HEY YOU!: A man from La Gomera, Canary Islands, speaks whistled Spanish.© ROLEX AWARDS/JACQUES BELAT (IN J.MEYER, WHISTLED LANGUAGES. SPRINGER 2015)
Onur Güntürkün left his native Turkey decades before he learned of whistled Turkish—a means of communication practiced in a remote region of the country. Güntürkün, a cognitive neuroscientist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, was on sabbatical in Australia a few years ago when a colleague there mentioned that he had visited these villages where whistling is used to converse over long distances. “From the first moment, it was clear to me this was what I needed to conduct critical experiments,” he says.
Güntürkün studies the asymmetries that exist in the brain, and the dogma in his field, he explains, has been that the left hemisphere is dominant in processing language. The right hemisphere plays a smaller role, primarily involving the interpretation of the prosodic ...
