For all you German speakers, the latest issue of Der Spiegel has an article about my research. Unfortunately, the full content is not available unless you’re a subscriber, but a friend of mine has translated the preview content. Here’s what it reads in English…
“An American psychologist claims that pictures speak their own language, with the pictures following a fixed grammar. Does the brain perceive ‘Peanuts’ in the same manner as Goethe’s ‘Faust’?
—————–On the day that the pictures learned to speak, Neil Cohn didn’t understand a word. In front of him lay a pile of manga comics that a friend had loaned him. He flipped through the stacks, and was bowled over by what he saw. Neil didn’t speak Japanese, but he read. Picture by picture, he deciphered the story. Hours later his head hurt.
Years later Cohn worked as a comics illustrator, and now as a psychologist, and he sometimes wonders whether that day and the Mangas had something to do with what would become of him. That day, he now believes, he learned a new language; a language that has nothing to do with words.”
The article is actually much longer (2 magazine pages), so if you read Der Spiegel, go check it out!
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