ETP — Episode 4: Beans on Toast
Would you like some beans on toast?
David asked me as he opened the kitchen cupboard, grabbed a couple of tins and placed them on the counter.
What on toast?
Beans, he said, pulling a tin opener out of the drawer.
I scratched my head and looked at the cooktop. No pressure cooker on it. Were the beans frozen? I asked myself. But then again, who puts beans on toast?
David opened the first tin and revealed its bright red content.
Should I open the other tin? He asked.
What for, David? Sorry.
For the beans. Would you like some beans on toast?!
Hey, This is Drix and this is an English Therapy podcast.
I was 19. It was my first week at David’s house. London and the English culture were still rather unusual to me in many senses, but the idea of having some beans on a piece of toast was outlandish. Let me illustrate why, for those of you who are not from Southern Brazil.
[pressure cooker hiss]
I close my eyes and I think of beans. I see some pitch-black grains soaking overnight in a bowl. I see a pressure cooker. I see a piece of pork belly chopped up in tiny pieces. I see a frying pan grilling that pork over the cooktop with some diced onions and a tad of garlic. I see some salt, a stirring of those black grains with those freshly cooked spices. And then they fuse into a gorgeous stew under the pressure in the pot. 45 minutes. You scoop that hot black casserole with a ladle, dark as the night, and pour it over some paper-white boiled rice on a plate. That’s beans to me: a traditional everyday meal for lots of Brazilians. There are no toasts involved, let alone tins with red contents in them. So what on earth does David mean by beans when he asks me if I want some beans on toast?
Here’s what YOU need to know. I had understood every single word in David’s question. I’d been a teacher of English since I was 17, long before I hopped on that plane to London. The words in his question were fine. The context was not. And when it comes to language, context is the almighty dictator.
Take the word bean, for example. On its own it is completely harmless. You hear it and you see a kind of seed, a grain of about the size of a fingernail, somewhat moon-shaped and appearing in various colours, but mostly brown. Have you got it in your mind right now?
So, go ahead and put it in your mouth. Can you bite it? Or will it break a tooth?
You see, it wouldn’t make any sense for David to be having some loose beans like that on a piece of toast, would it? But, come to think of it. Would it make any sense for him to pour some black runny pork-stew on crispy toast either? How would he eat that? How? With a spoon? And if that were so, where’s the pressure cooker? And why is he looking at that red gooey stuff in the tin when he asks me if I want some beans on toast?
I’m lost.
Context falls apart. Language comprehension falls along with it.
I stared blankly at David as my mind flooded with a million images. I was trying to make sense of what he meant by the word “beans” in his question. Unaware of the mental hurricane he had just triggered in my head, David placed a little pan on the stove and poured out the content of the tin into it.
White beans!
The tin was full of soft white beans swimming in what looked like ketchup to me. The storm cleared. The riddle was solved. That evening I learned that, in England, after a long day of work, if one is hungry, one can simply make toast, open up a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, heat it up over the cooktop (or in the microwave oven) and then pour it onto a slice of fresh toast on a plate. Fork in one hand, knife in the other, that’s a meal! Beans on toast. Nothing black on the dish. No pork. No garlic. No pressure cooker! So what were all these images doing whirling up in my head the minute David uttered the word beans to me?
“It was a perfect illusion” [Lady Gaga, Perfect Illusion, Joanne, 2016]
“The story I’m gonna tell you is that our conscious experiences of the world around us and of ourselves within it are kind of controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies.” [Anil Seth, TED talk, 2018, Your Brain Hallucinates your conscious reality]
“Ohhh” [Lady Gaga, Perfect Illusion, Joanne, 2016]
The images were a simulation, a kind of virtual-reality construction of a context, based on my past experiences. Normally, I don’t see a mental simulation because it beautifully matches the world outside my head. I hear a meow. My eyes turn to a furry blob on my sofa. I simulate a cat. I see a cat. It is a cat. There are no clashes between my internal and external contexts. So, I have a unified, congruent and therefore seamless (kind of invisible) perception. That happens all the time to me and to you. Things make sense to us.
But, sometimes, there is a mismatch between our simulations and the world outside. We go for the phone; it is the remote control. We jump away from the snake; it’s only a piece of rope. We hear the rain; it is the air conditioning. We taste lobster; it is chicken. The other night I almost had a heart attack, when I opened my eyes and saw a burglar right next to my bed. Since criminals don’t just stand there watching you sleep, my mental simulation was gradually updated with the memory of me leaving my coat on the chair to dry overnight. This new simulation matched the context more elegantly and the panic was over. The point is that context, the supreme king of understanding, is not only made of what is physically present in front of you. It’s also made of the images and stories simulated in our minds from our memories of the world.
So, when I hear “would you like some beans on toast?”, the context guiding my understanding of those words is not just what’s physically around me like the kitchen table, the digital 8pm shining on the clock over the counter, the smell of toast in the air and David’s hands opening a random tin from the cupboard. But the context is also my mental simulation of black beans with pork and garlic out of a pressure cooker. The context is also the memories of what beans usually are to me, in my personal experience. When those two contexts clashed, my ability to understand collapsed and with it so did my confidence. I panicked! Did I get that right? Did David actually say beans? Or did he say means, or teans, or leans? At first, I knew the words, but now I could no longer make sense of them. I am exposed. The spotlight is on me. How do I respond to his question? My blood pressure goes up. I start sweating. I can’t think straight. My Lizard Brain overtakes me. I’m not going to go into the details of how that happens here because I explain how the Lizard Brain impairs our cognitive abilities in another episode of this podcast and you can check that out later. What is important for you to take away is that understanding happens when you can match the context coming from your senses and the context coming from your memories. This is true for the coat hanging on my chair. This is also true for the word beans.
Okay, now! Stop! Breathe in. Breathe out. This conversation is very complex and if we don’t take it slowly I will lose you. So take a moment, please. Clear your mind. Imagine you’re sitting in an empty room full of light. It’s only you and the room and there is absolute silence. Okay. Now, I will tell you three words in English. Your only job is to pay attention to the image that comes to your mind, okay? Listen to the words and focus on the images in your mind. Here we go:
House.
Car.
Dog.
Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the images in your mind and there’s no way you can describe them to me here. But let me guess. You did not see a large sinister-looking grey house made of wood, like in the Addams Family, did you? You probably imagined something a bit more local to you, something you could easily find if you opened your window and looked outside. The same goes with the words dog and car. When you heard car, you probably saw a Ford sedan of some sort, not a Lamborghini. And when you heard the word dog, it is unlikely that you thought of a chihuahua, and not of a Labrador or something a bit more iconic of dog.
If you’re alone, with your eyes closed in an empty room and I say words like house, car, dog in isolation to you, the only external context you have is the sounds of the words themselves. Nothing else. You can understand them because your ears scan the sequence of sounds in each word, like “hhhhhaaaaauuuussssss”, and this sequence activates your past experiences with that string of sounds. If you’ve lived in Japan most of your life, the house that comes to your mind will be completely different from the house you would see if you were born and raised in Beverly Hills. That is, because you’re listening to these words in isolation, the sounds of the words are the only external context you have. So your internal context, your memories, the images you see, are a kind of average simulation. And there is nothing for them to clash against. So, if you can recognise the sounds, which are the only external context you have, you immediately understand the words by filling in the gap of what they mean based on your past encounters with them. Your mind generates a kind of avatar of that word. What you see is usually a simulation of its most frequent variant. Search that word in the dictionary and you will find that the image in your mind is probably a projection of its most frequent meaning, the one that comes at the top of the list. Go ahead, check it out!
In linguistics, we say that understanding is the result of two different kinds of mental processes that meet each other to create this picture, a bit like Clark Kent is Superman and Superman is Clark Kent. You can’t really separate one from the other. Understanding is therefore a reaction between your senses and your memories. Your external context and your internal context. I like to think of it as the meeting between a spark and gasoline to create a flame. The spark is made of your senses, the things you are touching, the tastes in your mouth, the smells in the air, the sounds hitting your eardrums and the lights coming into your eyes. All of these experiences come from the world outside and they are entering your body right now. Take a minute to observe them. Is the air touching the skin on your face cold? Can you smell anything? How intense is the light hitting your eyes? Do you need sunglasses? It’s like all of these experiences are constantly flowing in from the world around you. They run through your senses nonstop, every second, from the day you are born to the day you die. A neverending sensorial dance with the Earth. In many ways, it’s like this external-context information rises from the ground itself. So, cognitive psychologists categorise these experiences as bottom-up information, because it’s like they’re coming from the Earth to you. The sounds you hear when I say “haaaaauuuusssss” are all bottom-up information. They travel through the air outside, hit your eardrums and enter your brain. If you are reading this podcast on your computer, the external context is different. The light of the letters projected on the screen zaps off and stimulates the retina in your eyes. Whether in sound waves our photons the word “house” is coming to you from the bottom up.
However, the size of the house, the number of windows it has, its colour, the material it is made of… all of this information in your head is not coming from the world outside right now, is it? Come to think of it! So, it must not be coming from your external context. Instead, the characteristics of the house you see in your mind’s eye are being downloaded from an internal context made of your past memories. They are coming from your “mind cloud”, let’s say. Let me explain how this happens.
[The Matrix, 1999]
Child: “Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead, only try to realise the truth…”
Neo: “What truth?”
Child: “There is no spoon”
Neo: “There is no spoon”
Child: “Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends; it is only yourself.”
Woman: “The Oracle will see you now”
Your brain stores information from all your experiences, all the time. This mental archive includes rough memories of all the houses you’ve come across in your life. Which houses have you been in touch with most frequently? What are they like? When you hear the word house, your internal-context cloud of recollections with this word sends information from the top-down. So the spark of the sounds you hear from the bottom-up meets the gasoline of your memories raining from the top down. The result? A neurological firestorm of comprehension. A mental simulation with windows and doors forged by the fusion of your internal and external contexts. If you want to understand how people learn languages you have to understand the workings of context.
Every single thing I say here can only be understood because your brain can integrate bottom-up and top-down information on the fly. It’s a handshake between the experiences entering your body right now and the memories you have in your mind-cloud that enrich them. Internal and external contexts always walk hand-in-hand. I say house and because you have no other bottom-up information to constrain it, apart from the sounds themselves, what you see is a general, average, kind of every-day house you’ve come across on the streets. But, imagine you’re visiting an astrologer. She rolls out a printed copy of your astrology birth chart and points her index finger to one of the twelve divisions in the horoscope. When she says your sun is in the house of Libra, there are no windows, chimneys or doors in your mind. The bottom-up information is so rich that it takes you by the hand and all you can see is the old-fashioned plate scale of your Zodiac sign.
This combustion of language comprehension between information coming up from your senses and information coming down from your memory works beautifully most of the time. It is virtually imperceptible when you’re talking to people from the same culture, in the same language. But, that is not true for us bilinguals. I’m sorry to break that to you. When David asked me if “I would like some beans on toast”, his words were perfectly understood in isolation, yet I could not make sense of them. Imagining black beans on toast was like imagining windows in the house of Sagittarius. What was coming in from my senses in the kitchen that day did not match any memories I had of the word “beans” in use, apart from the sounds that compose it. External-context information was lighting up a firestorm of past experiences with beans, none of which made any sense to me there. It’s like finding a pair of socks in the fridge. Part of me understood every single word he said. Yet, part of me had no clue as to what he was talking about. I had to go through the exotic experience of having some white beans with vivid red tomato sauce on a piece of toast in order to update my mind-cloud files. If you offer me some beans on toast now, I will have some top-down mental simulation to go along with it. The flames of understanding are burning naturally again. And we can label that as an experience of learning.
I know that’s a lot to take in, so let me summarise what we’ve seen so far. Context is the God of understanding. There’s no such thing as understanding without context. Yet, context is not a single thing. There are two parts to context. The context outside of you, which enters your body through your senses, is made of bottom-up information. And the context inside of you, coming from the memories of your past experiences, is made of top-down information. What you actually experience is a simulation caused by the integration of these two contexts. Of course, I’m simplifying things a little because the simulation also includes interoceptive information coming in from the body itself, like how you’re feeling. So, we could say that this body-produced information is a third kind of context, a middle context. But, let’s leave that out. My intent here is not to teach you a course on cognitive science. For now, what you should have in mind is that understanding a question or a word requires your brain to integrate information from different contexts. We’ve also seen that sometimes even when you know all the words in isolation, your external context might clash with the memories you have in your internal context and the result of that will be confusion and discomfort. Language beginners inhabit a world of simulation chaos at first. If their emotions are not in place, they’ll simply give up. Yet, there is a bright side. Every time you fail to understand something, like me with “beans on toast”, you will eventually use this new external context to form a new memory of that experience. This update in your internal context refines future simulation and the result is learning. That’s what kids learning their first language do all the time. That’s what you should do as someone who’s learning a second language. You should use external context as your teacher.
When I was a kid, my dad was very poor. He had an old rusty car, a Kombi, with lots of holes on its body. So, there was this Sunday, he parked his car in the driveway, opened up a can of a thick grey paste and started filling in the holes with it. After the paste dried, he sanded the body, sprayed it with some paint and polished it carefully. The holes were gone. Most of learning is like that. All we do is to fill some gaps in our comprehension. That evening at Davi’s, I learned the hard way what “beans on toast” meant. That’s because my internal and external contexts clashed. The mental simulations they produced worked against me. But, it could have been different. Learning doesn’t have to be a rough experience. For instance, let’s imagine that I arrived in the kitchen 10 minutes later than I actually did. I would have found David sitting at the table having his exotic dinner. Curious about his meal, I would have examined the content of his plate with my eyes. I would have seen a piece of toast resting under soft white beans in tomato sauce. If David then, very politely, asked me if I wanted some beans on toast, the bottom up information coming from his plate would have suppressed my top-down past memories of Brazilian porky black beans. The richness of the external context would have been my guide. I would have filled in the hole of “beans on toast”, this gap in my experience, with the image of the food on David’s plate. Then, if I had said yes to the invitation, I would’ve found a copy of David’s beans on toast on my plate. At that point, my guess at what he had meant by “beans on toast” would have been confirmed and I would have learned a new expression effortlessly. No suffering. No trauma. Apart from the alien experience of having white beans in tomato sauce poured on a slice of toast for dinner, if the context was right, the expression would have been integrated with little friction.
You might have realised by now that context is the king of language learning. For millions of years, our brains have evolved to scan the information around us and to browse through our past experiences in order to make sense of what other people are saying. All you need is to fill in the gaps. By far, the best context to learn a language is talking to somebody face to face. And, of course, that person needs to be patient like a mother to you because you ARE like a child in the beginning. But, as long as you talk about things that are physically present around you, using plenty of body language, the bottom-up information coming in from your senses will be so rich that understanding becomes inevitable. No, you will not be able to talk about highly abstract and complex topics in the beginning, but within a few interactions, you’ll start to gain more traction, building upon the vocabulary you’ve been collecting. What you will notice, in the beginning, is that understanding will come to you as a low-resolution picture. The more words you learn and the more experience you gain, the clearer this picture will become until it comes to you in high definition. Nothing is harder than the beginning. Once you have accumulated enough words, they will themselves become part of the context and make learning new expressions a lot easier. You will start to learn new words without even noticing.
I was recently reading a few pages of a book with a client of mine. She was halfway through a paragraph and I stopped her. “What is the meaning of slam here?”, I asked. She looked surprised. It was the first time she had come across that word, but it was so obvious from the context that the word escaped her radar of doubts. She said “slam the door”, violently shutting an invisible door in front of us with her hand. “That’s it, but how did you know that?”. “I guessed from the context”. Indeed, the character in the book was angry. She walked out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Indeed, there could be no other reading to slam in this paragraph. If you know the other words, if you can build the scene in your mind, then you are like my father filling in the holes on his Kombi. You are using the context around you to help you fill in the gaps of understanding. That’s how you learned your first language. So, the job of a teacher or a language coach is to enrich the external context with so many details that the learner’s mental simulation can seamlessly match the experience, gradually integrating more and more expressions. Even people that don’t speak English would never struggle to understand what “hello” means when they hear someone answering the phone because the external context is rich enough to guide understanding. Substitute “hello” for “dada”, “bibi”, “bubu” and those words would still be understood as a phone-call greeting, just like the fillings on my dad’s Kombi were indistinguishable from the rest of the car when the job was done properly. Learning a language is going from a flimsy Kombi full of holes to a mighty Megazord or a Transformer, gradually integrating more and more external contexts into meaningful internal simulations. And the naked fact is that we NEVER stop learning.
“Não contavam com a minha astúcia!” [Capolin, 1973]
That’s what my childhood superhero, Chapolin, would say every time he thought he was outsmarting his enemies. This cry of triumph roughly translates as “They were not considering my cleverness”. The issue is that literally until yesterday, instead of hearing “minha astúcia” I would hear “minhas túcia”. For those of you who don’t speak Portuguese, all you need to know is that “túcia” is not a word in Portuguese. Yet, I spent most of my life with the vivid impression that that was what the superhero was saying. So, if túcia is a not a word in Portuguese, how come I felt I understood what he said every single time? My brain just filled the gap. Just like “beans on toast” or “slam”, it was clear from the context that the misheard word “túcia” meant something like cleverness. And I was perfectly fine with it. If you asked me what Chapolin’s superpower was until yesterday, I would have said “túcia”, instead of “astúcia”. At the end of the day, if you look closely at it, you will come to the conclusion that both words have the same meaning: a sense of cleverness. This sense was extracted solely from the context. I just happened to pick out the wrong sequence of sounds for it. I could go on to explain exactly why my brain was fooled into thinking that the new word in the sentence was “túcia” and not “astúcia”, but that would be the subject of another discussion. What is important for you to take away from this story is that our brains use the context to select and inject meaning into the sequence of sounds used by other people and that we never stop doing that. This is how words are born and maintained in our minds. They light up from the context in a chain reaction between our senses and our memories. All you’ve got to do is to live the language like a child. Sometimes you’ll fail to understand things even when you know all the words, like “beans on toast”. Sometimes you will get it kind of right, even when the word is new to you like “túcia” and sometimes you will land spot-on onto the right meaning for a word, like “slam”. Regardless of the outcome, all these mental definitions are constantly being updated in light of new experiences with the language. After more than 30 years mistaken, I can now most clearly hear my childhood superhero say he has “astúcia”. And that was in my mother tongue. So, I guess people are right when they say we never stop learning. Well, as far as languages are concerned we definitely don’t.
Keep on living the language, dear bilingual. And remember that abroad is a place within. Thanks for listening.
For more information visit www.harmony-co/englishtherapy
