The First Language: How Words Take Shape in Us

We think of language as a tool for describing what is within us, as we might describe a view through a window. But philosophy and neuroscience are approaching a stranger idea: words do not merely describe the body. They help make it.

Something Without a Name

We have all experienced it: a sensation in the chest, a heaviness in the stomach, or tension without an obvious cause. We try to explain it to a doctor or friend but cannot find the word. It is not quite pain, not quite fear, not quite exhaustion. Finally we say, “There is something in me, but I do not know how to say it.”

We usually treat this as a communication problem: the sensation exists clearly inside us, and the dictionary is at fault. But modern science suggests something deeper and more unsettling. Perhaps the sensation itself is not yet complete. Perhaps it is waiting for a word to become something definite.

The Brain Does Not Wait: The Body Is a Prediction Machine

The old picture of the nervous system is simple: the body sends a signal, the brain receives it, and then we feel. A widely used framework in neuroscience today, predictive processing, turns this picture around. According to it, the brain does not sit waiting for signals. It continually predicts them, compares its predictions with what arrives, and corrects the difference.

This concerns not only the external world. The brain also predicts the body's internal state: heartbeat, breathing, glucose, and temperature. Scientists call this inner sensing interoception, and the body's preparation for what it will need before the need arrives allostasis. The body does not act only after something happens. Often it acts beforehand.

Here is the crucial point. If what we feel is the brain's “best guess” about the body's state, that guess requires categories through which to make it. Words are among the most important of those categories.

A Word Makes a Feeling

In her theory of constructed emotion, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett proposes that emotions are not ready-made brain circuits firing on their own. The brain builds them in the moment from bodily signals and learned concepts. A racing heart and damp palms may become “anxiety” before an exam, or “excitement” before a long-awaited meeting. The raw sensation is almost the same. The concept through which it is read turns it into an experience.

Several findings support this idea:

Emotional vocabulary matters. People who distinguish feelings precisely—distress, disappointment, jealousy, longing—instead of merely saying “I feel bad” tend to regulate their emotions more healthily under stress, as a 2015 review by Kashdan, Barrett, and McKnight shows.
Naming a feeling calms it. In a well-known experiment by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues (2007), applying a word to an image of an angry or fearful face reduced activity in the amygdala, a region associated with emotional responses, compared with merely viewing it. The word was not a neutral description; it was an intervention in the nervous system.
The absence of words has a bodily cost. Clinicians call difficulty identifying and naming emotions alexithymia. Many studies have associated this difficulty with increased unexplained physical complaints. It is as though what cannot find a path into language seeks another route through the body.

“I do not know how to say it” is therefore not always a failure to express something clear. Sometimes it precisely describes a body that has not yet been given enough concepts to understand itself.

Words Inhabit the Motor Brain

If words shape the body, the body in turn inhabits words. In an experiment by Olaf Hauk, Friedemann Pulvermüller, and their colleagues (2004), participants read action words such as “kick,” “lick,” and “pick.” Motor areas associated with the leg, mouth, and hand respectively became active. Understanding a word was, in part, a silent simulation of movement.

At a more abstract level, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson argue that much of our thinking is built on bodily metaphors. We “grasp” an idea, “fall” in love, and feel “uplifted” by joy. Arabic is particularly rich in these expressions: “my chest tightened,” “my heart contracted,” “the matter weighed on me,” “my chest opened.” The Quran asks, “Have We not expanded your breast for you?” (94:1). These are not linguistic ornaments. They are maps through which people represent their internal states in the language of space, movement, and pressure: the body's own language.

Does Language Change What We Perceive?

This old question is known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, associated with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. Its strong version—that language determines what we can think—has lost most of its supporters. Its moderate version—that language influences attention and perception—finds experimental support:

Russian has separate basic words for light and dark blue. Jonathan Winawer and colleagues (2007) found that Russian speakers distinguished shades on opposite sides of this linguistic boundary faster, and that the advantage disappeared when their language capacity was occupied by another task.
The Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia describe directions using cardinal coordinates rather than “right” and “left”: “There is an ant on your northwest leg.” Lera Boroditsky's research has shown that speakers carry a continual bodily sense of direction uncommon among others.

But the picture does not run in one direction alone. Evelina Fedorenko and colleagues (2024) summarized evidence that the brain's language network is largely separate from networks for reasoning and calculation, and that people with severe language loss retain logical-thinking abilities. Language, then, is not thought itself. It sharpens attention, divides a continuum into graspable parts, and determines which differences we notice and which pass unseen.

Philosophy: The Body That Speaks

Philosophy reached many of these questions before science:

Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus that the limits of his language meant the limits of his world. In later work, he developed the private-language argument: we do not learn the word “pain” by looking inward, but from others, shared contexts, and observable behavior. This helps explain the difficulty of naming a sensation for which no one has taught us a word. A name always requires a shared world.
Merleau-Ponty rejected separation of mind from body. The body, for him, is not something we possess, but our way of existing in the world. Speech is not the translation of a completed thought, but a bodily gesture through which thought becomes complete.
Vygotsky observed children speaking aloud to guide their actions: “Now I put the block here.” Over time, this becomes silent inner speech. Language that began as dialogue with others becomes an instrument through which a person organizes their body and attention from within.
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, in The Embodied Mind (1991), and Antonio Damasio, through the somatic-marker hypothesis, placed cognition and decision within a continuous loop connecting brain, body, and environment. Thinking is not computation inside an isolated head.

These currents meet at one idea: there is no pure “inside” we first observe and then describe. The inside itself takes shape in dialogue among body, language, and others.

The Language of Cells: The Body as a Goal-Directed System

If words help make what we feel, does the body itself have a “language” through which it manages its states before and apart from consciousness?

From the mid-twentieth century, cybernetics, through Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby, established a simple, profound idea: any system that compares its present state with a reference and works to reduce the difference behaves as though it has a goal, even without awareness. Body temperature, blood glucose, and blood pressure operate this way. Biologists call this teleonomy: direction toward a goal without intention.

Recent research goes beyond temperature and glucose to form itself. In Michael Levin's laboratory at Tufts University, cells have been shown to communicate not only chemically, but electrically, through voltage differences forming patterns across entire tissues:

In a study by Fallon Durant and colleagues (2017), researchers briefly disrupted the bioelectric network of planarian worms, then cut them. Roughly a quarter of the fragments grew two heads rather than a head and tail. Stranger still, worms that appeared normal, when cut again months later in ordinary water, produced the same proportion of double-headed outcomes without genetic alteration. Researchers described this as “pattern memory” stored in the cells' electrical network.
In a study by Nirosha Murugan and colleagues (2022), a cap containing five drugs was placed on a frog's amputated leg for only twenty-four hours. Over the following eighteen months, a nearly functional leg grew, though some details were missing. Researchers did not give the cells instructions for building a leg. They activated a capacity already present.

A bold hypothesis emerges: perhaps the chemical and electrical signals we know are not the “message” itself, but media carrying more abstract information about the state a system is trying to reach or restore. Sound waves carry a sentence, but measuring their frequency is not understanding its meaning.

Where Does the Goal Come From?

If cells return to a particular form or function, where does the “reference state” against which they compare themselves originate? This is one of biology's great open questions, with several proposed answers:

Evolution wrote it. Millions of years of selection retained systems that “know” where to return.
It is not stored in one place. It may be an attractor emerging from the interaction of the whole network, as in Conrad Waddington's epigenetic-landscape image: a ball rolls toward the lowest valley, and the valley need not know anything.
It is written in a deeper structure. Levin himself proposes in recent writings that possible forms exist in something like a space of abstract patterns, which cells discover rather than invent. This is highly controversial among scientists.

Here science meets philosophy. Aristotle called this the “final cause”: what draws an organism toward its completion. History also warns us. In the early twentieth century, embryologist Hans Driesch inferred an immaterial “vital force” from embryos' ability to recover, then stopped investigating. The lesson is not that the question is wrong, but that mystery cannot serve as evidence.

A Quranic verse almost describes the entire loop: “Who created and proportioned, and who determined and guided” (87:2–3). “Determined” is the reference state; “guided” is direction toward it. From this angle, the question becomes: are we inventing a language of biological regulation, or discovering something written into life before us, and before artificial intelligence itself?

Artificial Intelligence: Translator, Not Creator

Perhaps the problem is not that the body does not know how to repair itself, but that our consciousness lacks the language or interface needed to communicate with these internal systems. AI might enter here, not as the creator of a capacity, but as its translator:

Human intention expressed in language → AI understands the intention → translates it into appropriate biological signals → the body responds through mechanisms it already possesses.

This sequence needs an important adjustment. Human intention usually does not specify the correct goal. “I want my knee to heal” does not identify the cellular state to be reached, and we do not yet know it ourselves. More precisely, intention supplies permission and direction, while AI first reads the goal the body itself carries from its signals, then helps it reach that goal. It learns to read the body's language before writing in it.

Very primitive versions of this loop already exist. Closed-loop insulin systems continually measure glucose and translate deviation from a target into doses. Adaptive deep-brain stimulation adjusts itself according to a patient's signals. The body also reminds us that its goals can conflict across levels: a cancer cell fulfills its local “goal” efficiently while killing the body; autoimmunity is defense directed at the wrong target. Any biological operating language must know which level it is addressing, or intervention becomes genuinely dangerous.

The point is not that thinking alone heals the body. It is to investigate whether a real biological operating language can be discovered, allowing intention to be translated into safe, precise internal regulation.

The First Name

In the Quranic story, the first distinction granted to humanity is naming: “He taught Adam all the names” (2:31). Naming here is not attaching labels to completed things, but an ability to distinguish and understand, to make the world readable.

In Helen Keller's account of her childhood after losing hearing and sight, a famous moment describes her teacher spelling “water” into one palm while cold water ran over her other hand. Only then did she understand that the movement in her palm was the name of what touched her skin. She described the moment as an awakening. She did not merely learn a word. Her bodily sensation became something she could think about.

The Question: When There Is No Name Yet

If words make feeling, what do we do when we cannot find the word?

Here comes the question, which I believe is truly the first language. When the name is absent, a good question can give the body alternative vocabulary:

Instead of “What is this called?” ask: What changed? When did it begin? Does it rise, spread, or remain still?
Instead of “Is it pain?” ask: What precedes it, and what follows it?
Instead of searching for a ready-made diagnosis, separate what we observe from what we infer.

Each question raises interoceptive precision a degree. This is no longer merely personal. At a time when AI tools answer health and psychological questions, their answers depend on the precision of the question. A person with language to describe their body receives more precise help. A person without it receives “monitor the symptoms.”

Conclusion: Language Is Part of the Nervous System

Language is not a garment worn over the body. In a real sense, it extends our nervous system: helping make what we feel, directing attention, regulating emotion, and turning vague sensation into an experience we can understand and engage with.

Losing words is therefore not merely a cultural loss. When we simplify language until fine distinctions disappear, or use three words for everything we feel, we lose more than ways of expression. We may lose ways of feeling itself.

The loop also completes itself from the other side. We need language to understand our bodies, and our bodies may speak a language we have not yet learned to read. Between the two, AI might stand as translator: not to create a capacity absent from us, but to reconnect us with one that has always been there.

When we cannot find the word, the question remains. A question is what a person says before knowing. It is the first language through which the body learns to understand itself.