A blind girl sat on the steps of a bank with a small box by his feet. She held up a signboard which showed: “I am blind, I cant see, please help.” There were only five coins in the box.A woman was passing by. She took ten coins from her pocket and dropped them into the box. She then took the board, turned it around, and wrote some different words. She put the signboard back so that everyone who is passing by would be able to see the new words.
Soon the small box began to come up to the brim. A lot of people have thrown money to the blind girl. This day, the woman who had changed the signboard who came to see how things were. The blind girl recognized her sound of steps and asked, “Were you the one who changed my word today? What did you write?”
The woman replied, “ I said the same but in a different way. I only beautified your truth”. What she had written was: “Today is a beautiful day and I cannot see it.”
Language manifests in our brain and ignites the forces necessary for our happiness. The words we hear enter into our brain and make us ready for action. For example, when a patient receives suggestions from his medical man, that would be just an information for him that how to handle his ailment. But if the same patient would be visited by a be loved who can capsulate the same words in care and love for him, he would be able to resist his sickness and it will enhance his immunity as well.
According to Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman, words can literally change your thinking.
In their book, Words Can Change Your Brain, they write: “a single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress.”
Positive words, such as “friendship” “peace” and “love,” can alter the expression of genes, strengthening areas in our frontal lobes and promoting the brain’s cognitive functioning. They enhance the motivational focus of the brain and convert it into action, and so build resiliency…..
All of us know that just like food and water, language is vital for human being. Basically, language has three basic functions.Informative, Expressive and Communicative. We built relationship through language and create art for aesthetic satisfaction. One way or another our whole life revolves around the need for a language or languages. In a common man mind, some important questions about language always arises,.e.g. Why beautifully coined and delivered words or sentences pacify our soul and satisfy our inner self?. In other word we can say that What language do with the brain? Research claims that there are two primary centers which are located on the left side of the brain. Brocas’ area which is tasked with speech utterances and Wernicke s’area which decodes and understands the speech. Language received in brain do not come alone. It has many associates e.g. accent, pitch of sound, cultural tools, identity, rhetoric and art etc.
A study lead by researchers from Lund University in Sweden found that Wernicke s’ area which main role is to decode and understand, has a large capacity for varieties of words and phrases that are liked by the human ears and mind. This area of human brain is internally linked with active and passive memories and is always helpful in comprehension. Another study by Medical News today found evidence to put forward that the more languages and terms we learn, the easier our brain find it to process. A multilingual individual will be socially more active than a monolingual living in any part of the world. Varieties of languages and varieties in language always enhance human brain performance.
A Language always follows rules and has a defined structure but deviation from the rule of a language creates varieties in language and has a pleasant effect on human mind. Advertisement is one of such example. IN advertisements, there are many deviations to attract the target audeince.These deviations in language, basically effect the brain of the customers to buy the product.
Research at the University of California has shown that areas of the brain involved in decision making and emotion, process experience significantly for the higher levels of activity when we look at advertisements of logical persuasion.
So the function of language is not confined to communicate massages only, rather it encompasses more complicated facets of human life which can meet human beings artistic and emotional needs as well. Language itself is versatile and has immense capacity to satisfy communication needs of this wonderful creation of Lord. Passing from basic need of communication it travels beyond , and move ahead to the delicacy of expression which can meet the needs of poets and writers. It’s a vast ocean indeed, everyone can plunge into and bring out the pearls to tapestried the patterns of his own choice.
In the light of above facts, we can say that language, when beautified, effects our brain positively. Input of beautiful words can be arranged, created and patterned to receive an output of desired response.
About the author: Qaisar Hayat Khattak is a member of editorial board of The Prelude.
