Speaking in tongues

‘Speaking in Tongues’, or glossolalia, is one of those fascinating things that first got me interested in the brain. At church, as a kid, you’d see people close their eyes, raise their hands in the air, and start murmuring in languages unknown, filled with some force they couldn’t explain. Like Walton to Margaret, their

swelling heart involuntarily pours itself out thus.

What’s interesting about glossolalia is that it’s an almost exclusively religious phenomenon, but a very widespread one. Most often reported in Christian texts as early as Gnosticism (around the second century), but with plenty of records in Vodun, Paganism and Shamanism, which predate Christianity quite substantially,¹ and documented across ancient Greece, Egypt, Assyria, and beyond.

Anything this widespread, you’d think, would branch out further than religious expression. If it cuts across so many religions and times and places, why wouldn’t it cut across other things too? Maybe it’s just a particular expression of some altered state of mind? The answer is, maybe not, and maybe what the literature on brain and behaviour tells us about it leaves us with a more interesting question.

¶When I get that feeling…

Let’s start with what people feel, to get a sense of the thing. People who speak in tongues will almost invariably report that the speaking is involuntary. More importantly, they’ll make it clear that it’s different from other involuntary actions, like blinking or breathing. People might also experience euphoric or ecstatic states whilst practicing. But the most important aspect, I think, is the sense of being ‘possessed’, or ‘filled up’ by some force. The speaking in tongues, they would tell you, comes from something that is not them, but is within them, and needs to be released.

Now, the obvious explanation is that this is some kind of pathology. Some kind of positive psychotic symptom, perhaps. Unfortunately for such skeptics, this explanation wouldn’t get you very far. Most reports of glossolalia simply don’t meet any of the criteria very nicely.

And there’s plenty of objectively measurable brain activity going on to show that it’s not just being ‘put on’, that matches peoples’ subjective self-reports. Here’s a quick rundown of some results of a series of neuroimaging work:

• The brain’s primary language areas aren’t active and the areas responsible for conscious or unconscious use of those areas aren’t lit up properly either. So when they’re doing it, they aren’t using any language that they know of.
• There is a decrease of activity in regions of the frontal lobe that we typically associate with voluntary ‘controlly’-type behaviour, which matches the feelings of involuntariness.
• There are some other areas involved in this too - the thalamus (a sort of relay station for the brain) lights up when we’re having a conversation, but is dim during glossolalia. Also an area known to be responsible for the perception of loss of sense of self (the TPJ; in e.g. out of body experiences, trance-like states, etc), is acting normally, which supports the reports that this phenomenon is different to other, superficially similar, involuntary behaviours.
• Structures that have instrumental roles in our emotions (e.g. the amygdala and the cingulate cortex) also change pretty dramatically which is almost certainly linked to those feelings of euphoria.

So it doesn’t correspond very well to any known pathology, and the brain is definitely doing something different to normal speech that roughly corresponds to what we might expect from what people say they’re feeling. It also seems to be doing something different to other, apparently similar, altered states of mind. The question is, what is that something?

¶It’s a language that’s native, kind of

The first really interesting thing about the ‘tongue’ that is being spoken is the relationship between it and the native language of the speaker. Felicitas Goodman and later William Samarin spent a while analysing the phonetics of glossolalics across different cultures. Basically, the ‘tongues’ appear to be a re-structuring of the natural sounds that exist in their native languages into words that don’t make sense in that same language; a pseudo-language, much like those spoken between twins or made up by children. So, Japanese glossolalia is going to sound a lot like Japanese, but it’s not Japanese. This finding is more-or-less settled, with little research done on the subject since the 70’s when phonetics was a sexy discipline. But more recently, investigating glossolalia against the, now sexy, aphasia² (a class of neural disorders that affect how people communicate), find more specifically that these glossolalic utterances are like music, with phrases typically of equal duration, pulses that typically begin with consonant sounds, and a primary and secondary stress. This is different to aphasia in two ways. Where aphasia, in which people will sometimes voluntarily produce sounds that are (to their dismay) unintelligable, glossolalia is about the involuntary production of unintelligable sounds. And where this unintelligible aphasia often has little pattern to it, glossolalia typically does.

¶Glossolalia can be learned

So the sounds aren’t under conscious control but they are sounds that we’re already familiar with, and they follow familiar-ish patterns. This all makes more sense when we consider that glossolalia seems like it’s something we learn.

See, while the sounds that are produced come from some involuntary place, the production of the sounds can be initiated and terminated on request, in a way that is very unlike known hypnotic or trance-like states. This fits nicely with our finding that it’s neurally different to these states, but is a little at odds with subjective reports, where people will really feel like this kind of responding is entirely out of their control. What sort of ties this all together is the fact that those same researchers linked above taught some people how to ‘speak in tongues’, simply by showing them clips of people doing it. It’s important to note that the learned speakers wouldn’t share the same motivation to speak in tongues as the speakers who already make glossolalic utterances. It just demonstrates that the activity is straightforward to learn. And now it gets really interesting.

¶Nothing is safe from ‘influencers’

Patterns of glossolalia experienced within groups of speakers are often heavily influenced by those in positions of prominence within those same groups (for instance, famous Pastors or televangelists). From Kildahl’s interesting book on the subject:

The importance of the leader was well illustrated by the fact that the style of glossolalia adapted by the group bore a close resemblance to the way in which the leader spoke

Kildahl The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues

So, not only is glossolalia phonetically similar to a persons native language, it also often sounds the same as everyone else in a group of glossolalics, changing based on prominent speakers. And, as the studies looking at whether glossolalia could be learned linked above, this is true whether people are currently in the group, or if they’re doing it at home, alone. It’s an expression of something unique, but perhaps the glossolalia itself isn’t the unique thing.

¶Where does that leave us?

So, while the order and structure of the sounds glossolalics produce aren’t under conscious control, some important aspect of those things are picked up from other glossolalics. They’re shared in groups, and influenced or ‘shaped’ by prominant speakers that interact with those groups. It might be that this is all some kind of unknown pathology, but so far it doesn’t really fit any known pathological pattern. Nor does it nicely fit the reports of neural activity of more common trance-like states of mind. And in fact, the neural activity patterns that go along with it are generally pretty unique, even from other speech-related phenomena like aphasia.

So it would appear that while glossolalia is clearly not an example of language as we know it, the ‘tongue’ itself might be a learned expression of something. This something, though, appears to be quite unique, and is certainly the product of an altered mind as well as an intrinsically heightened emotional state that appears to be tied almost exclusively to religion, though not any specific religion or any specific culture.

This is a kind of fun place to be left, for people who like there to be space for some magic in the world, because it leaves us with some room in how we go about explaining it from here. If you’re a little boring, you might say it’s simply a release of religious fervour: an entirely artificial phenomenon created and mimicked across time and culture. But, if you’d like something more exciting, you could say that glossolalia is the result of some kind of spiritual energy—some feeling evoked only in the context of connecting to others or something greater than oneself—filling the speaker and flowing from them in a societally acceptable route of expression. Then, where you think that feeling come from must depend entirely upon your faith; either your faith in a higher power or your faith that there is no such thing. Delightful.