Pill for learning language

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We learn from the newspaper that Salk Institute researchers recently have found two new drugs, Aicar and GW1516, that improve muscle tone in mice without requiring them to exercise. And that's exactly what all us couch potatoes have been dreaming about–a pill rather than a treadmill. Okay, it hasn't been applied to humans yet, but just you wait.

Aicar works on a user's own genetics, mimicking the effects of exercise and signaling the cells that it has burned the necessary energy and needs to generate more through a process called pharmacological exercise. They say red wine works almost the same way, but you need to drink gallons of it to get the same effect. So why are we reporting this in Language Log?

Because some linguists are already standing in line (unfortunately at the tail end) hoping that the next pharmacological breakthrough will be for them–that the next pill will mimic language-learning genes and make the world gloriously bilingual overnight. Although it is rumored that the much-needed Chinese and Arabic pills are next on the Salk Institute's workbench, some disgruntled linguists remain dead set against the whole idea, largely because they say they prefer the more controversial "drink gallons of red wine" approach. And university language departments, to say nothing of their deans, are already up in arms about their potential loss of foreign language courses and teaching positions.

At the  time of this writing, the future of the language-learning pill is far from rosy. 



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