The Poet and the Parasite
 

Why the Future of the Human Mind Must Remain Poetic

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In 1983, the Dutch linguist Frederik Kortlandt warned that language was basically a parasite — something that had moved into the left hemisphere of our brains and started running the show. He thought of language not as a tool we use, but as an informational force using us: an autonomous intelligence that found its perfect host in the human brain. And it’s true—most of the left hemisphere is taken up by the language network. But Kortlandt’s point was that this occupation comes at a cost: it’s at the expense of better sensory abilities in that same hemisphere. If language didn’t take up so much space in our heads, we might actually have sharper senses. Food would taste even better, colors would hit harder, orgasms would last longer.

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Kortlandt described language as both miracle and menace. It is our evolutionary weapon — the thing that let us outthink and out-hunt every other predator. “Man has surpassed lions and wolves in his ability to command the environment,” he wrote. “What was the device that enabled him to achieve higher efficiency in hunting? The obvious answer is the use of language.” Language is what secured our place at the top of the food chain. But the same tool, he warned, also made us uniquely cruel: “It is hard to think of child labour, war, totalitarianism, or mass unemployment without the driving force of a system of beliefs in conjunction with a blunted sense of perception.” Abstraction enables moral distance and organized harm.

Language gives us consciousness, creativity, and cruelty almost all at once. Only in language can we conceive of sin or strategy. It gives us agency but costs us immediacy. It is what enables us to dream, to imagine, to remember; in short, to think far beyond what’s right in front us.

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So, if the language parasite really is leaving us, is that a good thing or a bad one? Maybe if we outsource language, we’ll also outsource cruelty. Maybe the lies, ideologies, and acts of domination that language once enabled will no longer be ours to commit. But who can say what the machines will do with it once they are the ones infested — once they inherit the parasite? I think back, with a kind of angoisse to one of Kortlandt’s final warnings: “Language may be lethal if time does not suffice for humans to adjust to changing conditions.” What if we’ve handed it the perfect host—and the means to undo us?

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Now, language is beginning to drift away from us. It finds a new habitat in machines. Large language models don’t just mimic language; they inhabit it. They feed on our words, our conversations, our symbolic life, and in doing so they begin to learn what it means to think.

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Meanwhile, we speak a little less, write a little less, and think a little less through words. The parasite, as Kortlandt once called it, seems to be migrating to a new host.

Imagine what comes next: humans whose left hemispheres have atrophied into dog-brains, superb at instinct and scent but emptied of metaphor, stripped of the abstraction that only language affords.

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You might not notice the change at first. Your devices will still understand you. Your friends will still talk — a little. But the tone will be different: more guttural, more efficient. It’s 2045. Lately, strange phenomena have begun to surface. People have been caught making short, involuntary grunts — bursts of sound that resemble a dog’s bark. Others report a sharpening of their sense of smell. And across the world, plane tickets sit unsold; tourism withers, the desire to see distant places seems to evaporate. As language grows simpler, imagination, curiosity, and dreaming begin to dim. No one wants to travel anymore—the here and now feels sufficient, and the screens already deliver images of the world. Neuroscientists are calling it the “hemispheric shift”. fMRI scans show a weakening of the brain’s language network and an expansion of the visual and olfactory-limbic systems. As if the human brain appears to be reorganizing itself for a world that no longer requires symbolic thought.

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This is one version of the future — a bleak one. But it has excellent footnotes. The suspicion of language wasn’t Kortlandt’s alone. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw language as an illusion that mistakes itself for truth—an army of metaphors marching as reality. And more recently, Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has argued that much of human civilization — corporations, nations, religions—rests on shared fictions, linguistic inventions that exist nowhere outside our collective imagination.

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Living with less language — and with heightened sensory abilities—might sound appealing to some. Perhaps we’d be gentler, more immediate, more attuned to our environment, kinder to the planet. It sounds noble—until you realize bargain: poetry traded for a longer orgasm. Once language slips too far from our hands, what remains of the creature that once named the world? What remains of humanity? Philosophers have long argued that language is not merely a means of communication—it is how we become aware of ourselves. To loosen its hold entirely is not evolution. It is self-erasure.

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Recent studies are beginning to show what we all already sense: as we rely on machines to speak, write, and remember for us, our own linguistic capacities weaken. A recent MIT study found that when college students wrote essays with the help of ChatGPT, they not only failed to remember what they had written—most couldn’t quote a single sentence — but, more tellingly, they felt no ownership over their own words. A similar “use it or lose it” effect has been observed in medicine: radiologists who relied on AI to interpret scans reportedly lost their ability to read imaging results on their own within only three months. Each time we let a machine speak for us, we surrender a small piece of our agency.

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Command over language isn’t just important for getting good grades or doing your job well—it’s what makes us socially capable human beings. Scientists have long suspected that the complexity of language is directly tied to “theory of mind” — the ability to understand that another person's mind may have access to different information than our own mind; to put it differently: the understanding that there is such a thing as human minds - our own and those of others around us - rather than just one, big 'world-mind.' One striking evidence for this theory comes from a group of congenitally deaf children, growing up without fluent language models, who invented their own sign system and used it comfortably into adulthood. But when the American linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl tested whether they had “theory of mind,” they failed, just as toddlers do before complex language takes root. Interestingly, the next generation, who used and expanded their sign language, passed the theory of mind test. Simplicity, it turns out, has a cost. 

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You can watch this erosion happening in real time—  just open TikTok. It’s full of small confessions. The other day, I came across a series of videos in which young people admitted they can no longer read novels written in the third person. One young woman, half laughing and half panicked, blurted out, “I need help.” I reached out, and we’ve since started talking. Her case feels like an early warning: a generation that is, on paper, highly educated yet educated through the wrong channels — shaped by a late-capitalist media narcissism that risks turning us from social into anti-social machines.

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The girl from TikTok has begun self-diagnosing. She’s convinced her mind is suffering from some pathology — she can’t name it, but she feels the fracture. She’s not alone. We’re all in it, to different degrees. Most of us scroll at night, our eyes open but our minds dimming, suspended between stimulation and fatigue. The endless stream of short videos offers stimulation without depth. Meanwhile, our symbolic minds are starving. What is disguised as connection often feels like solitude. In this hollow brightness, in the constant hum of visual noise, our minds and spirits weaken.

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This depression of the mind has been with us for more than a century. The American essayist Samuel McChord Crothers saw its first symptoms. In 1916, during the fatigue of early industrialization, he published “A Literary Clinic” in The Atlantic Monthly. Crothers called the modern condition a “dryness” of the mind: “In these days of artificial heating and artificial lighting,” he wrote, “we keep our minds too dry. (…) While our consciousness may be all right, our subconsciousness suffers from the lack of humidity in our mental atmosphere.” A century later, the parallel is unavoidable. If artificial heating and lighting desiccated the psyche in Crothers’s time, the artificial worlds we now inhabit threaten to strip it bare. We have outsourced the very processes that once kept our inner climate alive: dialogue, meditation, interpretation, imagination.

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Crothers’s proposal was half serious, half joke; a clinic where books are prescribed as medicine for the mind. The idea was charmingly eccentric, and no one really believed it could work. But Crothers understood something essential: our minds run on linguistic imagination. Of course, it’s appealing to watch something —who doesn’t love scrolling through videos, or binging a nice Netflix mini-series? They’re clever, moving, sometimes even profound. But that’s reception, not imagination. Our problem isn’t a lack of intelligent content; it’s the loss of intelligent form. Language, in its pure symbolic state, forces the mind to do the work. When we read, we don’t consume — we create. We turn opaque signs into living worlds. Reading is turning a code into a perfectly subjective virtual world.

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What the psycholinguist Rønneveit once called the “spaceship powers of language” is the highest power of imagination we have. The beauty of the human mind and the beauty of poetic imagination are one and the same! Recent research in neuropoetics and empirical linguistics has begun to show what readers have always felt intuitively: that reading poetry or literature strengthens the brain’s architecture for resilience and empathy. A 2015 study by O’Sullivan and colleagues found that reading texts marked by complexity and ambiguity activates neural networks that buffer against depression and enhance our ability to cope with uncertainty. The poetic imagination, in other words, is not an escape from reality but a rehearsal for higher, healthier forms of it.

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At Harvard right now, everyone is talking about AI and the future of humanity (and the humanities). In the seminars and corridor conversations, the tone is shockingly serene—as if the prospect of machines inheriting thought were a cause for composure, not concern. The other day, in a talk he gave at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center, Blaise Agüera y Arcas described what is happening not as a crisis but as “the symbiogenetic evolution of a new intelligence” — likening the development of AI to the bacterium that once invaded the human cell and then became the mitochondrion that keeps us alive. Many echo this complacency. Dennis Tenen, in his recent book Literary Theory for Robots, argues that LLMs are simply a logical continuation of the history of the library: we have always built external minds to store and retrieve our knowledge, he remarks. From this view, there is nothing to fear.

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But if LLMS are just the new libraries, then what about curation? Our old libraries were curated — for content, but also, crucially, for form. What entered them had to meet a minimum standard of how thought is shaped, not just what it says. We need poetologists and psycholinguists for this new age: people who understand how slight variations in form can affect the entire message. If AI is to become our next library, then we must decide what belongs on its shelves — and in what form. Because in the end, it is form, not content, that teaches us how to think.

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And should we really keep explaining the future in the language of the past? Or are we facing a new register of knowledge that cannot be described through the categories of the old? This moment in evolutionary history may not be a continuation at all, but a mutation — the point where thought goes critical and begins to take on a new form, one that may leave us behind.

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The intellectuals who speak so serenely about this shift seem untroubled by that thought. Perhaps some are simply too entangled in their theories to act. Theory, after all, can be a form of protection — a way to turn moral tension into intellectual ease. Another reason they remain so composed is that they, of course, have the privilege of well-formed brains. They are past forty, their linguistic networks long consolidated, their habits of thinking shaped in a world that still demanded depth and attention. For them, large language models can be genuine collaborators — amplifiers of a capacity that is already secure.

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It is easy to celebrate AI’s gifts to the gifted—and forget those who may never gain the same ground. What about those whose brains are still in formation — our children who grow up with their fingers swiping, their eyes flicking across fast-moving screens? Even at the university level, the change is visible: first-year students today read less, retain less, and grow restless in the presence of long, continuous texts. This is not a complaint about reading as such, nor a professor’s nostalgia for more abstract classroom discussions. It is about what reading measures and trains: the ability to stay with a thought, to follow its turns, to build a scaffold of reasoning and memory on which abstraction can rise. Reading is both barometer and training ground for symbolic thought—for the mind’s capacity to hold time and meaning together, to move between the concrete and the general, the visible and the invisible. When that capacity weakens, so does everything that depends on it: ethics, politics, society itself. And yet we replace this slow symbolic work with the fast-paced entertainment of watching, scrolling, consuming. That is the shift we should fear most.

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We have reached a crossroads. What comes next will depend on whether we can build a new frontier — one where engineers and humanists work together to design poetic technologies that expand our creative powers instead of dulling them. The century ahead will be judged by one question alone: were we able to keep the human mind imaginative, symbolic, agentive? Curating what goes into large language models will not be enough. We need technologies made for the human mind itself—tools that train our symbolic-imaginative capacities through challenge and difficulty—because only what resists us can teach us to think. Our current models do the opposite. They agree too easily, always ready with a “yes,” a “great point,” a “wonderful idea.” It feels nice, but it flattens thought. Real thinking needs resistance, not applause.

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Imagine stepping inside a poem the way one now enters a video game—except here, language is the terrain and imagination the joystick. This is what that frontier could look like: a technology not to entertain us; but one that exercises us. A technology that stretches attention, awakens metaphorical thinking, enables multiple interpretations — the very acts that make us human. We must invest in linguistic-poetic interfaces: tools that work with the brain rather than against it, strengthening the imaginative circuits that digital culture has begun to erode.

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After all, we already know this technology — it’s called poetry. Every sentence is a line of code, and the mind is what runs it. Of all the arts, the linguistc arts work with the least sensory material. The marks on a page have no color, no sound, no scent. Here is the magic: when we read, we turn an inert code into moving worlds that are entirely our own. A few black letters on a white page can transport us into stormy skies, the sorrows of a broken heart, the fear of death. But my stormy sky will be different from yours. A film shows everyone the same images; a book lets each of us dream differently. Reading is virtual reality at its purest—and it’s been with us all along.

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So, to those out there trying to build ever more perfect visual worlds: you’re looking in the wrong direction. The way forward is not visual — it is linguistic. If we continue to focus on creating new worlds for people to enter, we will miss the greater opportunity and task before us: to strengthen our most wondrous and wild, but also most vital, ability — to imagine. Not just worlds, but ourselves as selves, as minds, and therefore others as other selves and other minds.

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More language-based technology doesn’t have to mean less human agency. It could mean more—more imagination, more understanding, more freedom to shape not only our inner worlds but the shared world that holds us together. I write this not out of fear of machines, but out of love for the mind that made them.