M
MNathaniel
Guest
This scenario is actually very different. John the Baptist went into the wilderness, but he started in society, and he regularly spoke to other humans (and especially, as a baby, we can know that other humans spoke around him, enough to gather the necessary language skills during critical brain-formative years that when he was eventually an adult, he was cognitively normal enough to think and speak like other humans, which is very different from what happens to humans who actually grow up without human contact or exposure to language). Most psychology classes eventually look at case studies of such ‘feral children’, who are rare but such cases have happened and do get studied, so this is a scientific question not just a thought experiment.