#lcc10 John R. Harness, Jeannie Ashelin, Tihi Hayslett - Panel A Na’vi, a Dothraki, and a Klingon Walk into a Trinkejo…

https://conlang.org/lcc10/#fmri
Jeannie: https://learnnavi.org, Learn Na’vi Discord Server http://discord.gg/LearnNavi
John: Twitter @cartweel, https://cartweel.neocities.org, Klingon Wiki http://klingon.wiki/En/JohnHarness
Tihi: Languages of Ice and Fire Community Discord https://discord.gg/SP9uMYM2

In November of 2022, neurolinguistics researchers at MIT invited speakers of Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, and Na’vi to participate in an fMRI brain scan study. That research project seeks to understand the way conlangs work in the brain, and to help neuroscientists compare brain activity during different modes of communication (languages, puzzle solving, and gesture interpretation).

The panelists for this presentation–each a speaker of a different constructed language–all participated in this study. They spend some of the session time describing their experiences at MIT and their thoughts on the study’s preliminary findings.

Additionally, the MIT fMRI study represented a seemingly unprecedented meeting of participants from various conlang speaking communities. Over beer and vegan food, these panelists met and began to compare their experiences as conlang speakers.

Building upon this preliminary gathering, the majority of the session continues discussions started then: How are various conlang speaker communities alike, and how are they different? How have these communities built themselves, and how do they sustain themselves? How have speakers of various constructed languages adapted their languages to the needs of a community?

References

Ev Fedorenko et al., forthcoming; see MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brains on conlangs https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2022/12/12/brains-on-conlangs/
https://mcgovern.mit.edu/profile/ev-fedorenko/
https://evlab.mit.edu/

—
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOSXnL88bvWv5AAOWy43J7Jy-Sh7gSF5B
Join the LCS: https://conlang.org/become-a-member/
Captions by @stenoknight.