#this is fascinating stuff

@zitronenmilchmaedchen great tag! What have you done. Now I'll never shut up. This is for you and for everybody else who cares a lot about Cacofonix/Assurancetourix.

Justforkix/Goudurix (from Asterix and the Vikings) did! Though not in the movie (because it didn't have as much focus on Cacofonix) but in the comic book that the movie was based on, Asterix and the Normans. This volume has a special place in my heart for how much spotlight and appreciation Cacofonix received in it, so let's talk about it!

After Cacofonix attempted to sing and received the usual response from his fellows, Justforkix proceeded to compliment him, he even went as far as to tell him that he's wasting his talent in the village and that he'd make a great career in Lutetia!

The thought excited Cacofonix so much he kept bringing it up multiple times to Justforkix, who at that point was too scared by the Normans coming to Gaul to really pay any attention to the bard and his career. Eventually Cacofonix decided to take matters into his own hands and leave...

...at the worst possible time! He left unaware of the fact that the Normans had kidnapped Justforkix and refused to let him go unless there was another way to teach them the meaning of fear. The best way to strike fear into the Normans' souls was, of course, Cacofonix, though fetching the bard turned out to be more difficult than expected since he had to be chased down and persuaded to abandon his plans of prestige and fame.

He didn't hesitate one bit though once he learned that Justforkix was the one who needed his help. How could he not rush to his aid, the teen has been so kind to him and appreciative of him after all, unlike all those barbarians he's constantly surrounded with, with no appreciation for music! He happily returned, put one hell of a performance and reveled in well deserved praise for it. The goal was accomplished: the Normans learned to feel fear, Justforkix was safe, Cacofonix got to give his first real concert in front of a willing audience. He gets to be the hero that saves the day!

The satisfaction from it appeared to be enough for Cacofonix to not give any more thought to his previous career plans. He stayed and even got to participate in the banquet, instead of being tied up like usual, which I honestly love so much. His singing, though almost universally frowned upon, has proven helpful and worthy of respect. What a sweet and validating moment for my boy <3

Linguist Evelina Fedorenko (quote from The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages. What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us? by Judith Thurman)

Does language share a mechanism with other cognitive functions? Or is it autonomous? To seek an answer, Fedorenko developed a set of “localizer tasks,” administered in an fMRI machine. Her first goal was to identify the “language-responsive cortex,” and the tasks involved reading or listening to a sequence of sentences, some of them garbled or composed of nonsense words.

The responsive cortex proved to be separate from regions involved in other forms of complex thought. We don’t, for example, use the same parts of our brains for music and for speech, which seems counterintuitive, especially in the case of a tonal language. But pitch, Fedorenko explained, has its own neural turf. And life experience alters the picture. “Literate people use one region of their cortex in recognizing letters,” she said. “Illiterate people don’t have that region, though it develops if they learn to read.”

In order to draw general conclusions, Fedorenko needed to study the way that language skills vary among individuals. They turned out to vary greatly. The intensity of activity in response to the localizer tests was idiosyncratic; some brains worked harder than others. But that raised another question: Did heightened activity correspond to a greater aptitude for language? Or was the opposite true—that the cortex of a language prodigy would show less activity, because it was more efficient?

The Foreign Language of ‘Mad Men’ | The Atlantic