seen as a modern exploration
of trying to figure out how language acquisition worked, what
(27:31):
was going on with this abnormal child psychology that she had.
And you know, some of the professionals that dealt with her,
I think sort of again like we talked about with Victor,
they saw it as sort of their mission to rescue her.
But then they realized how difficult it was and either
gave up on her or there were some accusations. I
(27:51):
don't know if you saw this that that there were
instances where some of them were trying to get media
attention by taking care of her. Yeah, there's so many,
so many factors sort of tugging apart this situation with
this girl up. You know, a very real girl at
the center of it all um, And he's worth noting
to the At one point she did wind up with
her mother again, like her father recovered enough to where
(28:13):
and was cleared of abuse charges and apparently tried for
a limited amount of it didn't work with my understanding,
and then she that was when she entered multiple foster
homes right after that, I believe, and some of those
foster homes were abusive, and that was where she was
abused for vomiting one time. Uh. So she was seen
(28:35):
as a perfect opportunity to test out this language, this
idea about language development that is called critical period hypothesis.
And I believe that this was first coined by is
his name Eric Lennenberg or Lenniburg Um. Yeah, I believe
it was proposed by a pair of a neurologist wild
(28:57):
Her Penfield and co author Lamar Roberts in fifty nine,
but then it was popularized in the seventies by Eric Lindbergh. Okay,
that's what I read. So the idea is that of
the critical period hypothesis is similar to that window that
I was talking about earlier, which is that in the
first few years of life it is a crucial period
for human beings to learn language and to be presented
(29:19):
with the you know, appropriate stimuli to join civilization. Yeah,
and Linburg helped popularize this. He argued that, yeah, the
first language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity, and if you make
it to puberty without it, then you'll never have full
mastery of a language. And you know, therefore you can
(29:40):
have a limited ability to even uh, not only communicate,
but also to process the world around you. And like
you're saying, this is not something that we can experiment with, right,
we can't take a child and say, you know what,
we're purposely not going to teach this child. We're gonna
isolate this child and not teach them language for four
years just to see what happened. Yeah, the best, generally
(30:01):
you can do is is see how normal children acquire
language and study delays and other children. But for a
full blown case like this that you just have to
wait for something horrible to happen. So let's talk about
how Noam Chomsky comes into this. Uh not in terms
of I don't believe Chomsky had any direct interaction with
(30:22):
Genie's case, but that Chomsky it was. You know, many
of you probably know Chomsky as a political dissident and theorist.
I feel like that's what he's he's more known as
these days. It might come as a surprise to some
people to realize that he was linguished. In fact, he right,
that was what he was most known for when I
was in school. That that was how I was introduced
(30:42):
to him, as was that he was one of the
most regarded linguists. And he was he taught at m
I t if he doesn't, I don't think he's still
teaching there, but he was teaching there when I lived
in New England ten years ago. Yeah, and he he
had this argument that we acquire language not just because
we're taught at but because we're born with the principles
of language, that it's in our genes. So that so
(31:06):
this would be the nature side of the nature nurtural
coin when it comes to linguistics. Yeah, Chomsky called this
a universal grammar. Uh. And the idea is that as
children were hardwired to have and this is an important term,
an instinct for language. And this concept dominated linguistics for
(31:28):
forty years. But as we're gonna you know, discover as
we go along, it was wrong. Um. So it's important
to consider this as we're thinking about these feral children
and how they either did or did not learn language
and how that affected them during the you know, the
critical window Lendenberg talks about. But there, let's let's acknowledge
(31:49):
up front, like the Chomsky's uh, theory of universal grammar
has not panned out. Yeah, because we've yet to find
a universal framework across all like seven thousand odd different languages.
You know, a child from one nation can be raised
in another with no difficulty. Um. And in the and
yet we see no you know, real clear synchronicity in language.
(32:10):
But it's it's an appealing theory because it helps explain
the wonders of rapid language acquisition that we see in
children where they're they you know, I've I've seen it
in my own son's life where he goes from this
this you know, largely mute little creature, and then suddenly
he's saying words, and then he's building things with those words.
He's building concepts, he's getting ideas and expressing them. Um.
(32:32):
So this is one of the key truth series that
our brains really are language ready in a limited sense.
I mean, we have the right sort of working memory
to process sentence level syntax. We have an unusually large
prefrontal cortex that gives us the associated learning capacity to
use symbols, and our bodies are made for language. Our
learn x is set low at least, you know, compared
(32:52):
to other primates, allowing us to expel and control the
passage there. The position of the tiny hyroid bone in
the jaw gives us fine muscular control over our mouths
and tongues to form all those words and to make
you know, upwards of a hundred forty four distinct speech sounds.
So even if we're not born with the linguistic software,
(33:13):
we do come factory ready with much of the linguistic hardware. Yeah.
So exactly that hardware is the important part in distinguishing
that it is not an instinct right, we're physically built
for it. By the time children are three to four
years old, they've acquired the elements of language from around them.
And that's regardless, like let's keep this in mind of
(33:35):
all the different languages that exist in human culture. That's
regardless of what that language is. It's grammar system, it's
sound system. Children can acquire that. But by six months old,
and those of you with children out there experience with
with infants will know this, they're already category categorizing sounds
(33:55):
of their language right there, picking up on the sounds
that are around them and trying to figure out what
they made and and and putting them into boxes. Um.
By their first year, children have honed in on what
we call phonology, and this is just the sounds and
patterns of you know, a particular language. They're used basically
as symbols around them, and you know, the vocabulary of
(34:15):
young children is essentially a reflection of what their everyday
lives are. Right. So I would imagine that fashion your
son is probably not having a whole lot of moments
where he's thinking deeply about different times in history or
or space that's far away from him, right, or some
kind of abstraction. He's probably thinking about the things that
are immediately in front of it, Like if he's thinking
(34:36):
about the past, he's saying, remember that time that we
saw a dead spider, that that sort of thing, But
not so much like I wonder, you know, how come
the Mongols weren't able to invade Japan exactly. We don't
develop that capacity until much later. But the vocabulary is
more immediate for us. And language in humans as a species,
you know, it's essentially similar in all of us, um
(35:00):
what we need. So we should distinguish this as we're
talking along here and using feral children as an example
for this. True language requires that the speaker is able
to make new utterances and combine or expand upon the
forms that they already know, right, And so we think
of this a syntax when we're when we're sort of
breaking down language. See, these are the rules for how
(35:22):
to combine words into acceptable phrases or sentences, how you
transform existing words. And this is something we sort of
learn instinctively along the way, right. I mean, it's it's
why a parent reciting some words that it that it
is learned. It's not talking, it's really saying these words Yeah.
In fact, you cannot teach true language to another species. Uh.
(35:43):
We have examples of many animals, primates especially that are
capable of learning cues or symbolic communication. Lots of primates
use American sign language, but that's not language technically, that's
symbolic communication. Uh. There's a difference, and language certainly goes
(36:03):
well beyond just simply communicating exactly. Yeah. And so you know,
part of this is, this is why it got to
the heart of the sort of human versus animal difference,
is that to learn language, you have to be in
a society. It requires that you have emotional motivation and
social interaction. Like for instance, we know that you cannot
(36:27):
just put an infant in front of a television and
they'll learn language. They will hear the more themes and
the phonology that's going on through the television. But because
they're not getting any actual social interaction, there's no give
and take there, they won't learn the language. And so
that's why these feral children in the in instances they
(36:48):
have no capacity for language, and and oftentimes they've gone
past that window so they can no longer learn it either.
One last thing I want to say about language and
this is another sort of you know, tie end to
the idea of that some of these feral children were
mentally disabled, but they just didn't have sort of the
categorization for that at the time. Is that, Um, there
(37:08):
are several areas of the brain. We used to just
think it was one part of the brain broke as
area that was responsible for language, but we know now
several special areas. There's Wernicke's area. There's another part that's
called the I'm gonna mess this up. Everybody who's listening
to me on stuff to bully your mind now is
probably used to me butchering Latin that the RQ it facilious.
(37:29):
Uh So those are in different parts of our brain,
and so there doesn't appear to be just like one
dedicated spot. So of course then if there's brain damage
and at birth, then there's potentially going to be a
difficulty for both learning language and for um developing you know,
simple use and culture later on. Now to come back
(37:51):
to Genie's case, Um, she did acquire some language in
her life. She used it to make sense of past
and president and express herself, but she never like fully
communicated and certainly this was all of this was was
made more problematic by her you know, her aggression at
various times in her life and just the overall dramatic nature.
(38:15):
So what that sounds like to me is is symbolic
communication but not necessarily language. Right. She she didn't possess
the ability to transform words and into syntactical structures. Uh,
but she was able to communicate still the same way
like a you know, a dolphin can or a chimpanzee can.
And uh, you know her case to this day, writers
(38:37):
continue to analyze it, pick it apart. She's no longer
actively studied, as I understand it. She just resides in
a home um somewhere in California and leads a quiet
life there. And it's explored in that documentary. Of course,
it's her case. Is it's kind of controversial due to
(38:57):
you know, so many people trying to inject themselves and
and also a lot of them I think we're trying
to do the right thing, but those agendas kind of
become crossed here and there, where one person really wants
to to to get to the root of her problem,
to study what's happening, and another just wants to see
her cared for in an environment that is not not
(39:18):
going to jar her confuser. And of course during this
period of time, this was when I think that there
was a lot of debates in American politics about how
much tax money should be going towards supporting mental health care.
And so in nineteen seventy four, the National Institute of
Mental Health provoked her treatments funding. And this was when
she went back to her mother. Her mother was acquitted
(39:39):
of all the charges. Again, like it didn't work out
with her mother, she went into foster system. Bad things happen.
As far as we know now right, a private investigator
found her at some kind of facility in California for
for my understanding, it's for mentally underdeveloped adults. So she's
being cared for, Okay. So actually, there's another example of
(40:03):
very similar to Genie, from as close enough as two
thousand five, and this is a young girl named Danielle
Crockett Um. Some referred to her as the girl in
the window because of that was how she was discovered.
People saw her in the window at this home she
was in Florida, and when she was a six year old,
she was found isolated in a small room within her
(40:23):
mother's home and the officer that found her said that
this was the worst case of child neglect he'd seen
in twenty seven years on the force. And I won't
go into the details here, but it was absolutely filthy.
It was just horrifying the description of this place that
she was living in. And I think, like Genie, I
don't know that she was chained down, but she was
(40:45):
kept in a room by herself. When they found her,
she was unclothed and emaciated. She was covered in bites
and sores. She couldn't communicate at all. She couldn't even
eat solid food. And the most telling thing was that
she didn't recognize any kind of communication from other human
beings or even affection. And then what's important about this
(41:05):
is severely autistic children still respond to affection, but she
wasn't responding at all. And so as a result of this,
her imprisonment was defined as being something called environmental autism.
So it was that like the circumstances of how she
was raised up until that point basically generated the same
(41:26):
symptoms that she would have if she was autistic. You know,
this brings to mind research we looked at in the
past about about just the effects of isolation on adults,
you know, the individuals who have already made it through
their their childhood, uh and acquired language. But but just
to put a regular, otherwise healthy adult in an environment
(41:47):
of very limited stimuli has has kind of a disastrous
effect on the psyche. Yeah, absolutely, I know just for myself,
Like if I stay in that house for too long,
I have a tendency to hold up while I'm doing work,
and but I can easily go a couple of days
on end without leaving the house. And you don't realize it,
but it starts to affect you. Utah. I mean, our
(42:08):
brains evolved to allow us to live in a world
of you know, a various stimuli of fixed and moving objects,
and so when you deny it those things, it begins
to non itself. You see things that aren't there, You
are things that are not there, and uh, you know,
and that's again, that's an adult. Now imagine that scenario
for a child that is in the process of absorbing
(42:30):
all the data about the world they live in and
she has no other example. Yeah. Well, the good news
about Danielle Crockett is that she was adopted by a
very loving family. From what it sounds like and made
significant developmental progress in the years since. So it's been
ten years since she was found, So she's probably sixteen now,
and she lives in Tennessee with her adopted parents, and
(42:53):
they're caring for her and and and they're dedicated to
being with her for the rest of her life. Good good, Well,
hopefully that that will continue to look up. I think
it will. Yeah, it was reading in particular. There's a
there's a really great piece uh about Danielle um that
hopefully we can link to in the in the show notes.
But there's they they at length interview the family that
(43:15):
adopted her, and it's um, it's it's it's heartwarming, all right.
So that's just the first part of our exploration into
feral children and the acquisition of language and what language
does as this software for the hardware of the brain.
And we're gonna pick it up in a second episode. Yeah,
we're gonna talk more about the science of feral children,
(43:36):
focusing in on language and child development. Now that you've
had these examples, you know, both mythical and real life
that we can work from, now we can really dive
deep into the science of it. In the meantime, head
on over to stuff to blow your mind dot com.
That's where you will find uh all the podcast episodes,
the the blog post videos, links out to our social
(43:58):
media accounts like Tumbler and Facebook and it or would
blow the mind on all of those and uh and again.
The landing page for this episode will include links to
some of the studies we've talked about, as well as
related content on the site. Yeah, and you know, please
listen to the second episode. But you know, let us
know anything that you've learned about feral children over the years,
maybe you perhaps have done some work in child development yourself.
(44:19):
We'd love to hear more about it. You can reach
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Christian
what comes to mind when I mentioned far old children? Well,
I read a book when I was a young adult,
(00:24):
book called My Side of the Mountain. Have you ever
read that? It was one of my favorite books when
I was a kid, and it was about a kid
who was twelve years old, I think, and and he
just decided he lived in New York City, and he
decided the aid of the city, so he went to
the forest upstate where his grandparents had property, and proceeded
(00:45):
to live in a tree. And his best friends were
a hawk named Fearful and a weasel named the Baron.
And I thought that was just the best thing ever,
So I thought, Faraoh kid when I when I read that,
it sound like a good deal. Yeah, it's it turns
out not so much. Yeah. I had a similar experience
(01:05):
with this topic because because early on, of course, you know,
you're supposed to the Jungle Book, you know, and if
itures of Mogli or or of course another similar tale
um where the wild things are the little boy runs
off to live this animalistic existence with monsters in a
far away land. Um. And it's a it's an appealing
idea that plays into like the you know, the best
(01:26):
deal nature of children and the wildness of children, and
also you know, kind of the purity of them. But yeah,
when you actually start looking into the history and science
of feral children, it's a it's a far more depressing reality.
It's one of those things that we have had with us, uh,
(01:47):
at least mythologically for in human culture, for probably as
long as humans have been around, the idea of the
feral outsider that doesn't belong in civilization, but we try to.
We try to fix them and bring them back and
train teach them how to live, right. Yeah, And it
plays into just basic ruminations on what it means to
(02:10):
be human, like what if you remove culture and or
language from a human and what are they? Are they
truly human anymore? And and so yeah, it's an idea
that we've continued to come back to time and time again,
and we will continue to and both romantic and um,
darkly realistic manners. Yes, certainly, I think um. One of
(02:31):
the things that we discovered when we first started researching
feral children for this episode was that there's distinctly two
different types of feral children. There is the wild child,
which is what you and I were both thinking of,
the Mowgli type for the romantic idea even yeah, exactly,
which you know some some child who at a young
age gets lost or is abandoned and lives in the
(02:52):
wild and is probably raised by animals, right, uh, And
then this is not one that I had considered. But
this is the more realistic is instances of child abuse,
where there are children who have been confined or uh
possibly abused by their parents and isolated in such a
way that it has the same effect as if they
(03:13):
grew up in the wild, cases of severe neglect and
abuse that achieved the same ends of growing up without culture,
because there's just no culture, no language thrust upon them, exactly.
And those are the ones that we have definitive examples
of in the last thirty forty years. We have two
that we'll talk about in these episodes. But that's one
(03:35):
of the reasons that I had previously looked into doing
this topic and quickly got too depressed it to keep going.
So this is a this time we nailed it. I
think though, well, I mean, I do think it's probably
worth us mentioning up top that this is dark subject matter,
but I think it's worth visiting. And one of the
(03:58):
reasons why is because of exactly what you said that
the scientific and philosophical communities keep coming back to this
idea of what divides human beings from animals, and the
myth or the reality of a feral child is like
it seems to be their best way of conceiving that difference, right. Um.
(04:19):
In some of the early you know, sort of medieval
examples that we'll talk about today, there was an idea
that a feral child was humanity in a quote raw state, Uh.
In one example, they actually categorized feral children as an
entirely different species and Homo sapiens. Interesting. Yeah, I mean,
it's the idea of the the wild child, the feral child.
(04:41):
It just I mean, if you're just around children, you
you see it in them. Um. Yeah, So, as we
go through this episode, we're going to talk about some
of these specific cases that are generally rather depressing. We're gonna,
you know, so you're gonna have to roll with those
if you if you listen to it to the episode
but we're going to do our best to to obviously
not make fun, but to keep it light and to
(05:02):
engage in our usual interaction. Yeah. And uh, and there's
gonna be a lot of content just about the power
of language, how we acquire language. So you know, it's
also not going to be just you know, an hour
plus block of addressing abuse cases. So let's define up
top though, a feral child. Okay, So like probably like us,
(05:25):
many people listening out there have an idea of them
as a sort of you know, wild child type. The
sort of definition that is that a feral child is
one who from an early age has lived an extended
period of isolation from human contact. Doesn't have to be
in a forest. In some cases, it's they've been locked
in a room and never let out right. Um, Typically
(05:46):
what we see is that they are impaired, and they're
lacking the cognitive abilities and the communications skills and especially
the socialization that we come to expect from human beings. Uh.
And they almost always have an impaired language ability and
mental function. And that's why we're gonna focus. We're gonna
later in the episode, we're gonna really like hone in
on language how it develops. So some of the key
(06:10):
myths though that that most people were A lot of
people are gonna be familiar with um are as follows.
The first big one, of course, is Romulus and Remus.
You've probably seen statues of this, like the twin the
twin infants suckled by the she wolf, right uh And
and I'm not gonna blow through the whole myth here,
but basically you have twin brothers, uh, the sons of
(06:33):
the god Mars and the priestess Rahea Sylvia. They're bannon
at birth, which you know is essentially a form of infanticide.
You leave them out in the wilderness and let nature
take its course. I think in the myth there's something
it's some relative of the kings who's afraid that they're
going to usurp the king or something exactly. It's the
fear that like, basically, it's their destiny to rule, and
(06:55):
they try to to interfere with this destiny by just
throwing them away in the woods. But they're suckled by
a she wolf, they're fed by a woodpecker. Then they're
raised by shepherds and they eventually rise to power. They
learn of their origins, overthrow, there would be killer and
end up a founding Rome. So it's a tale of
destiny weaving its way through plots and circumstances, and it's
(07:15):
in in kind of a you know, an early examination
of nature and nurture. Like they have it is in
their nature to rule, to be the king, but they're
the nurturing environment has been taken from them. Are they
still the thing that they were born to be? Or
have they become something else? Yeah, there's probably that idea
in there too that since they're they're half God, that
(07:38):
that's why the animals helped raise them, right, is that
like they sensed the royal urgency of keeping these children alive.
Interesting side note, one of those statutes that you mentioned
is just outside of where we live here in Atlanta, Rome, Georgia,
you know, in allegiance with the city named after, constructed
(08:02):
such a statue. So I believe in downtown Rome there's
one of those I forget what the wolf's name, but
that that giant wolf, and there's a statue of the
two little infants kind of reaching up and trying to
drink from her. But Rome, Georgia not founded by feral children.
Unconfirmed There is another example sort of again, this is
(08:26):
one that we don't know if it's true or not,
but that's sort of a myth, the feral child. And
this is the more medieval one, Valentine and Orson, and
unlike Romulus and Remus, they're separated. So the deal was
was that they were European twins, so vague, we don't
even know where in Europe there just European. Uh, they
were lost in a forest. Valentine was found, however, and
brought back to civilization where Orson was not. So you
(08:49):
had that dichotomy, right, And Orson was supposedly raised by bears,
and he became this wild man who just terrorized all
the villages and abducted women and children. And so I
suppose that was, you know, a cautionary tale of the
difference between man and animal or or what would happen
to man without civilization. Yeah, I mean we see that
in so many beast man monster man myths throughout history
(09:11):
to just trying to figure out what is what's the
line between man and beast and and that's also exploring
in the idea of the feral child. And of course
there's Mowgli and Peter Pan. You know, I don't think
we really need to go into those too much because
you know, they're mostly known from those Disney movies. I'm
sure the the actual Mowgli and Peter Pan from the
literature that they're those movies are based on, are significantly different,
(09:34):
but the idea is essentially the same. Right. Yeah, if
you're like me and you've seen Jungle Book, you know,
thousand times in the last couple of years, you you
really don't need a lesson in what happens. But raised
by wolves, it winds up living with humans again and
everything's okay. So we've got a few examples of feral
children that I don't want to say that this is
(09:55):
well documented because some of these go back quite a
ways and there's a little bit of I think fictionalization
in some of the accounts. And the first one would be,
and this is sort of one of the most famous
of feral children is wild Peter and the idea, uh well,
at least the story goes is that it was July
(10:16):
of seventy four and outside of Hamlin, Germany, a naked
twelve year old boy stumbled out of the forest and
people saw him. He only ate grass and leaves, and
whenever people tried to approach him, he would run up
into the trees and hide. He totally couldn't speak, He
had no language capacity whatsoever. Um. People assumed that he
(10:38):
was a feral child who was raised in the woods
by animals. It was later speculated, like like much later
by a German anthropologist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, that Peter
was actually a mentally disabled child who had just been
abandoned by somebody within the village or somebody nearby, and
he'd only been out there for maybe less than a
(10:59):
week before he was discovered by other people. Um. Apparently,
some of the accounts indicate that Peter had a defect
with his tongue, which made it difficult for him to speak.
So the idea here being was that, like, you know,
potentially Peter wasn't what we think of as a wild
child ferald child at all. He might have just been,
(11:19):
you know, a mentally disabled child who was abandoned by
his parents, but then was was refound and his story
is remarkable but also somewhat sad, so brace yourselves. Um.
He somehow went from being discovered in Germany two living
with King George the first in England. The literature doesn't
(11:41):
really fill the gaps in on that one, so I'm
curious what goes on between that time. The idea was
that they treated him as a quote unquote guest, but
basically he was kind of like a court jester. They
made him dress and fancy clothes. He sat at the
dinner table. They thought it was very funny because he
couldn't talk and because he had bad manners. But what
happened was he ended up, you know, gorging on all
(12:02):
the food presented in front of him and not having
the you know, appropriate etiquette for for court life. So
he was taken away, uh, and he briefly escaped, then
he was brought back to London. They kept him around
as sort of like a humorous object for court life. Uh. Caroline,
the Princess of Wales, had him moved to her own
residence where he was basically kept as a pet. She
(12:24):
didn't refer to him as such as a pet from
what I understand, but the conditions he was kept in
were as such. Uh. He slept on the floor, he
was made to dress in a tailor made suit every morning.
But as you can imagine, you know, he didn't really
like that. Try to get out. Um, he was given
a tutor, and the tutor wasn't trying to teach him,
you know, how to be a civilized person, how to
(12:46):
how to acclimate to society. They taught him tricks that
he could do for the ladies in court. Uh. And
the only words he could say were his own name
and a garbled version of King George. So seventeen, this
tutor says, you know what, he is unable to receive
instruction from me any longer, and lots of Uh, I
(13:09):
don't want to see scientists, I want to say intellectuals.
Maybe it sort of assess him and write papers about
him and observe him over this period of time they're
trying to decide. It's that period of time where they're
trying to decide whether he has a soul or not.
That's the thing they're the most interested in. So this
gets back to that animal versus human. Yeah. So he's
(13:30):
basically kept along all this time at best as a curio,
if not just pure spectacle. Yeah, exactly. And after the
sort of spectacle war out and it was no longer
amusing to the royalty, they sent him to a farm
in Hurtfordshire. I believe it's how you pronounce it. I'm
sure there's a much better British pronunciation for that. Uh.
(13:51):
And basically they they've had a pension set aside for him,
a thirty five pounds a year to take care of him,
so they weren't, you know, entirely heartless. But he never
learned to speak. He escaped multiple times, there were incidents
where you know, he had run ins with villagers. Um.
They eventually fitted him with a leather collar that had
an inscription of his name and address on it, and
(14:13):
he died at age seventy two in sev That is
a depressing story, depressing life to try and imagine, Yeah,
I'm part of me. Wonders if given you know the
nature of how he how he ended up and outside
of this village in Germany, if he even understood somewhat
(14:34):
of the m hmm, the depressing nature of how he
was being treated. Um. But like I said, there were
many researchers who were studying him at the time, and
the idea was basically, at that period of time they
considered themselves going through a scientific revolution and that this
was a means of rational investigation. So by all means
(14:55):
we should we should study Peter. I mean, I guess
one could argue that he was he received better treatment
than he certainly could have given other circumstances. I think
that's true, Yeah, especially when we see some of these
other examples as we go through UM. One of the
intellectuals of the time, Daniel Defoe, defined Peter as this
was the guy who said he's an entirely separate species.
(15:16):
So he made up a species called homo for friends,
a species of wild men. And then this is important
to what we're gonna talk about later with language. Others
thought that Peter showed what is referred to sometimes as
a critical window for development and children. So there's this
period of time roughly between I think about six months
and four years old, where there's this window of development
(15:38):
where children are, you know, they're like sponge, your your
son is about that age, and they're absorbing everything around
them and they're learning language, and language subsequently leads to culture,
which you know, I think is a huge way of
how we define humanity. Yeah, pretty pretty much who we are.
Like the troupe we end up coming back to and
we'll come back to again again in this episode is
language as the software, the operating system for the human brain. Yeah,
(16:03):
and Peter didn't have that. He only had the survival
instincts to basically eat and sleep. Uh. And so you know,
there was a lot of speculation about what this all
meant and what it philosophically implied for humanity. And then,
like I said, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach came along and was like,
I actually think that this was a mentally disabled child.
(16:24):
And you're all, you know, speculating about nothing other than
that this poor child was abandoned by his parents. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Alright,
(16:45):
we're back now. The next one we're gonna mention here briefly,
Victor of Avron. Yeah, this one he was found just
uside of France and eighteen hundred. Yeah, he was. He
was studied by and written off by a physician, uh,
Jeanne Mark Gaspard Todd, and he eventually gave up and
asked his housekeeper to care for Victor. But some of
(17:08):
you maybe remember may remember Victor from Tropos nineteen seventy
film The Wild Child, which gives um, you know this
fictionalized account of their relationship and his work with the Victor. Yeah,
I haven't seen that, but from what I was reading
about the the case of Victor was basically that, you know,
and we see this in a lot of cases of
(17:29):
these Ferald children, that there's some intellectual curiosity at first
and then they just kind of give up. Yeah, because
once because ultimately you're left with the hard problem of
what do you do with somebody who you can't bring
them back. You can't just you can't turn them into
a fully functional, um, you know, member of society at
this point. Yeah, and the care is more difficult than
(17:50):
what they believe that they signed up for, right, I mean,
everybody wants to save today and then everyone wants to
figure out what's going on. But yeah, it's it's a lengthy,
lengthy proces this. But supposedly Victor, you know, did have
some progress at least compared to Peter, and he knew
how to read simple words and uh, he never really
eventually learned how to talk, but um, you know, he
(18:12):
had some capacity for understanding symbols. It seemed like, yeah,
and this is where we we see it to refer
to as quote the forbidden experiment, because that's the thing
about this. You could never create a language less child
to study. I mean you could, but it would be
the most heinous thing ever, like well beyond most, uh
(18:33):
most things that make lists of the evil experiment. And
so to find it you have to you just have
to have something fall into your lap. You have to
find a child that has been abandoned or neglected to
a severe level. And then of course you're dealing with
additional behavioral constraints. Yeah, And that's what's somewhat perverse about this, right,
(18:53):
is that it is always tragic when when a child
like this is found, and yet at the same time,
intellectuals jump at the opportunity to be able to define
the difference between humanity and and that other state, that
animalistic state, because it's so rarely comes along for them
to study. We've also got another example. These are just
(19:18):
a few. We didn't have much deep dive research on them,
but there was one one child named memy LeBlanc and
she was the Savage Girl of Champagne. She appeared in
France and seventeen thirty one. She's dressed in animal skins again,
was wild and resisted capture. Eventually she acclimated to society
and she was actually able to tell her story, and
(19:39):
what she said was that she had been sold into
slavery when she was a little girl, and she's survived
a shipwreck and then she and I'm assuming this girl
was also on the shipwreck with her. An African girl
of the same age survived in the wild together and
they parted ways. And that was when Memy I think,
eventually was found by civilization. Then there's sent humilia. Yeah,
(20:02):
I think that's right. Yeah, Ukrainian girls supposedly raised by
wild dogs and eight raw meat. Not a lot of
details here beyond that. And in six Ivan Mushakov was
found in Moscow. He was a four year old who
wandered away from his home and ended up living in
the streets with a pack of wild dogs. But eventually
(20:22):
the authorities captured him and you know, forced him back
into society. Well, I mean, I don't know about forced,
but it sounds like he was enjoying from what I
read that he enjoyed being with the dogs. Well, yeah,
I mean, little kids love the dog. This kind of
gets back and just the appeal of it, Like you see,
little boys want to take all their clothes off and
run around in pet dogs, you know. Yeah, and I
(20:44):
think that to a certain extent, the dogs allowed him
to be their pack leader to write, so that was
probably enjoyable for a four year old. There are always
some some interesting dogs toys coming out of Moscow. I
want to say, that's also where there were tales of
dogs using the subways wild dogs, Yeah, with board a
train and take it to their stopping. But I I
(21:05):
heard about that recently. Yeah, I can't remember if it
was in Moscow or not, but yeah, that's definitely a thing.
And sometimes maybe this explains that they have they were
taught by Ivan in how to read the public transportation system.
All right, so this is we're we're going to talk
now about Genie. All the examples before this were what
(21:26):
we think of as wild children, children who were raised
in the wild, either on their owner with animals. Right,
Genie is our first, uh, concrete example in the twenty
century of one of these children who was abused and
basically abandoned or at least isolated, uh, and subsequently was
(21:47):
thought of as a feral child. Yeah, and it's it's
a sad story and we're not gonna be able to
even cover all the angles on it because it involves,
you know, the media, it involves well meaning scientists, well
meaning caregivers, and just the the lifetime care of an individual.
There's an excellent documentary that came out years ago from Nova,
The Secret of the Wild Child, and uh I I
(22:09):
embedded a YouTube of it in in a cliff in
a in a post that I'll link to on the
landing page for this episode. So that's a great place
to go. That post is up on stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com right yesterday. Okay, So it's a
wonderful documentary that gets into you know, all the if
you really want, you know, a full deep dive into
the history of Genie, we're gonna we're gonna provide as
(22:29):
much information as we can here, but you know, we
need to cover the whole instance of feral children. Yeah.
So this takes place in Arcadia, California. Genie and that's
not her real name, of her case name, UM because
you know, it's like the mythical Genie, an emergent creature
without a human childhood, just born in ninety seven UM.
(22:51):
And she still resides in California as a ward of
the state, but she suffered from a a very traumatic childhood,
if you can even call it a childhood locked in
a room, tied for to a potty chair for most
of her life. Yeah. One instance I read was that
she was chained to it and that she slept there.
(23:12):
She sat and slept on this potty chair like she's
basically kept in an upstairs room for the first thirteen
years of her life. And and a lot of it
had to do, I mean, if not most of it
had to do with her father being a rather disturbed individual,
um who who thought that she was retarded and that
(23:33):
and that she would die before she reached the age
of twelve. Yeah. I think his idea was like he
would sort of hide her from society until she passed away. Yeah,
and then I suppose he would, you know, take her
body away in the middle of the night and bury
her somewhere. I'm not sure it was very deranged. It
seemed to be from by account that we're looking at,
(23:53):
um dominating abusive towards not only her but also the mother,
who was partially blind and suffered from some ailments as well. Yeah.
And her claim was that she didn't really have a
whole lot of say in it that that she could
there wasn't much that she could do, and that she
was as much of a victim as Genie was. Uh.
And then my other understanding here is that when when
(24:15):
Genie was found, uh, they did you know, obviously, they
did some tests right when they found her, and they
she had abnormal brain waves which suggested that she had
brain damage from birth. Uh. Not everybody agreed on this though,
because later on in life, Genie showed improvement when she
was taken to you know, some she had a long story,
(24:39):
but when she was taken care of by caring families, Uh,
she showed improvement. And in most cases of birth brain
damage like that, that's not the case. So there's some
dispute over this. Yeah that you know, there's so many
additional factors involved in this one, because again she was
she deprived of language, but deprived of love, deprived of
(25:00):
environmental stimuli. She was she was punished for making noise
of apparently, you know, beaten from making noise throughout her life.
It was it was a real effort to try and
get sounds out of her. And I believe it one
case later later on, she was in a foster home
environment and she was punished for vomiting, so she backtracked
(25:21):
after that. She basically was taught through punishment that opening
her mouth was wrong, and so she did everything that
she could to either not speak or open her mouth
at all. Or so not only was she mute because
she never learned language properly, but because she was basically
taught not to talk, she had a very They described
(25:43):
it as a bunny walk when they found her. Apparent,
you know, she was strapped to this, uh this this
potty chair. Apparently the way that she walked was sort
of like a rabbit, but with both feet she would
jump forward. Yeah. The footage of her in the documentary,
she she moves very mysteriously, you know, and you know,
(26:04):
and it all kind of plays into into the appeal
of her case is that she's she looks like a
normal child, you know, she looks there's there's something kind
of haunting about her though, because there's anotherness to her
as well and heart breaking. Yeah, exactly, it's that um right, exactly,
it's it seems alien instead of human, and so there's
(26:26):
something about it that that turns you off. But then
at the same time, it's such a heartbreaking story that
you just can't help but feel horrible for her. What
eventually happened was the father shot himself basically right after
they took her away. Yeah, the media really got involved
in this pretty quickly. And and and there's actually a
(26:48):
connection to Victor in this because that Tropoe movie we
mentioned debut exactly one week after Genie was discovered, So
in no time at all, just you know, full fledged
media circus and this guy's atrocities that have been revealed
to the world. Yeah. I wasn't alive then, but I
suspect that at this period of time in nineteen seventy,
(27:08):
that Ferald children were a hot topic in the media
at the time, probably in newspapers and television reports and such.
Uh So, Jeannie, you know, like like we said, she
went on to have a lot, She was researched a lot,
but that she also was seen as a modern exploration
of trying to figure out how language acquisition worked, what
(27:31):
was going on with this abnormal child psychology that she had.
And you know, some of the professionals that dealt with her,
I think sort of again like we talked about with Victor,
they saw it as sort of their mission to rescue her.
But then they realized how difficult it was and either
gave up on her or there were some accusations. I
(27:51):
don't know if you saw this that that there were
instances where some of them were trying to get media
attention by taking care of her. Yeah, there's so many,
so many factors sort of tugging apart this situation with
this girl up. You know, a very real girl at
the center of it all um, And he's worth noting
to the At one point she did wind up with
her mother again, like her father recovered enough to where
(28:13):
and was cleared of abuse charges and apparently tried for
a limited amount of it didn't work with my understanding,
and then she that was when she entered multiple foster
homes right after that, I believe, and some of those
foster homes were abusive, and that was where she was
abused for vomiting one time. Uh. So she was seen
(28:35):
as a perfect opportunity to test out this language, this
idea about language development that is called critical period hypothesis.
And I believe that this was first coined by is
his name Eric Lennenberg or Lenniburg Um. Yeah, I believe
it was proposed by a pair of a neurologist wild
(28:57):
Her Penfield and co author Lamar Roberts in fifty nine,
but then it was popularized in the seventies by Eric Lindbergh. Okay,
that's what I read. So the idea is that of
the critical period hypothesis is similar to that window that
I was talking about earlier, which is that in the
first few years of life it is a crucial period
for human beings to learn language and to be presented
(29:19):
with the you know, appropriate stimuli to join civilization. Yeah,
and Linburg helped popularize this. He argued that, yeah, the
first language acquisition relies on neuroplasticity, and if you make
it to puberty without it, then you'll never have full
mastery of a language. And you know, therefore you can
(29:40):
have a limited ability to even uh, not only communicate,
but also to process the world around you. And like
you're saying, this is not something that we can experiment with, right,
we can't take a child and say, you know what,
we're purposely not going to teach this child. We're gonna
isolate this child and not teach them language for four
years just to see what happened. Yeah, the best, generally
(30:01):
you can do is is see how normal children acquire
language and study delays and other children. But for a
full blown case like this that you just have to
wait for something horrible to happen. So let's talk about
how Noam Chomsky comes into this. Uh not in terms
of I don't believe Chomsky had any direct interaction with
(30:22):
Genie's case, but that Chomsky it was. You know, many
of you probably know Chomsky as a political dissident and theorist.
I feel like that's what he's he's more known as
these days. It might come as a surprise to some
people to realize that he was linguished. In fact, he right,
that was what he was most known for when I
was in school. That that was how I was introduced
(30:42):
to him, as was that he was one of the
most regarded linguists. And he was he taught at m
I t if he doesn't, I don't think he's still
teaching there, but he was teaching there when I lived
in New England ten years ago. Yeah, and he he
had this argument that we acquire language not just because
we're taught at but because we're born with the principles
of language, that it's in our genes. So that so
(31:06):
this would be the nature side of the nature nurtural
coin when it comes to linguistics. Yeah, Chomsky called this
a universal grammar. Uh. And the idea is that as
children were hardwired to have and this is an important term,
an instinct for language. And this concept dominated linguistics for
(31:28):
forty years. But as we're gonna you know, discover as
we go along, it was wrong. Um. So it's important
to consider this as we're thinking about these feral children
and how they either did or did not learn language
and how that affected them during the you know, the
critical window Lendenberg talks about. But there, let's let's acknowledge
(31:49):
up front, like the Chomsky's uh, theory of universal grammar
has not panned out. Yeah, because we've yet to find
a universal framework across all like seven thousand odd different languages.
You know, a child from one nation can be raised
in another with no difficulty. Um. And in the and
yet we see no you know, real clear synchronicity in language.
(32:10):
But it's it's an appealing theory because it helps explain
the wonders of rapid language acquisition that we see in
children where they're they you know, I've I've seen it
in my own son's life where he goes from this
this you know, largely mute little creature, and then suddenly
he's saying words, and then he's building things with those words.
He's building concepts, he's getting ideas and expressing them. Um.
(32:32):
So this is one of the key truth series that
our brains really are language ready in a limited sense.
I mean, we have the right sort of working memory
to process sentence level syntax. We have an unusually large
prefrontal cortex that gives us the associated learning capacity to
use symbols, and our bodies are made for language. Our
learn x is set low at least, you know, compared
(32:52):
to other primates, allowing us to expel and control the
passage there. The position of the tiny hyroid bone in
the jaw gives us fine muscular control over our mouths
and tongues to form all those words and to make
you know, upwards of a hundred forty four distinct speech sounds.
So even if we're not born with the linguistic software,
(33:13):
we do come factory ready with much of the linguistic hardware. Yeah.
So exactly that hardware is the important part in distinguishing
that it is not an instinct right, we're physically built
for it. By the time children are three to four
years old, they've acquired the elements of language from around them.
And that's regardless, like let's keep this in mind of
(33:35):
all the different languages that exist in human culture. That's
regardless of what that language is. It's grammar system, it's
sound system. Children can acquire that. But by six months old,
and those of you with children out there experience with
with infants will know this, they're already category categorizing sounds
(33:55):
of their language right there, picking up on the sounds
that are around them and trying to figure out what
they made and and and putting them into boxes. Um.
By their first year, children have honed in on what
we call phonology, and this is just the sounds and
patterns of you know, a particular language. They're used basically
as symbols around them, and you know, the vocabulary of
(34:15):
young children is essentially a reflection of what their everyday
lives are. Right. So I would imagine that fashion your
son is probably not having a whole lot of moments
where he's thinking deeply about different times in history or
or space that's far away from him, right, or some
kind of abstraction. He's probably thinking about the things that
are immediately in front of it, Like if he's thinking
(34:36):
about the past, he's saying, remember that time that we
saw a dead spider, that that sort of thing, But
not so much like I wonder, you know, how come
the Mongols weren't able to invade Japan exactly. We don't
develop that capacity until much later. But the vocabulary is
more immediate for us. And language in humans as a species,
you know, it's essentially similar in all of us, um
(35:00):
what we need. So we should distinguish this as we're
talking along here and using feral children as an example
for this. True language requires that the speaker is able
to make new utterances and combine or expand upon the
forms that they already know, right, And so we think
of this a syntax when we're when we're sort of
breaking down language. See, these are the rules for how
(35:22):
to combine words into acceptable phrases or sentences, how you
transform existing words. And this is something we sort of
learn instinctively along the way, right. I mean, it's it's
why a parent reciting some words that it that it
is learned. It's not talking, it's really saying these words Yeah.
In fact, you cannot teach true language to another species. Uh.
(35:43):
We have examples of many animals, primates especially that are
capable of learning cues or symbolic communication. Lots of primates
use American sign language, but that's not language technically, that's
symbolic communication. Uh. There's a difference, and language certainly goes
(36:03):
well beyond just simply communicating exactly. Yeah. And so you know,
part of this is, this is why it got to
the heart of the sort of human versus animal difference,
is that to learn language, you have to be in
a society. It requires that you have emotional motivation and
social interaction. Like for instance, we know that you cannot
(36:27):
just put an infant in front of a television and
they'll learn language. They will hear the more themes and
the phonology that's going on through the television. But because
they're not getting any actual social interaction, there's no give
and take there, they won't learn the language. And so
that's why these feral children in the in instances they
(36:48):
have no capacity for language, and and oftentimes they've gone
past that window so they can no longer learn it either.
One last thing I want to say about language and
this is another sort of you know, tie end to
the idea of that some of these feral children were
mentally disabled, but they just didn't have sort of the
categorization for that at the time. Is that, Um, there
(37:08):
are several areas of the brain. We used to just
think it was one part of the brain broke as
area that was responsible for language, but we know now
several special areas. There's Wernicke's area. There's another part that's
called the I'm gonna mess this up. Everybody who's listening
to me on stuff to bully your mind now is
probably used to me butchering Latin that the RQ it facilious.
(37:29):
Uh So those are in different parts of our brain,
and so there doesn't appear to be just like one
dedicated spot. So of course then if there's brain damage
and at birth, then there's potentially going to be a
difficulty for both learning language and for um developing you know,
simple use and culture later on. Now to come back
(37:51):
to Genie's case, Um, she did acquire some language in
her life. She used it to make sense of past
and president and express herself, but she never like fully
communicated and certainly this was all of this was was
made more problematic by her you know, her aggression at
various times in her life and just the overall dramatic nature.
(38:15):
So what that sounds like to me is is symbolic
communication but not necessarily language. Right. She she didn't possess
the ability to transform words and into syntactical structures. Uh,
but she was able to communicate still the same way
like a you know, a dolphin can or a chimpanzee can.
And uh, you know her case to this day, writers
(38:37):
continue to analyze it, pick it apart. She's no longer
actively studied, as I understand it. She just resides in
a home um somewhere in California and leads a quiet
life there. And it's explored in that documentary. Of course,
it's her case. Is it's kind of controversial due to
(38:57):
you know, so many people trying to inject themselves and
and also a lot of them I think we're trying
to do the right thing, but those agendas kind of
become crossed here and there, where one person really wants
to to to get to the root of her problem,
to study what's happening, and another just wants to see
her cared for in an environment that is not not
(39:18):
going to jar her confuser. And of course during this
period of time, this was when I think that there
was a lot of debates in American politics about how
much tax money should be going towards supporting mental health care.
And so in nineteen seventy four, the National Institute of
Mental Health provoked her treatments funding. And this was when
she went back to her mother. Her mother was acquitted
(39:39):
of all the charges. Again, like it didn't work out
with her mother, she went into foster system. Bad things happen.
As far as we know now right, a private investigator
found her at some kind of facility in California for
for my understanding, it's for mentally underdeveloped adults. So she's
being cared for, Okay. So actually, there's another example of
(40:03):
very similar to Genie, from as close enough as two
thousand five, and this is a young girl named Danielle
Crockett Um. Some referred to her as the girl in
the window because of that was how she was discovered.
People saw her in the window at this home she
was in Florida, and when she was a six year old,
she was found isolated in a small room within her
(40:23):
mother's home and the officer that found her said that
this was the worst case of child neglect he'd seen
in twenty seven years on the force. And I won't
go into the details here, but it was absolutely filthy.
It was just horrifying the description of this place that
she was living in. And I think, like Genie, I
don't know that she was chained down, but she was
(40:45):
kept in a room by herself. When they found her,
she was unclothed and emaciated. She was covered in bites
and sores. She couldn't communicate at all. She couldn't even
eat solid food. And the most telling thing was that
she didn't recognize any kind of communication from other human
beings or even affection. And then what's important about this
(41:05):
is severely autistic children still respond to affection, but she
wasn't responding at all. And so as a result of this,
her imprisonment was defined as being something called environmental autism.
So it was that like the circumstances of how she
was raised up until that point basically generated the same
(41:26):
symptoms that she would have if she was autistic. You know,
this brings to mind research we looked at in the
past about about just the effects of isolation on adults,
you know, the individuals who have already made it through
their their childhood, uh and acquired language. But but just
to put a regular, otherwise healthy adult in an environment
(41:47):
of very limited stimuli has has kind of a disastrous
effect on the psyche. Yeah, absolutely, I know just for myself,
Like if I stay in that house for too long,
I have a tendency to hold up while I'm doing work,
and but I can easily go a couple of days
on end without leaving the house. And you don't realize it,
but it starts to affect you. Utah. I mean, our
(42:08):
brains evolved to allow us to live in a world
of you know, a various stimuli of fixed and moving objects,
and so when you deny it those things, it begins
to non itself. You see things that aren't there, You
are things that are not there, and uh, you know,
and that's again, that's an adult. Now imagine that scenario
for a child that is in the process of absorbing
(42:30):
all the data about the world they live in and
she has no other example. Yeah. Well, the good news
about Danielle Crockett is that she was adopted by a
very loving family. From what it sounds like and made
significant developmental progress in the years since. So it's been
ten years since she was found, So she's probably sixteen now,
and she lives in Tennessee with her adopted parents, and
(42:53):
they're caring for her and and and they're dedicated to
being with her for the rest of her life. Good good, Well,
hopefully that that will continue to look up. I think
it will. Yeah, it was reading in particular. There's a
there's a really great piece uh about Danielle um that
hopefully we can link to in the in the show notes.
But there's they they at length interview the family that
(43:15):
adopted her, and it's um, it's it's it's heartwarming, all right.
So that's just the first part of our exploration into
feral children and the acquisition of language and what language
does as this software for the hardware of the brain.
And we're gonna pick it up in a second episode. Yeah,
we're gonna talk more about the science of feral children,
(43:36):
focusing in on language and child development. Now that you've
had these examples, you know, both mythical and real life
that we can work from, now we can really dive
deep into the science of it. In the meantime, head
on over to stuff to blow your mind dot com.
That's where you will find uh all the podcast episodes,
the the blog post videos, links out to our social
(43:58):
media accounts like Tumbler and Facebook and it or would
blow the mind on all of those and uh and again.
The landing page for this episode will include links to
some of the studies we've talked about, as well as
related content on the site. Yeah, and you know, please
listen to the second episode. But you know, let us
know anything that you've learned about feral children over the years,
maybe you perhaps have done some work in child development yourself.
(44:19):
We'd love to hear more about it. You can reach
us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com.
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Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!