In 2009, I stood in Utrecht presenting research on the bilingual brain at the International Symposium on Bilingualism. This was my great-grandfather Wilhelm’s city, the place he’d left more than a century earlier to migrate to Mexico. I was presenting research on the very phenomenon his migration had set in motion.

Wilhelm adapted quickly to San Luis Potosí. He learned Spanish, raising five children in a household that was neither fully German nor fully Mexican. He never taught his children German. The language was gone within a generation. But three generations later, my own children recovered it through deliberate immersion during my research fellowships in Germany, becoming trilingual.

This family story isn’t just personal history. It’s a case study in something fundamental about human cognition: Our capacity for adaptation is inseparable from our capacity for translation.

The Bilingual Brain as Model

Bilingual individuals offer a useful window into how human cognition achieves flexibility, albeit not for the reasons usually cited. The advantage isn’t just about accessing two languages. It’s what managing multiple linguistic systems reveals about adaptive cognition.

When bilinguals switch between languages, they engage neural networks that manage context-dependent selection—choosing the appropriate linguistic system based on who they’re talking to, where they are, what they’re discussing. This requires mapping different contexts onto different response systems while maintaining coherent output.

This same mechanism operates across domains. London taxi drivers navigating complex spatial layouts engage similar cognitive architecture, managing thousands of routes and selecting appropriate strategies based on context. Japan’s aging population maintains cognitive health through practices requiring constant context-dependent adaptation via a multisystemic written language while remaining firmly monolingual.

The pattern isn’t specific to language. It’s about flexibility through managing multiple systems that can’t be simultaneously active but must remain accessible. This is domain translation at the cognitive level.

Translation as Fundamental Mechanism

Translation, from the Latin translatus, means "to carry across." And this carrying across is what brains do constantly.

Every act of cognition involves translation: the infant translates sensory patterns into categories, the child translates embodied experience into symbolic thought, the scientist translates observations into theory. What we call "learning" is translation. What we call "understanding" is translation. What we call "adaptation" is translation between what our neural architecture expects and what the environment provides.

This reframes intelligence itself. Intelligence isn’t just computation within a single domain. It’s the ability to move between domains, to translate incompatible systems of meaning into coherent action.

The Human Advantage

This matters urgently because of artificial intelligence. Large language models can process information at scales humans never could, matching human performance on many standardized tasks. However, they remain trapped within computational frameworks.

Humans do something different. We translate between fundamentally incompatible systems: between computational abstraction and embodied sensation, between symbolic representation and physical presence, between what we can articulate and what we intuitively understand.

When we’re overwhelmed by abstract processing, we don’t solve it with better algorithms. We translate to an entirely different domain: we go for a walk, listen to live music, cook dinner. We move from the symbolic to the sensory.

Intelligence Essential Reads

This isn’t stress relief. It’s domain translation as survival mechanism. The body knows what the overwhelmed mind forgets: adaptive intelligence requires moving between systems, not optimizing within them.

Why This Matters

AI systems optimize within domains. When the environment changes in ways training data didn’t anticipate, they fail catastrophically. They have no mechanism for domain translation. They don’t have a body. They don’t have a life.

Humans survive environmental change by switching domains entirely. When one framework stops working, we adopt another. When symbolic processing becomes overwhelming, we shift to sensory experience. When conscious reasoning reaches its limits, we rely on intuition.

This flexibility isn’t a deficit in human cognition. It’s our core strength. We’re not information processors who happen to have bodies. We’re domain translators who happen to process information.

Implications

If translation between domains is our fundamental adaptive mechanism, then human flourishing in the AI era requires cultivating this capacity. This means recognizing when we’re domain-trapped and need to translate, developing fluency in multiple domains, and building cognitive architectures that facilitate domain switching.

My children’s trilingualism isn’t only valuable because they can communicate in three languages. It’s valuable because they learned early that meaning exists across incompatible systems, that you can belong to multiple worlds simultaneously, that adaptation requires translation.

This is what Wilhelm’s migration taught me a century later. He didn’t just move from Utrecht to San Luis Potosí. He translated himself into a new world while maintaining continuity of self. The capacity to become someone new while remaining yourself, to carry meaning across incompatible domains, is the inheritance that matters.

The Future

AI will continue improving at computational tasks within defined domains. But the uniquely human advantage lies in our ability to move between domains AI cannot bridge. Between computation and embodiment. Between optimization and meaning. Between what we can measure and what we can feel.

The future won’t belong to those who process the most information. It will belong to those who can translate between human and artificial intelligence, between multiple systems of meaning, between who we are and who we need to become.

Because adaptation, at its core, has always been translation. And translation, at its core, has always been human.

For the personal story behind the science, see my essay "The Language We Carry Back" on Substack.