Speaker 1: Are there really dozens of words for snow in northern cultures?
Speaker 1: And what did the movie Arrival have to do with
Speaker 1: how we speak language? Why are Russians better than Americans
Speaker 1: at distinguishing certain shades of blue? And what does any
Speaker 1: of this have to do with space or time or gender?
Speaker 1: And how your language shapes your thinking. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 2: I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford and in these
Speaker 2: episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to
Speaker 2: understand why and how our lives look the way they do.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about language, and specifically a question about
Speaker 1: how your language interacts with your thinking. Now, if you've
Speaker 1: been listening to this podcast for a while, you'll know
Speaker 1: that I often start off talking about how the brain
Speaker 1: is locked in silence and darkness inside our skulls, and
Speaker 1: all we ever get are trillions of spikes coming in
Speaker 1: and running around there, and our perception is constructed from that.
Speaker 1: But it's also true that wherever you grow up, whatever
Speaker 1: spot on the planet you happen to drop in on,
Speaker 1: you are taught a particular language. Now, does the language
Speaker 1: you learn tell you what to pay attention to in
Speaker 1: the world. Does it change your perception of the things
Speaker 1: around you? And if so, does that mean that if
Speaker 1: you grew up with a different language you might see
Speaker 1: the world a little differently. So that's the question we're
Speaker 1: going to look at today. Does the language you speak
Speaker 1: modify the way that you think? So let's start in
Speaker 1: the eighteen eighties with a young man traveling through northern Canada.
Speaker 1: His name was Franz Boaz, and he was an anthropologist,
Speaker 1: and he met and fell in love with the Inuit natives,
Speaker 1: and he worked to take on their diet and to
Speaker 1: learn their language, and he ended up writing a book
Speaker 1: in nineteen eleven called Handbook of American Indian Languages, and
Speaker 1: in it he reported that they have many many words
Speaker 1: for snow. For example, he pointed to the different words
Speaker 1: for snow on the ground versus snow falling, and there
Speaker 1: were subtleties like achille kog for softly falling snow and
Speaker 1: piegnartog for the snow that is good for driving sled.
Speaker 1: His point is that when you look at English, it
Speaker 1: doesn't divide the types of snow as finely. So you've
Speaker 1: probably heard this claim that Inuit natives have lots of
Speaker 1: words for snow. And while the public loved this, among linguists,
Speaker 1: this snowballed into a big debate about whether it was true.
Speaker 1: Many linguists turned a cold shoulder to this as an
Speaker 1: urban legend. They said that it came from neglectful study
Speaker 1: and was then magnified by journalists. Some linguists have gone
Speaker 1: so far as to label it the Great Eskimo Vocabulary hoax.
Speaker 1: But the debate about this isn't over. There was a
Speaker 1: study published a few years ago that suggested Boaz was correct.
Speaker 1: The study showed that the Inuit language in Nuktitute does
Speaker 1: have at least fifty words for snow. These studies authors
Speaker 1: point out as could be guessed that these aren't just
Speaker 1: different ways of saying snow, but instead they referenced different
Speaker 1: types of snow, like wet snow, dry snow, drifting snow,
Speaker 1: and the paper suggests that Boaz's observations were accurate and
Speaker 1: that the Inuit do indeed have a rich vocabulary for
Speaker 1: the stuff that you and I might just call by
Speaker 1: one word now. Obviously, it's easily imaginable and understandable that
Speaker 1: if you're surrounded by snow, you'll develop lots of distinctions
Speaker 1: for it. All snow is the same to me, or
Speaker 1: maybe I have snow that's good for skiing or not
Speaker 1: good for skiing. But if you're surrounded by it all
Speaker 1: the time, and your hunts depend on subtle differences in it,
Speaker 1: and your livelihood depends on subtle differences in it, then
Speaker 1: you'll get good at making those distinctions. And by the way,
Speaker 1: cultures who live in warmer climates, like the Aztec speaking
Speaker 1: their language Nahwattle, use only a single broad term that
Speaker 1: means snow, and it includes other cold things like ice.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that our language is shaped by
Speaker 1: the need for efficient communication. Brains want to come up
Speaker 1: with words that are exact and informative to other brains
Speaker 1: in the community, and they want to be able to
Speaker 1: produce these with minimal effort. In other words, you don't
Speaker 1: want to have to use a six syllable word for
Speaker 1: a word that you use a lot, like dog or cow,
Speaker 1: but you might use longer, less efficient words for concepts
Speaker 1: that you don't need to refer too much, like anti
Speaker 1: disestablishmentarianism or anachronistic or sesquipedalian. So, using snow as an example,
Speaker 1: if your community subdivides this into lots of words. That
Speaker 1: requires more effort to store all these words, but it's
Speaker 1: worth it if you get a big gain in informativeness.
Speaker 1: So wherever you find things frequently referenced in language, then
Speaker 1: you find finer grained categories appearing. And this is how
Speaker 1: you get communication. So the way that we talk about
Speaker 1: the world is shaped by our environment and our experiences
Speaker 1: in the world. For the Inuit, snow is an important
Speaker 1: part of their environment and their language reflects this. So
Speaker 1: this is how language gets shaped. But there's a debate
Speaker 1: that's been raging in the linguistics community for a century,
Speaker 1: and that is, if you grow up speaking a particular language,
Speaker 1: does it make you think differently? In other words, if
Speaker 1: you grow up in a language with lots of distinctions
Speaker 1: for snow in the vocabulary, do you actually see snow differently?
Speaker 1: When you look out the window. You don't just see
Speaker 1: falling white stuff, but do you perceive distinctions that would
Speaker 1: be invisible to me? And does your language shape your thought?
Speaker 1: Does it restrict or expand what you are able to see?
Speaker 1: So let's start with the twenty sixteen movie Arrival, which
Speaker 1: was based on the novella story of Your Life by
Speaker 1: Ted Chang, and for reasons of not spoiling it if
Speaker 1: you haven't seen it, I'll leave out the details. But
Speaker 1: this movie is about alien ships coming to the Earth
Speaker 1: and they just hover there and we meet the protagonist
Speaker 1: played by Amy Adams, because the military can't figure out
Speaker 1: how to communicate with the aliens, and so she's called
Speaker 1: in as a linguist. Can she figure out how to
Speaker 1: communicate with these aliens? And in this story she ends
Speaker 1: up learning the alien's language, and at the end, once
Speaker 1: she speaks this new language, she's able to perceive the
Speaker 1: world differently. And in fact, some of you may have
Speaker 1: seen this movie but didn't catch this part of it.
Speaker 1: The aliens have a different relationship with time, and once
Speaker 1: Amy Adams learns to speak like they do, she can
Speaker 1: see time like they do. Now. Although Arrival is a
Speaker 1: work of fiction, I talked with Head Chang about this,
Speaker 1: and indeed he based this on this longstanding debate about
Speaker 1: whether and how your language shapes your thinking, And really
Speaker 1: the debate began in Earnest a century ago. There were
Speaker 1: two linguists who thought about this idea, and they proposed
Speaker 1: that maybe language isn't just the output of how we think.
Speaker 1: But instead, when you teach a child language, you're actually
Speaker 1: shaping how they can think, or how they can see
Speaker 1: the world, or how their mind can cogitate. These two
Speaker 1: linguists were named Edward Sapier and Benjamin Wharf, and the
Speaker 1: idea that language shapes thought became known as the Sapier
Speaker 1: Wharf hypothesis. Now we can divide this into the strong
Speaker 1: version and the weak version of the hypothesis. The strong
Speaker 1: version states that language determines thought, meaning that the structure
Speaker 1: of a language actually limits what its speakers can and
Speaker 1: think about. So if you don't have a word for
Speaker 1: something in your language, you can't even conceive of it.
Speaker 1: The weak hypothesis states that language influences thought, meaning that
Speaker 1: the structure of your language can affect how you think
Speaker 1: about the world. I'll cut to the chase here and
Speaker 1: say that the strong hypothesis that language determines thought has
Speaker 1: not held up against testing, but there is evidence supporting
Speaker 1: the weak hypothesis. As an example that we'll get into
Speaker 1: in a moment, some languages have different ways of dividing
Speaker 1: up the color spectrums, so they might verbally distinguish two
Speaker 1: neighboring colors whereas your language might just use a single
Speaker 1: word that encompasses both colors, and the evidence suggests that
Speaker 1: speakers of that other language are better at seeing, better
Speaker 1: at distinguishing between those different colors, between different shades than
Speaker 1: you are because they have words for them. Is this
Speaker 1: because the language itself is influencing their perception or is
Speaker 1: it simply because they're more familiar with these colors because
Speaker 1: they have separate words for them. We'll get back to
Speaker 1: that momentarily, but either way, they get the difference between
Speaker 1: these colors better than you do, just as a function
Speaker 1: of the language that they speak. Now, the extent of
Speaker 1: language's influence on your thinking is debated, and in part
Speaker 1: this is because it's really hard to design good experiments
Speaker 1: that can isolate the effects of language on your cognition
Speaker 1: from other factors about your culture and your environment. And
Speaker 1: also a lot of people are bilingual or multilingual, so
Speaker 1: their cognitive processes might be shaped by the interplay of
Speaker 1: multiple languages, so it's not always straightforward to test this.
Speaker 1: But that said, our language does seem to play a
Speaker 1: role in shaping how we think and perceive the world,
Speaker 1: and that's not so surprising. After all, language provides a
Speaker 1: framework for organizing and categorizing thoughts and experiences. The words
Speaker 1: and labels we use to describe things can influence how
Speaker 1: we mentally organize the world around us, and our language
Speaker 1: is what we use to express complex and abstract ideas,
Speaker 1: and the availability of specific words or phrases can affect
Speaker 1: how effectively and precisely we can communicate these ideas, or
Speaker 1: take something subtle, like gendered nouns. A lot of languages
Speaker 1: use gendered nouns, meaning each object is either a male
Speaker 1: or a female. English doesn't have this, but lots of
Speaker 1: languages do, and there's a lot of study on how
Speaker 1: that leads speakers to notice different things. Like the word
Speaker 1: bridge in one language might be male and female in another,
Speaker 1: and so people who speak those languages will often describe
Speaker 1: different things about the same bridge, whether it's strong or
Speaker 1: it's sleek, depending on their native language. And of course,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, the words and concepts that are prominent
Speaker 1: in your language influence what you pay attention to, like
Speaker 1: the differences in snow or colors. Now, I recently made
Speaker 1: an episode on the idea of translating animal language, where
Speaker 1: we talked about using AI to decode communication between say, dolphins,
Speaker 1: or between whales, or between songbirds. And the idea behind
Speaker 1: that comes out of research showing that all human languages
Speaker 1: share a similar structure, where the words each sit in
Speaker 1: a network of meaning related to each other. And you
Speaker 1: can plot this out and see that languages have a
Speaker 1: particular shape to them, and so researchers are interested in
Speaker 1: whether that same shape could be success fully applied to
Speaker 1: decoding animal languages. But one of the possibilities I brought
Speaker 1: up is that an animal language might contain concepts that
Speaker 1: we don't have any way to understand, and so those
Speaker 1: parts of the space would be totally uninterpretable to us.
Speaker 1: And that's because the sensorium of an animal, the kind
Speaker 1: of signals that can pick up from the world, might
Speaker 1: influence their concepts what they can think about. And so
Speaker 1: if we just keep that idea in mind, that's really
Speaker 1: the heart of the question that we're asking today. There's
Speaker 1: been so much excitement in machine learning about the similar
Speaker 1: structures of human language, but what we're asking today is
Speaker 1: in what ways are are they different, even if only
Speaker 1: subtly different, and how might that map onto differences in
Speaker 1: human thought or experience. Even though we all emerged from
Speaker 1: the same origins recently, and all have the same brain structure.
Speaker 1: Culture and history modify the details of languages. So to
Speaker 1: understand this better, I called up my colleague, the cognitive
Speaker 1: scientist Lira Boroditsky, and I asked her, does the language
Speaker 1: you speak change how you think?
Speaker 3: What a great question. Certainly, research in my lab and
Speaker 3: many other labs over the last thirty years is shown
Speaker 3: that the structure of the language that you speak changes
Speaker 3: the way you think, changes the way you see the world,
Speaker 3: the way you feel, what you pay attention to. And
Speaker 3: what's emerging from all of that research is this idea
Speaker 3: that human minds construct not just one cognitive universe, but
Speaker 3: actually many thousands of cognitive universes. Right, every language is
Speaker 3: its own little inner cosmos, and every language gives you
Speaker 3: a different perspective not just on the physical world, but
Speaker 3: also on the incredible complex invented worlds that we humans
Speaker 3: create that allow us to think about complex things like
Speaker 3: our inner universes or the cosmos, or the kinds of
Speaker 3: things that allow us to play chess, or compose symphonies
Speaker 3: or do really high level mathematics. Every language is its
Speaker 3: own little set of tools for creating those very complex
Speaker 3: ideas and ends up with very different complex ideas as
Speaker 3: a result.
Speaker 1: So you grew up speaking Russian, Yeah, so give us
Speaker 1: a sense of the differences between English and Russian and
Speaker 1: what that might lead to in terms of thinking about
Speaker 1: something different.
Speaker 3: Sure, I can give you a couple of basic differences.
Speaker 3: Russian is a language that has grammatical gender, so every
Speaker 3: now and is masculine or feminine, and so people who
Speaker 3: speak languages like that end up actually assigning some gender
Speaker 3: stereotypically gendered properties to things that don't have gender, like
Speaker 3: toasters or gloves or plants, things like that. Russian, in
Speaker 3: the perceptual realm makes an obligatory distinction between light blue
Speaker 3: and dark blue. So things that English calls blue for
Speaker 3: Russian speakers, the light part of the blue spectrum is
Speaker 3: gulaboy and the dark part is seeny, and you have
Speaker 3: to call them by different names. They are just two
Speaker 3: different color words like blue and green and English. And
Speaker 3: what we find is that people who speak languages like
Speaker 3: this actually do make a sharper distinction perceptually between those
Speaker 3: two colors, and very early on their brain and starts
Speaker 3: treating those two colors as categorically different. So if you're
Speaker 3: looking at the brain of say a Greek speaker Russian speaker,
Speaker 3: looking at a stream of colors, when it changes from
Speaker 3: the light blue category to the dark blue category, the
Speaker 3: brain gives us very fast surprise response like Ooh, something
Speaker 3: categorically has shifted. But if you're looking at the brain
Speaker 3: of an English speaker where they're all just blue, then
Speaker 3: you just get this nice, smooth function. The brain isn't
Speaker 3: alarming at saying, oh, you've changed something. So that tells
Speaker 3: us that language sneaks into even the very finest, little
Speaker 3: tiny decisions that your brain is making about the perceptual world.
Speaker 3: Just looking at colors is not such a hard conceptual task,
Speaker 3: but even there, language is interfering.
Speaker 1: And what about examples across cultures with for example, time
Speaker 1: and space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so both of us are very interested in how
Speaker 3: people think about and across lots and lots of cultures.
Speaker 3: What we see is people think about time using ideas
Speaker 3: from space, so they're using metaphors, they borrow spatial representations
Speaker 3: to think about time. But the way that space is
Speaker 3: used to talk about time and to think about time
Speaker 3: differs from culture to culture. Let me give you some examples.
Speaker 3: So in English we talk about the best being ahead
Speaker 3: of us and the worst being behind us. So the
Speaker 3: future is in front of us and the past is behind.
Speaker 3: And we used to think maybe this is a biological necessity, right,
Speaker 3: because of course we walk forwards, not backwards. We have
Speaker 3: eyes on the front of our heads, not on the
Speaker 3: backs of our heads. But then it turns out there
Speaker 3: are lots of cultures that put the past in front
Speaker 3: and the future behind, and for them that's the more
Speaker 3: natural way, they say, because of course you know what
Speaker 3: has already happened. The past is no and it's manifest,
Speaker 3: that's why it's in front of your eyes, whereas the
Speaker 3: future is unknown. So what humor is for us to
Speaker 3: think that the future is in front of ours, to
Speaker 3: think that we can see it. To them, that seems absurd.
Speaker 3: There are differences in how people think about time, even
Speaker 3: based on how their language is written. So, for example,
Speaker 3: if your language is written from left to right, events
Speaker 3: unfold in your mind from left to right. If your
Speaker 3: language is written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew,
Speaker 3: that events will unfold from right to left. Some languages
Speaker 3: have a strong vertical dimension for time, so for example,
Speaker 3: in Mandarin, the past is up in the future is down,
Speaker 3: and so Mandarin speakers have this strong vertical orientation for time.
Speaker 3: My favorite example comes from some work that I got
Speaker 3: to do in Aboriginal Australia, and so there's this group
Speaker 3: called the kook Tire that I had a chance to
Speaker 3: work with with my colleague Alice Gabee. And in kook
Speaker 3: Tire you don't use words like left and right to
Speaker 3: talk about space. Instead everything is in north south east
Speaker 3: west space and really everything. There are a lot of
Speaker 3: languages like kuk Tire where you would even say, oh,
Speaker 3: there's an ant on your north northwest leg and of course, well,
Speaker 3: if your body that's no longer than north northwest leg,
Speaker 3: you have to recalculate. The way you say hello and
Speaker 3: coop Tire is to say which way are you going?
Speaker 3: And the answer should be something like north northwest in
Speaker 3: the far distance, how about you? So even to get
Speaker 3: past hello, you have to be oriented, and this is
Speaker 3: very different from the way most Western folks orient themselves.
Speaker 3: Most of the time we're thinking about space with respect
Speaker 3: to our bodies, not with respect to the landscape. So
Speaker 3: for me, the question was how do folks like this
Speaker 3: think about time. If it's true that we use ideas
Speaker 3: from space to think about time, but these folks think
Speaker 3: about space with respect to the landscape, how do they
Speaker 3: think about time? So I made up a very simple task.
Speaker 3: I have a set of picture cards. I give them
Speaker 3: to you, and they might be, say, pictures of my
Speaker 3: grandfather at different ages, and I just say, put these
Speaker 3: in the correct order, and so you lay them out
Speaker 3: on the ground in some order that you think is correct.
Speaker 3: But what I'm interested in is what is the orientation
Speaker 3: with respect to your body or the respect to the landscape.
Speaker 3: And what we find is if a cook tire speaker
Speaker 3: is sitting facing south, they'll put the cards out from
Speaker 3: left to right. If they're sitting facing north, they'll put
Speaker 3: the cards out from right to left. If they're sitting
Speaker 3: facing east, they'll put the cards out coming towards their body.
Speaker 3: So if you do a little mental rotation in your mind,
Speaker 3: think about what the pattern there is. Well, it's from
Speaker 3: east to west right, It's always in the same direction
Speaker 3: in the landscape, it just goes in different directions of
Speaker 3: the respect to the body. And as an English speaker,
Speaker 3: I look at that and they think, oh, how strange
Speaker 3: time is flowing in different directions for them, depending on
Speaker 3: which way they're facing. But another way to think about
Speaker 3: that is no, actually time is always flowing in the
Speaker 3: same direction for them east to west landscape. And it's
Speaker 3: so strange that for me, time shifts every time I
Speaker 3: move my body right. So if I'm facing this way,
Speaker 3: then time goes this way. If I'm facing this way,
Speaker 3: then time goes so ego centric of me to make
Speaker 3: the dimension of time change anytime I turn so to me,
Speaker 3: that's a really wonderful example about the potential also of
Speaker 3: the human mind, because in order to be able to
Speaker 3: organize time that way, you have to be oriented in
Speaker 3: a way that we used to think humans couldn't be oriented.
Speaker 3: We used to think it was beyond human capability to
Speaker 3: be able to keep track of your orientation at all times.
Speaker 3: And it turns out not only was it not impossible,
Speaker 3: it's not even that hard. You just have to try.
Speaker 3: It's just a mental practice that you start, and in
Speaker 3: these cultures and cultures like the kouk Tire, it's constantly
Speaker 3: reinforced socially because you have to use the language. The
Speaker 3: language requires you to be oriented, and so to me,
Speaker 3: this is always a really putent reminder of how much
Speaker 3: more is available for our brain to do that is
Speaker 3: not just what we're used to, but what we could
Speaker 3: do if we just try out a couple things.
Speaker 1: How do you suppose it got started in the Koukti.
Speaker 1: One possibility is that it just gets passed along from
Speaker 1: generation to generations, so people have to become very aware
Speaker 1: of the landscape. Another possibility is that there's some genetic things,
Speaker 1: such as they have slightly more magnetite in their inner
Speaker 1: ear and they're more sensitive to the orientation of the planet.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious how you think about why that happens
Speaker 1: in some cultures and why it doesn't happen in others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it happens in culture all over the world,
Speaker 3: and it happens this property of using absolute space instead
Speaker 3: of terms like left or right happens in all kinds
Speaker 3: of different environments. So sometimes it's people who live in
Speaker 3: dense forests, and sometimes it's people who live in barren deserts,
Speaker 3: and sometimes it's people who live in mountains, and sometimes
Speaker 3: it's seafaring people, and sometimes it's landlocked people. So you
Speaker 3: can kind of find it in every geographical environment. So
Speaker 3: I don't think the geographical environment is the best predictor
Speaker 3: of this. I don't think we have any evidence that
Speaker 3: there's a genetic component, and I can give you a
Speaker 3: couple of anecdotal reasons for it. One is, if you
Speaker 3: look at people living in the same community, let's say,
Speaker 3: in the same village where they're bilingual or some people
Speaker 3: are stronger, and one language that's an absolute orientation language,
Speaker 3: in another language that's a relative left right orientation language.
Speaker 3: The way people stay oriented in the way they gestured
Speaker 3: to depends on the language that they're dominant in, not
Speaker 3: on you know, anything else. They're all related, they're all
Speaker 3: part of the same village, as part of the same
Speaker 3: genetic pool, right, And so you can find even within
Speaker 3: a very very small genetic community, variation based on language
Speaker 3: exposure rather than on geography or other things. And in
Speaker 3: my own experience, you know, I spend a lot of
Speaker 3: time outside. I love to go hiking, and i go
Speaker 3: mushroom hunting, and I'm constantly traveling and finding myself in
Speaker 3: new places. It would have been extremely useful for me
Speaker 3: to develop an ability to stay oriented as well as
Speaker 3: the kuktai or stay oriented. There have been lots of
Speaker 3: times in my life where it would have been really useful,
Speaker 3: And the first time that I really felt it was
Speaker 3: when I was spending time in this community. Because when
Speaker 3: you don't know which ways which they're people treat you
Speaker 3: like you're stupid, but because you kind of are by
Speaker 3: local standards, right. And I remember after about a week,
Speaker 3: I was walking along and suddenly I saw this window
Speaker 3: open up in my mind and it was a bird's
Speaker 3: eye view of the landscape, and I was a little
Speaker 3: red dot that was just traversing the landscape. And as
Speaker 3: I turned the thing, this window, this map stayed locked
Speaker 3: on the landscape and it just turned in my mind
Speaker 3: and it seemed to happen automatically. And as soon as
Speaker 3: I saw it, I thought, oh, well, this makes it
Speaker 3: so easy, Like if this thing keeps working, if this
Speaker 3: automatic little widget that my brain just grew keeps working,
Speaker 3: it'll be trigger to be oriented. And then I kind
Speaker 3: of sheepishly told someone there, I said, you know, this
Speaker 3: weird thing happened. I said, saw it from a bird's
Speaker 3: eye view and it rotated in my mind. And they said, well,
Speaker 3: of course, how else would you do it. So I
Speaker 3: noticed it developing within my brain within the course of
Speaker 3: a week because of the intense social pressure to try
Speaker 3: to appear not so useless and not so not so
Speaker 3: stupid to the people around me, even though it would
Speaker 3: have been useful lots of other times in my life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, So getting back to language, the language that
Speaker 1: you speak, there seems to be some structuring of how
Speaker 1: you think or what you're able to think. How do
Speaker 1: we know that language is a causal factor there, that
Speaker 1: the language actually structures how you think.
Speaker 3: That's a great question because whenever you compare to groups
Speaker 3: of people who speak different languages and you say, well,
Speaker 3: look they think differently, what you're showing is a correlation
Speaker 3: because there could, of course be lots of other things
Speaker 3: that are underlying causes that are not the language. And
Speaker 3: so the way we try to attack that very directly
Speaker 3: is in the lab. We bring people in and we
Speaker 3: teach them new ways to talk about time. So we
Speaker 3: teach them new ways to talk, new metaphors, and then
Speaker 3: we see if we have shifted the way that they think. So,
Speaker 3: if you come in and let's say you're an English speaker,
Speaker 3: I try to teach you vertical ways to talk about time.
Speaker 3: So now in this version of English, you're going to
Speaker 3: say Monday is above Tuesday, and Tuesday is above Wednesday,
Speaker 3: or the reverse mondays below Tuesday, Tuesday's below Wednesday. After
Speaker 3: doing that for a little while, even just a few
Speaker 3: minutes of just getting it down, making sure that you
Speaker 3: really understand the metaphor, what we see is people start
Speaker 3: to develop an implicit mental timeline that's vertical and in
Speaker 3: the direction that the metaphors go. And we can measure
Speaker 3: that implicit timeline with clever little experiments that and tasks
Speaker 3: that we set up in the lab. So that's a
Speaker 3: very clear sign that changing the way that people talk,
Speaker 3: changing language very quickly changes the way people think. You
Speaker 3: can teach people new ideas by introducing a new metaphor,
Speaker 3: for example.
Speaker 1: And at what age do you see these kind of
Speaker 1: effects in children?
Speaker 3: Oh? Well, with the grammatical gender example that I showed
Speaker 3: you that I told you early on, you see even
Speaker 3: quite young kids, like five year old kids starting to
Speaker 3: think that if you're going to make a movie about toasters,
Speaker 3: for example, the toasters should have boy voices or girl voices,
Speaker 3: depending on the grammatical gender in the language. But with
Speaker 3: more basic perceptional things like differentiating different sounds. That starts
Speaker 3: to happen in infancy. So different languages make use of
Speaker 3: different sound contrasts, and human infants are born ready to
Speaker 3: be able to discriminate all the possible sounds in human languages,
Speaker 3: but some of those turn out not to be useful
Speaker 3: because their language doesn't actually make use of those contrasts.
Speaker 3: And you see those abilities start to fall away in
Speaker 3: the very first year of life. So if you compare
Speaker 3: relatively newborn infants that are growing up, say in a
Speaker 3: Japanese speaking environment in an English speaking environment, they're equally
Speaker 3: sensitive across the contrast range. But if you compare them
Speaker 3: at one year of age, you start to see that
Speaker 3: some contrasts have fallen away, and they're different ones for
Speaker 3: different language environments.
Speaker 1: God, and are people swayed by the framing of language
Speaker 1: that they receive, for example, in the context of the
Speaker 1: legal system.
Speaker 3: Oh well, obviously our lawyers would hope so because they
Speaker 3: want you to They want you to give them lots
Speaker 3: of money so that they can continue to sway them. Yeah,
Speaker 3: language is very powerful in shaping how we construe situation,
Speaker 3: even a very simple situation let's say there's an accident
Speaker 3: someone breaks a oz. There are lots and lots of
Speaker 3: ways to describe that situation in language, and depending on
Speaker 3: how I frame it, if I say he broke the vaz,
Speaker 3: or I say the vaz broke, or to him it
Speaker 3: so happened that the vaz broke. All of those lead
Speaker 3: people to think to construe the situation in different ways,
Speaker 3: to focus more on who's to blame. In our experiments,
Speaker 3: people both blame people more and require more money if
Speaker 3: you describe as a situation a situation as he did it,
Speaker 3: as opposed to it happened. And this is true even
Speaker 3: if they can see the video themselves.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So if we show them an example of a crime
Speaker 3: against a balloon, for example, someone popping a balloon or
Speaker 3: breaking of oz, people will both blame the person more
Speaker 3: and want more money if we describe the situation as
Speaker 3: he did it.
Speaker 1: So that was Lera Boroditsky, and she studies how our
Speaker 1: language and our brains are in a feedback loop with
Speaker 1: one another, such that the language you speak can modify
Speaker 1: what you are sensitive to, like if you have different
Speaker 1: words are blue, or how you think about space and time.
Speaker 1: So fundamentally, there are still many open questions about this.
Speaker 1: The long version of the Sapier war hypothesis has been
Speaker 1: largely dismissed, but there are a lot of excellent questions
Speaker 1: and possibilities about the weak hypothesis. As you know if
Speaker 1: you've been listening to this podcast for a while, my
Speaker 1: obsession is about the way that we have different internal
Speaker 1: worlds on the inside, with each of us living on
Speaker 1: our own planet. Whether that's the way that we see colors,
Speaker 1: or whether we have synesthesia or word a version or
Speaker 1: a fantasia, or one hundred other measurable differences about our
Speaker 1: internal reality, we all end up having a slightly different
Speaker 1: experience of reality. And so while there are plenty of
Speaker 1: remaining questions about language and the extent to which it
Speaker 1: modifies your thinking, the work of Lira and other linguists
Speaker 1: and cognitive scientists gives us yet another way to zoom
Speaker 1: in on some of these questions and get a better
Speaker 1: of the differences between how each of us sees the world.
Speaker 1: Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information
Speaker 1: and to find further reading. Send me an email at
Speaker 1: podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussions, and
Speaker 1: I'll be making episodes sporadically in which I address those.
Speaker 1: Until next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.