What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.
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Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.
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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. We’ve talked a lot on the podcast about the idea of thinking and consciousness, what is it that is going on inside our heads, inside our brains that makes us a conscious living being. Of course, a lot of what we know about consciousness is first person. We know about our own consciousness from thinking about what’s going on inside our heads. What do we know about how other people are doing their thinking?
0:00:27 SC: Well, of course, you need to be able to communicate. You can observe people and just sort of be completely scientific about it, but most of our experience with the thoughts of other people comes from talking to them, reading them, talking about them and so forth. So, to facilitate this kind of communication, human beings invented language, a symbolic system that lets us represent things and then talk about them.
0:00:50 SC: It’s then very natural to ask, how much is the way that we think influenced by our language? When we make different choices about how language should work, those choices can then affect how we actually do our thinking. There was an idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis back in the early days of the 20th century. The strong version of it said that language actually determines how we think. You can’t think in ways other than the ways that language gives you. No one really believes that anymore, but there’s a weaker version that says that language influences how we think, and a growing number of psychologists actually believe that.
0:01:27 SC: Today’s guest is Lera Boroditsky, who is a neuroscientist and psychologist. She’s Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, and I got to know her because in her work on neuroscience and psychology and language, she talks a lot about time. Time is one of my favorite things, so we end up at the same conferences. But the point is, when we talk about time, interestingly, we very often use spatial metaphors. We talk about moving the meeting forward. What is that supposed to mean? How do you move a thing in time, forward or backwards? Does moving something forward an hour mean it’s an hour earlier or an hour later? Well, that depends on whether you metaphorically think of yourself as moving forward in time or the meeting as moving toward you as you stay stationary. Neither one of those ideas is correct or incorrect, they’re just metaphorical choices that relate a spatial picture to the time language that we use.
0:02:25 SC: So, Lera has studied how different cultures use language, particularly when you talk about time, but in other ways as well, and you’ll figure out that not everyone uses just simple forward, backward language. There are cultures and languages that relate time to up and down. There’s cultures and languages that relate it to what compass direction you’re pointing in, or where the big mountain on your island is. This kind of stuff illuminates how we think about the world in very interesting ways. You have a long way to go to figure it out, but Lera’s research is a wonderful window onto the weird ways in which we, without even knowing it, shape the way that we think.
0:03:03 SC: I wanted to mention that I do have a little project that I’m thinking of maybe trying to start, namely doing a little set of YouTube videos about big ideas in physics as sort of a way to get through the coronavirus epidemic pandemic that we’re kind of all facing. It’s not really very helpful, but it’s something to do, something to give me a sense of contributing some way. I know a lot of people are at home. A lot of people are worried. Maybe we can have some videos, talk about how the universe works. Maybe that will be a fun thing to do. So, look for that, links to that on my Twitter feed and webpage and so forth.
0:03:39 SC: What I hopefully will be doing is releasing short videos and then a couple of days later, doing also short question-and-answer sessions where after the first video is released, you leave some questions on YouTube or on Twitter, and then I’ll try to answer some of the best ones. So we’ll see how that goes. I hope everyone is staying safe, washing your hands, social distancing, all those things that we need to do. It’s a delicate balance that we have to strike. We have to be careful. We have to take care of ourselves, and we have to think about the welfare of others, but we also have to not panic, and we also have to keep living our lives, and it’s not at all obvious how to do that. I hope you’re all doing it the best we can. So, with that, let’s go.
[music]
0:04:38 SC: Lera Boroditsky, welcome to Mindscape podcast.
0:04:39 Lera Boroditsky: Thanks for having me.
0:04:41 SC: So, I am a physicist. I think about space and time, but time, probably my favorite dimension in space time. I wrote a book about time, but from a physics point of view. One of the little factoids that I got was that the word time is the most used noun in the English language.
0:04:57 LB: It is, yeah. This is sometimes reported as news, but it’s been true for hundreds of years. But actually it’s also very commonly used in lots of other Indo-European languages. So, words like time are in the top ten across lots and lots of languages. We seem to be obsessed with it.
0:05:13 SC: Is it less true in other… In non-Indo-European languages?
0:05:16 LB: I just haven’t checked.
0:05:17 SC: Okay, you just haven’t checked.
0:05:18 LB: There are 7,000 languages.
0:05:19 SC: Yeah, you can’t look through all of them. That’s a good little PhD project.
0:05:22 LB: But we use the word time in many different ways in English, so it’s a bit of a cheat to say it’s the most frequently used word. So, because we can say, how much time do you have, or how many times have you seen it, or time after time.
0:05:35 SC: It’s time for this, yeah.
0:05:36 LB: Or I’ll see you another time, all of those are actually different uses of the word time. Or you can even say, time me, in which case you’re using it as a verb. So it’s a bit of a cheat, but still, we’re talking about time a lot.
0:05:48 SC: Well, it indicates… Because a lot of people think that time is somehow mysterious, and certainly we’re able to use it. We’re able to capture it. We know what we mean when we say be at the seminar at 1 PM or something like that. That operationalizes very straightforwardly into the world.
0:06:04 LB: Well, we’ve created conventions that we require each other to follow, but those conventions aren’t actually that important in a lot of other places. So, if you’re living in a village in the jungle, making an appointment for Tuesday, for example, is not that useful unless something happens in your life on a regular seven-day schedule and actually, Tuesdays are in some important conventional way different from other days. If not, then the seven-day week is a completely arbitrary imposition on the flow of time. In fact, lots of other cultures have different week structures that they follow.
0:06:40 SC: Well, this is… I really want to get into this about how… The interplay of the language that we use and the reality that we perceive around it. But first, you have all these wonderful examples of the relationship between spatial metaphors and our use of time. So, why don’t we just start with a classic question of, let’s move next week’s meeting forward.
0:07:02 LB: Yeah, so if you ask people, next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, what day is the meeting now that it’s been rescheduled, people often have a very strong intuition about what the answer is, but about half the people think that it’s Monday and about half the people think that it’s Friday. The reason is we can talk about time two different ways in English. We can talk about ourselves as moving in time, so we can say things like we’re approaching the deadline, we’re coming up on the holidays. We’re moving across a stationary path, which is time, from the past to the future. Or we can talk about time as moving, so the deadline is coming up, the holidays are approaching. So, we’re stationary and time, events and time are moving towards us. These are two different perspectives.
0:07:52 LB: So if you’re thinking of yourself as moving in time, then the meeting moves forward in your direction of motion from Wednesday to Friday; but if you’re thinking about time moving towards you, then forward is in the direction of motion of time from Wednesday to Monday. What we find actually is getting people to think about themselves moving in space like scooting in a chair to a goal, or something coming towards them like bringing a chair to them using a rope, something like that, that will change the perspective that they take on time. So if you’re thinking about yourself moving through space, you’ll say the meeting is on Friday.
0:08:27 SC: So you prime them in some sense by making them think about this.
0:08:30 LB: Yeah, we get them to imagine one spatial scenario or another, and when they’re imagining themselves moving in space, they get the seemingly unrelated question about next Wednesday’s meeting, and it changes their answer about the meeting because the way we think about space and time are so closely related.
0:08:47 SC: The 50-50 is fascinating ’cause you’ll have other examples we’ll get to about how people in different languages or different cultures think about it, but this is the same culture, the same set of people using the same words and still it’s almost equally split. Are there correlations between personality types? Do nervous people think of it one way and relaxed people think of it the other way?
0:09:06 LB: People have tried looking for personality correlations, and there have been some small studies. I think I’d want to see larger samples to really be sure, but what we find is that even though people might have an original intuition, if you don’t prime them, they have an original intuition that it’s either Monday or Friday, you can get a whole lot of people to switch.
0:09:26 SC: It’s pretty loose. It’s not deeply ingrained.
0:09:28 LB: Yeah, and it’s just that that use of the word forward is ambiguous in English, just like most other words are ambiguous. It’s just, in this case, you can get it to be ambiguous to mean one thing or the opposite of that thing.
0:09:39 SC: And presumably it’s all completely unconscious that we’re even using that as a spatial metaphor. We just use the word, and people think they know what it means.
0:09:47 LB: Yeah, and it’s almost impossible in English to talk about time without using spatial words. So, for example, if you want to talk about duration in English, there’s no word like duratious.
0:09:58 SC: Long.
0:10:00 LB: Yeah, you say long, or you say how much time did it take. So, you talk about amount. You talk about distance. Other languages might have dedicated words that you use only for duration, not for distance, but in English, it’s almost impossible to talk about anything with time without using words that were originally spatial. So, you might say, I’ll see you at 3:00, on Tuesday, in an hour.
0:10:24 SC: It’s interesting, because most people…
0:10:26 LB: Those are spatial prepositions.
0:10:27 SC: Yeah, most people sort of think that the 20th century realization that space and time are part of the same thing was this big counterintuitive thing, but they were always, at least metaphorically, related to us.
0:10:41 LB: The way that we think about lots of abstract things that we can’t see is often spatial, so we kind of use our visual spatial abilities to allow us to imagine and organize a lot of other things that are abstract. So, whether it’s talking about stocks, or prices going up and down, or emotions going up and down; there are lots of things that are kind of nebulous or not directly perceivable by the senses that we just map into space, and it makes it seem like we can handle it then in our minds and manipulate it and think about it more easily.
0:11:11 SC: This is probably already hinting at some relationship between how the brain works and how we develop these things. I did a wonderful podcast with Lynne Kelly about memory palaces, building these little structures that have interesting shapes and they let you remember things. So, again, analogizing things in space to things you want to remember makes it much easier.
0:11:29 LB: Yeah, we’re very… We do have a lot of capacity for organizing things in space. We have a lot of experience of navigating spaces in our actual lives, in our actual physical experience, and so then we can draw on that to reason about lots and lots of other things.
0:11:45 SC: Are we allowed to say that maybe the spatial capacities evolved first, before we had a nuanced grasp of time and other things?
0:11:54 LB: I don’t know that that would be the case. I think a lot of modern work on neuroscience shows that there are cells that mark locations in space time, that the things that we used to think were spatial cells are really more like context.
0:12:10 SC: Yeah, okay, good.
0:12:12 LB: And so…
0:12:13 SC: We were at the meeting together about this very idea, right?
0:12:15 LB: Yes.
0:12:15 SC: Yeah, neurons and space time, yeah.
0:12:17 LB: So, certainly lots of even extremely primitive organisms need to do timing. In order to perform even the most basic motor action, you have to be able to time things. You have to move one thing and then the other. So, certainly very basic senses of time exist throughout the evolutionary tree. The way that we end up thinking about time once we start thinking about the deep past or thinking about moving events and things like that, that of course starts leverage, starts leveraging a very different system. But even within the human mind how we do timing is really distributed around the brain, so if you’re doing millisecond timing for motor movement, a lot of that is going to be in the cerebellum at the back of your brain. But if you’re thinking about something that’s on an order of a second or more than 30 milliseconds or more than 30… Yeah, more than 30 milliseconds it’s going to be a little bit further forward in the brain. If it’s something like a minute, it’s going to be the frontal cortex.
0:13:20 SC: I didn’t know that. Okay, so is that clearly sort of monotonically related?
0:13:24 LB: It’s not that it’s monotonically related, it’s just they’re really different functions. Keeping track of a minute is a really different task than controlling your fingers to play the piano. Even though we would call them both timing, there is just…
0:13:37 SC: Use different parts of the brain.
0:13:37 LB: The mechanisms are totally different for doing those things.
0:13:40 SC: And you have this wonderful set of examples about how the spatial metaphors and time are different in different cultures. So a range, a set of things in duration. And I guess when they happen…
0:13:52 LB: In order. Yeah.
0:13:52 SC: And that relates to how you read and things like that?
0:13:56 LB: There are lots of cultural practices that shape how we correlate space and time. So reading direction certainly makes a difference. So if you read from left to right, you’re likely to think that earlier things are on the left and later things are on the right. And so if I give you a set of pictures of someone at different ages for example, you’re likely to put the youngest pictures on the left and the oldest pictures on the right.
0:14:18 SC: Right.
0:14:19 LB: But if I give the same test to someone who reads from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew, then they’re likely to put the earliest pictures on the right and the latest pictures on the left. So the way that we scan the world and organize events in our minds is set by this very simple convention of which direction your language is written.
0:14:41 SC: Yeah.
0:14:41 LB: And even just the way you imagine an event unfolding. So for example, if I ask you, imagine Bill is giving flowers to Mary, draw me a picture of that. If you ask an English speaker to do that, they’re likely to put Bill on the left, and Mary on the right. The action is going from left to right. But if you ask an Arabic speaker to do that, they’re likely to put Bill on the right and Mary on the left. So, they’re imagining quote unquote the same event, but it’s unfolding in these different directions depending on their practice reading and writing.
0:15:11 SC: And that must be just some arbitrary accident of history, who chose what, left to right, or right to left?
0:15:17 LB: It’s a little bit less than arbitrary. It had to do with what kinds of writing implements you had and how much…
0:15:23 SC: Oh, okay. [chuckle]
0:15:23 LB: Smudging you would have depending on what you were using to write with. Or if you were using a hammer and chisel, for example, you would hold the hammer in your dominant hand, the chisel in your less dominant hand, as opposed to if you’re writing with ink, you’re going to use your dominant hand. Because most people are right-handed it makes more sense to go in one direction with some implements and in the other direction with the other implements. So depending on when your writing system was being developed, and some have switched directions when the implements changed.
0:15:50 SC: Yeah, I remember thinking when I first heard about this stuff. Even just within physics, there are sub-fields within physics that draw pictures in their papers of how time is flowing. Almost never from right to left, but frequently from left to right, from top to bottom, or from bottom to top. There’s no… Cosmologists and people who do relativity, time flows upward. But computer scientists, time flows downward and I really don’t know why. [chuckle] It’s not because we use different implements or anything like that. So it is interesting. And different cultures have up and down also metaphors for time?
0:16:27 LB: Yeah, so in Mandarin, for example, there is a strong up-down metaphor. So earlier events are above, later events are below.
0:16:34 SC: Earlier is above. Okay…
0:16:35 LB: The past is up.
0:16:36 SC: Time flows down.
0:16:37 LB: Well, [chuckle] the past is up.
0:16:40 SC: The past is up, alright, that’s…
0:16:43 LB: The future is down.
0:16:43 SC: That’s a simpler way if saying it. Yeah.
0:16:43 LB: I don’t know, are you moving, it time moving?
0:16:45 SC: Right. Okay. I know.
0:16:46 LB: We have to set that also, right?
0:16:47 SC: That’s right. Yeah.
0:16:48 LB: So if we think of ourselves as stationary, then you would say that time is moving, events and time are flowing up so that earlier things end up further and further up above you.
0:16:58 SC: Okay. That’s right.
0:17:00 LB: But the way you would use the metaphors in Mandarin would be for example to say the last month, you would say the up month, and the next month is the down month. And what we’ve seen in a lot of studies is that Mandarin speakers actually do use this organization in their minds privately when they’re organizing events in time.
0:17:18 SC: How do you test something like that?
0:17:20 LB: Well, you can do it in lots of ways. I’ll tell you the simplest one which is I can stand next to you and I point to a spot in front of your body. And say, “Suppose I told you this here is today, where would you put yesterday and where would you put tomorrow?” And then you just have to point somewhere in space. And when you do that English speakers will almost always organize things from left to right, so they’ll put yesterday on the left and tomorrow on the right. Whereas Mandarin speakers, will often organize things vertically, putting yesterday above and tomorrow below. You can also see that in spontaneous gestures. So just get people talking about time and they’ll start using their hands, ’cause we like to use our hands when we talk.
[chuckle]
0:17:56 SC: Yeah.
0:17:57 LB: And so you can see that. And you can also set up little experiments where you require people to push a button that means earlier or later and you are very meanly either placing that button above or below the start button and you see which one is harder for people. So if they have already in their minds an implicit association that up is earlier, it should take them longer to respond when you’ve very meanly placed the button in the wrong place, and so you can measure that across lots of cultures.
0:18:25 SC: This is a technique, right, in psychology, so I don’t know a lot about it, of figuring out things that people don’t even know about themselves by figuring out how long it takes them to do something. Is this… How reliable is this? How good is this or is it perfectly established?
0:18:39 LB: Well, the technique I’m describing would broadly be a test of implicit associations. So you’re asking what implicit associations do people already have. And whatever is automatic or whatever is very ready for you to do is going to be easier to do, you’re going to be able to do that task faster. And so often we set up exactly the kind of thing I described, where you say, well, would it be stressful or difficult for you if I arrange things in a way that’s different from the norm? And so for English speakers for example, it doesn’t matter for them if I put the earlier key above or below, they don’t have a strong association that goes either way. Whereas for Mandarin speakers they’re faster if it’s above than if it’s below. And so that tells us that there is this implicit association, that they have an expectation that those things are associated that they have to override when I do it the wrong way for them.
0:18:42 SC: Right. Okay. I just want to keep getting all these wonderful examples on the table. You also have examples of just the fact that we have the words past, present, future. But some languages slice the baloney much more finely than that, and some less, I suppose.
0:19:45 LB: Yeah. Well, the way that languages treat time grammatically are really diverse. So, for example, in some languages there is no past tense, there is no future tense, there’s no tense marking adverbs at all. In fact, verbs never change.
0:20:04 SC: There are verbs, but they’re not tensed.
0:20:05 LB: Yeah, some people argue whether or not they’re verbs, but that’s a different discussion. Yeah, so the way you would say if I showed you a picture of someone who is about to kick the ball, someone in the process of kicking the ball, someone who’s just kicked the ball. There are some languages where you would just say, “He kick ball,” in all three cases.
0:20:28 SC: Ball kick.
0:20:31 LB: Yeah. And then there are other languages that make much finer distinctions. So, in some languages there might be five different past tenses depending on how long something… How long ago something occurred, right. So if it was within a week that’s one tense. If it’s within a month it’s another tense and so on. And so you really have to keep track of how long ago something was and make sure you use the correct tense.
0:20:51 SC: And does that affect how people think about time, are they better at knowing how long ago things were if they have those words available?
0:20:57 LB: There hasn’t been an empirical test of exactly… That language that I was just describing is this minority language spoken in Papua New Guinea so it would be quite challenging to do.
0:21:05 SC: Not that many test subjects, yeah.
0:21:08 LB: Not impossible but it would be really interesting to see. In general, the prediction would be that whenever you make a distinction, you see things that fall in the category together as being more similar, and you see things that are in different categories that fall on different sides of that, the category boundary as being more different.
0:21:30 LB: So if your language makes a distinction between things that happen up to a week ago and other things, then you really have a separate category in your mind for things that have happened within the week and those are seen as different from things that have happened within the month, but not within the week.
0:21:47 SC: And somehow in your brain, they keep changing categories as a week goes by. That’s what’s weird to me.
0:21:52 LB: Yeah. They have to continuously fade, fade into new categories, yeah.
0:21:58 SC: I wonder… This is probably an unfair question, but do we know enough about how the brain works to say that these memories are in our brains but they get re-classified as they pass the boundary or do we sort of have to think about, oh, that was three weeks ago, so okay, it’s in this category?
0:22:19 LB: Well, we don’t know enough about the brain to know that. I can make an educated guess, which is that when you’re about to tell someone about an event you’re retrieving elements. And when you’re retrieving, you’re adding information as well. This is true in any retrieval case, right? So if I ask you about a birthday party that you attended you’ll be able to retrieve some details that may be how you directly experienced, but you’re also going to fill in a lot of other details from general knowledge that you have about birthday parties, and what you’re like at birthday parties and all kinds of other general knowledge that you have. And so it’s in that context of retrieval that that information gets added or it gets reclassified.
0:22:57 SC: So I guess we have this naive metaphor based on computers or something like that, that images or files have timestamps. But probably memories are not quite that simplistic, although clearly, we do have some ability to remember when things happened, but I don’t know exactly how it works.
0:23:12 LB: Yeah, well, we’re remembering context, right? So with every memory there’s going to be context that you store away. You might know that it must have happened before this because you hadn’t yet known about that, or you might know that a particular person was there, and you didn’t yet know that person before such and such a time, so you can often use context to try to…
0:23:36 SC: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s not that it has a timestamp, it’s that one memory is sort of connected to all these other memories and we can reconstruct when it must have been.
0:23:44 LB: Exactly, but we certainly don’t have a timestamp. Mostly, we’re terrible at remembering when things happen, which may be for the best, it’s not usually that important. But imagine if you had an exact timestamp for every event that occurred, how fine grained would you want that? Like every time you picked up a fork.
[laughter]
0:24:06 SC: Yeah.
0:24:08 LB: I think in general you kind of know the relationship between events in your life more or less.
0:24:14 SC: Do you think in general that the fact that we’re so used to computers now has given us a bad idea of how the brain probably works ’cause they are pretty different?
0:24:22 LB: So we do have a tendency to compare brains to whatever is the most complicated technology available at the time, right? So it used to be that the most common metaphors for thinking were clay tablets, right, and then after clay tablets maybe it was the abacus and then it was a calculator. And then it was a telephone switchboard ’cause those were very complicated. Then it was the computer and maybe now it’s the internet. And so, people draw on whatever complex things they have around to try to understand this other extremely complex thing.
0:24:53 SC: Yeah.
0:24:53 LB: You see that in all branches of science, right? So in physics the atom used to be a ball and then it was a bowl of pudding with raisins in it.
[laughter]
0:25:01 LB: And then it was a solar system.
0:25:02 SC: Right.
0:25:03 LB: And it’s a cloud.
0:25:03 SC: Now it’s a cloud, yeah.
0:25:04 LB: And so you have these metaphors that drive hypotheses, that drive thinking, drive debate and they’re always evolving.
0:25:13 SC: And I guess we shouldn’t just talk about spatial metaphors for time, but even, I want to say spatial metaphors for space, how people think about space could be very different, how people think about directions in space, for example.
0:25:26 LB: Yeah, so the way that we orient ourselves in space and which dimensions we think are primary really differs from culture to culture. So for example, we’ve been talking a lot about left and right and you organize time from left to right, for example, but there are some languages that don’t really use words like left and right and instead they do everything in some kind of absolute space. So cardinal directions would be an example, north, south, east, west. I had a chance to work in a culture like this in Australia. Actually, about a third of the world’s languages rely strongly on cardinal directions of some sort.
0:25:39 SC: So as opposed to saying forward, backward, left, right, they say north, south, east, west.
0:25:39 LB: Not necessarily north, south, east, west, the set of directions could be different. So it could be, if you live on a hill, your directions are uphill, downhill, across the hill, or it could be that your directions are set by the river that you live by, or they’re just… Or they’re set by the locations of the mouth and the source of the river, not the flow of the river or…
0:25:39 SC: Things that are important to your life.
0:25:39 LB: Yeah, prevailing winds or… Or they could just be an arbitrary set of directions that roughly divide things into quadrants but aren’t aligned with north, south, east and west, right? So there are lots of possible systems. On islands there’s often a concentric system where there is a direction that’s seaward and a direction that’s inland.
0:26:49 SC: Yeah.
0:26:50 LB: Like volcano-ward is a…
0:26:51 SC: Yeah, typical. Yeah.
0:26:53 LB: Is a direction. And sometimes you have mixed systems, like you might have a seaward, inland dimension, but also an east-west dimension. And so people use both east-west, that’s very common because of the sun, of course. And then you also have this more concentric system that’s about how far away you are from the sea.
0:27:10 SC: And that does seem like that linguistic convention would have an effect on what you understand. I mean, right now I have no idea what direction north is, right? But if I grew up in that culture, I would probably keep track of it all the time.
0:27:21 LB: Yeah, in fact, that’s what we find. People who speak languages that require you to use cardinal directions, for example, do keep track of which way they’re facing because you have to to speak the language, right? So in the community I worked in, literally to say, “hello,” you say, “Which way are you going?” And the answer should be something like, “North north west in the far distance about you,” right? So you literally can’t get past hello. And the social pressure, of course, to learn is very, very strong. You just get treated like you’re a nincompoop if you don’t. And even very small kids there are very well-oriented. So I could sit down with a four-year-old and say, “Hey, can you draw me north, south, east and west,” and they would just make these two effortless lines in the sand, and I would get my compass out and be blown away. Exactly, right, this tiny little human. And you’re like, “How did you do that?”
0:28:14 SC: Yeah. What about people whose brains are not completely functional, does that affect how they perceive these things?
0:28:21 LB: We had a chance to test this, looking at patients who’ve had strokes. We looked at patients with strokes in their right parietal lobe. This is a common place to have a stroke ’cause there’s a lot of vasculature, so it’s common for things to go wrong. And when you have a stroke there one consequence often is that you start neglecting things that are on the left side of space, on the other side of space. So these patients might only eat…
0:28:45 SC: Because your right brain…
0:28:46 LB: Controls…
0:28:47 SC: Covers your left perceptions.
0:28:49 LB: Yes. So these patients might only eat food on the right set of their plate, or they might only put makeup on the right side of their face or might only shave the right side of their face, they might only read words on the right side of the page. They just don’t… They seem to be unaware of what’s happening on the left. And so we wonder, does this also extend to time. So how concretely is time really on the left or the right?
0:29:14 SC: I mean, sorry, can I just ask, for the plate thing, is there a part of their brain that knows that they’re only seeing the right-hand side and they can just rotate their plate and there’s more food there?
0:29:24 LB: If you rotate it for them, they’ll be happy and they’ll eat the other side.
0:29:27 SC: But they won’t…
0:29:28 LB: They won’t… If… They will eat food on the right side of the plate and then complain that they’re still hungry.
0:29:32 SC: Huh. So there’s something else going wrong in their brains that they can’t…
0:29:37 LB: They’re just not able to bring into consciousness things that are…
0:29:42 SC: Okay, they’re not able to bring to consciousness.
0:29:43 LB: That are on the left…
0:29:43 SC: Which is amazing. But yeah, it does undermine the idea that there’s a separate unified consciousness.
0:29:49 LB: Yeah, so obviously your brain is aware of lots of things that it’s not telling you about. It’s kind of like on a need-to-know basis, with your conscious experience.
0:29:57 SC: Yeah. Yeah.
0:29:58 LB: So if you really stress test this, like if you have something on fire on the left side or you show a salacious image on the left side, people might blush…
0:30:07 SC: Your brain will let you know.
0:30:09 LB: Well, they might blush…
0:30:09 SC: Okay, they’ll react.
0:30:10 LB: But might not know why they’re blushing.
0:30:12 SC: Interesting.
0:30:13 LB: And so… Yeah, so we told people, these were patients who read from left to write, they were French-speaking patients in Switzerland. We told them about a guy, David, who liked doing some things 10 years ago in the past and will like doing different things 10 years from now. These are trivial things. Like 10 years ago he liked cherries but 10 years from now, he’ll like strawberries. And these are just facts that they had to remember. And what we found was, when we tested their memory, they were much more likely to remember things that were associated with the future, the right side of time. And if they remembered things from the past, they mis-attributed them to the future. So if they remembered something that we said happened 10 years ago, if they recognized it, they mistakenly thought that it had to be in the future, so they kind of squeezed everything in their mental timeline into the part that they could attend to, which is in the right part of their mental timeline.
0:31:14 LB: So that to me shows just how deeply ingrained these cultural patterns are, right? So culturally, we have assigned the left side of Time to be the past and the right side of time to be the future. It’s a completely arbitrary convention, it’s a arbitrary cultural convention. And yet by the time we’re grown adults, if you destroy the part of the brain that represents the left side of space, you also knock out that culturally associated part of time.
0:31:40 SC: So it’s somehow encoded in the physical brain.
0:31:42 LB: It is, yeah.
0:31:43 LB: In ways that we’re learning.
0:31:45 LB: Yeah. Well, there’s no other option than for things to be encoded in the physical brain. We don’t have any other hypotheses that…
0:31:51 SC: That’s true. Fair enough. Where it correlates.
0:31:52 LB: But you can see it. Yeah.
0:31:53 SC: Alright. Very good.
0:31:53 LB: You can see it. Yeah.
0:31:53 SC: I mean, maybe this is a digression, but I want to hear more about what this fieldwork is like. How do you find this tribe with this language? How do you visit them? Are they presumably a small tribe?
0:32:08 LB: It’s… The particular linguistic community is about 200 people, the entire community is about 500 people and there are speakers of five different languages that live together in this community.
0:32:21 SC: Isolated, or?
0:32:23 LB: Yeah, they’re pretty isolated, they live on the west coast of Cape York on this town called Pormpuraaw. It was set up as a mission in Australia. But to answer your question, how do you kind of start on this kind of work. Well, you always start with a question or an interesting observation that catches you, and you say, “Oh, I wonder… “
0:32:43 SC: Right. Yeah.
0:32:44 LB: And then… So I ended up doing this work with a wonderful collaborator, Alice Gaby, who was the first to describe the grammar of the Kuuk Thaayorre language that was spoken here. So she wrote the grammar for the language as her dissertation, and she spent a lot of time in the community. And I got connected with Alice, because I’d been bothering one of her advisors for years about, “Hey, you’re working with people who speak these languages that have this cool way of thinking about space. How do they think about time? Have you noticed anything? Have you noticed anything?” Every time I would go to visit his lab I would constantly bug him. And after years, he said, “Oh, you know what, Alice noticed something. You should go talk to Alice.”
0:33:26 SC: The progress of science, that’s how it works. Yeah.
0:33:29 LB: But then recently I was going through some of my college notebooks, and I’m a very disorganized note taker and so my notebook contains some notes on Husserl and then someone’s phone number, a recipe for lamb stew and then a note.
0:33:45 SC: As they do, yeah.
0:33:46 LB: A note that said, get in touch with such and such a person, and find out how speakers of this language organize time. It would be cool. It fits in cardinal directions. And I have zero memory of writing that note. And then, of course, 20 years later you get to do the study, but it was one of these things where you just get interested in a question and you keep asking people who you think might know and eventually an opportunity opens up and the gift of a wonderful collaborator, and then you get to get to find out the answer to the question that apparently I’d wanted to know for much longer that I remembered.
0:34:22 SC: Yeah. Did you have to learn the language?
0:34:25 LB: No, Alice was my contact on the language front.
0:34:29 SC: I mean, how many languages do you have to know to do your job? Is that a fair question?
0:34:35 LB: It’s really useful to know about languages and it’s really useful to have wonderful collaborators that you trust who are experts, it’s always best to have someone who is more expert than you.
0:34:45 SC: Sure. You’re not going to be super fluent in all, thousands of languages, but, okay, so what’s the answer? Does a [0:34:52] ____ says cardinal directions affect how you talk about time?
0:34:56 LB: It affects how people organize time in their mind. So when we asked people in this community to… For example, organize cards that show a person aging from young to old, instead of organizing them from left to right, they organize them from east to west. So if they’re sitting facing south, they made them go from left to right, but if they’re sitting facing north, they made them go from right to left. If they’re sitting facing east, they made them go coming towards their body.
0:35:24 SC: Right.
0:35:25 LB: And for me, that was just the most amazing thing to see with my own eyes, ’cause it’s one thing when you make a prediction theoretically, you say, “Well, here’s a bold claim. If I think that the way people think about time depends on space and you build one out of the other, then they should do this thing,” but it’s a thing you’ve never seen anyone do.
0:35:44 SC: Right. No, that’s the scary part, right. Falsifiable predictions.
0:35:48 LB: And millions and millions of people have been given a task to organize cards and you’ve never seen someone do it that way and so you sit someone down and you say, “Let’s see what happens,” and then you see it happen before your eyes. It’s the coolest thing to see.
[chuckle]
0:36:03 SC: And in a sense, it’s very weird to us to think that I need to keep track of north, south, east, west, when I put some cards on the floor, but maybe it’s a little bit less egocentric, it’s not like time revolves around you, it’s more stuck in here, inherent in the earth somehow.
0:36:21 LB: Yeah, there’s definitely one way of thinking about that pattern of data I just described that says, “Oh, how weird, they make time go in different directions depending on which way they’re facing.” But actually the other way of describing it is, “Oh, no, they’re doing in a different coordinate frame, so actually time always goes in the same direction in the coordinate frame that’s important to them,” so they’re using a qualitatively different set of coordinates and for them the relevant coordinates are east to west and time always goes from east to west. And it’s me who is making the dimension of time chase me around every time I turned my body. Extremely egocentric of me.
0:36:56 SC: And is it… This is again maybe future research, but are there other correlations? So this is a whole another category to think about both space and time a little bit differently. Can we match that up to other ways they think?
0:37:09 LB: There are lots of things that we would want to explore. It’s definitely too early to make other conclusions. But people have found lots of other cool patterns of how time goes that isn’t left to right or right to left. So for example, my colleague here at UCSD, Rafael Núñez, and Kensy Cooperrider did work in a community in Papua New Guinea, the Yupno people, and what’s cool about the Yupno is for them time doesn’t go in a straight line. So it rolls into the village at one angle and then it hits the village, it takes a turn and rolls out at a different angle.
0:37:41 SC: Okay, that’s just crazy talk. I’m sorry, that’s gone too far.
0:37:43 LB: Well, this is why I’m telling you, right.
0:37:45 SC: Yeah.
0:37:46 LB: So because we have traditionally had all these assumptions about how time must go.
0:37:51 SC: Right.
0:37:52 LB: So it used to be, well, it has to go from left to right, and maybe it has something to do with handedness, because you’re right-handed so people would have that kind of explanation. Or it has to go so that the future is in front and the past is behind, because we walk forwards mostly and not backwards and we have eyes in the front of our heads and not the back. That turns out not to be true either. The past, for some people the past is in front, the future…
0:38:12 SC: Except for all these logical things, yeah.
0:38:13 LB: It has to be in a straight line, of course. How else could it be? But it doesn’t have to be in a straight line, if there are places around you that are important to you, so in this case, the mouth and the source of the Yupno River are really important locations and there’s no way to make a straight line between them and hit the village, so time takes a detour to the village, stops in the village, and then takes a turn and goes in…
0:38:36 SC: What does that mean operationally, like when you say, when you’re referring to something a week ago it’s in one direction and a year ago it was in a different direction, is that…
0:38:42 LB: Yeah, so if you’re looking at the way people gesture as they’re talking about events in the past and the future, you’ll see them gesturing along this bent timeline.
0:38:51 SC: Okay. Right, more things in heaven and earth, I guess, yeah, that’s very cool.
0:38:57 LB: But I think all of this is a testament to the incredible ingenuity of the human mind that we’ve invented not one way of thinking about time, but so many thousands of ways of thinking about time, and probably we haven’t invented most of the ones that are still possible.
0:39:12 SC: At least all the ones you mentioned are one-dimensional, right, I would be more troubled if people were thinking of time as two-dimensional, ’cause I don’t know how to make sense of that.
0:39:21 LB: Well, so the example we started with, when I say next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days, what day is the meeting? You tell me if you think it’s more than one-dimensional. So if people are giving me different answers depending on how they’re thinking, whether they’re thinking about themselves moving or time moving.
0:39:39 LB: Now, if time is one-dimensional, and it’s like a one-dimensional, unidirectional entity, then it should not matter if I’m moving towards the meeting or the meeting is moving towards me, right? Those are the same thing. In space, it matters because there’s a fixed ground against which we’re moving. So if I’m moving towards you, that’s different than you moving towards me, because there are other things that are staying stationary relative to us, but that requires more dimensionality. It’s not… Right?
0:40:09 SC: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think that, I mean, number one, of course, part of what Einstein figured out was that the ground, it’s perfectly okay to think of the ground as moving if you’re on a train or something like that, right? So that you can choose your reference frame as you want, but even if space were only one-dimensional, there could still be ground and there could still be a reference frame with respect to which you were at rest, I think. The thing that is having space be more than one-dimensional enables is that you can go in circles, right? Whereas in time, you can’t go in circles, you only go in one direction.
0:40:45 LB: Well, a lot of cultures do go in circles.
0:40:47 SC: So they think. They linguistically talk about it that way but…
0:40:51 LB: Well, certainly, people draw diagrams of time that are circular, or at least imply a spiral. And we have a lot of cycles built into our systems, right? So we have the week cycle where things repeat and the months of the year repeat and so on. And in some cultures, those circles are a lot more prominent as a way of thinking than in others.
0:41:09 SC: Yeah, I know. I mean, the standard paradigmatic clock is a pendulum going back and forth, right? Repeating itself over and over again. Yeah, no, no, there are definitely cycles in nature.
0:41:18 LB: But in general, I have described a lot of things that sound linear. And part of that might be an artifact of the measurement, right? So when you’re measuring how people think about time you give them some cards to lay out, they give you a line. Well, when you’re looking at a line, it’s possible that what you’re looking at is a small part of a really big circle.
0:41:39 SC: Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, very much.
0:41:40 LB: Right, and you’re just not making a measurement of the whole system. So if it was possible for us to create a task that measured a lot more of the space, we wouldn’t just see a bunch of little lines, we would see a lot of lines that connect, small lines that connect into a circle.
0:41:54 SC: Sure.
0:41:55 LB: Or a rhombus or something, right?
0:41:58 SC: And we’re talking about weeks and months and years, but presumably, all these different cultures have their cosmologies, or their eschatologies, or whatever. And so they might have guesses or hypotheses about what happens on much, much, much longer timescales that are different from culture to culture, right? Hindus have a cyclic sort of cosmology that is like way longer than most western cosmologies as far as…
0:42:22 LB: Yeah, definitely people’s relationship to deep time, whether it’s the past or the future, is really different from place to place. I’ll give you two examples. One is just how many steps of causation do you think are relevant to a current outcome. So if I set up a pool table, and I say, “Here’s the location of all the balls, I’m going to make a shot. How important is this shot for all of the next shots that I’m going to make?”
0:43:00 SC: Right. Okay. The causality.
0:43:00 LB: So does it make an impact on the second one, and the third one and the fourth one? And if you ask students in different countries this, everyone will say the next shot of course is being affected by the outcome of this first one, but then people start to fall off, and American students fall off after basically like the second or third shot. So by the time you make it to the fourth or fifth shot, they say, “Yeah, that first shot is no longer exerting a lot of causal force.” And, but students in Korea, for example, will say even the sixth and the seventh shot, they still think it’s exerting a lot of causal force. And going the same way in the opposite direction, in the past, you say, “Well, here’s the location of the balls that’s ended up now. How important was the shot before that, the shot before that, the shot before that?” And again, American students have a much narrower slice of time, slice of causal links that they allow to be relevant. Whereas other people have a deeper causal chain that they allow to be built.
0:43:56 SC: It’s interesting ’cause as a physicist, I can justify either one of those approaches, right? I mean, clearly, the shot that you do right now in principle affects all the subsequent shots, right? But maybe in practice, there’s enough unpredictability that it doesn’t affect it in a noticeable way. So, I mean, it depends on what you care about, right?
0:44:15 LB: Yeah, so you said also about time being one-dimensional as opposed to two-dimensional in cycles. And I wanted to tell you about the Balinese calendar ’cause it’s such a cool example. People describe Balinese time as dense time. So instead of one seven-day week, the Balinese calendar has 10 concurrently cycling weeks. There’s a one-day week, a two-day week, a three-day week, a four-day week, a five… And so all of these are have their own rhythms, right?
0:44:43 SC: Wow. Good for them.
0:44:43 LB: And different things happen on different size weeks. So for example, the fish market might be on the third and fifth day of a five-day week, the vegetable market might be on the fifth and seventh day of a eight-day week. And so you can imagine the kind of complex rhythm that this creates in your kind of understanding of time. And also there are three concurrent years happening. So there’s like the Gregorian calendar, there’s the Lunar calendar, and there’s the Solar calendar. And all of these are also happening at the same time. So if you have a chance to look at a Balinese calendar and see all of the markings and designations and colors and additional markers that are required to keep track of all of these, it’s really phenomenal.
0:45:26 SC: How did they do this before they had laptops and things like that, like, I can’t keep track of my appointments next week.
0:45:35 LB: I think that’s a cultural practice that you see also, for example, in music in Bali, so if you think about gamelan and all of the complex cycles of rhythm that happened on the gamelan where if you’re playing one part of the gamelan, you might be on a, I don’t know, 87 count.
0:45:52 SC: Okay.
0:45:52 LB: Where you hit on the 31 and the 47, right? And someone else is on a much different set of times. And so I think that idea of embedded cycles that are recurring but are of different lengths and things kind of falling into that rhythm that’s ever existing is just a very important part of the culture that permeates lots of…
0:46:15 SC: That does sound like something that would I would expect clearly have an impact on one’s cognitive capacities, right? I bet the typical Balinese person is better at juggling all these rhythms than I ever would be. They’re trained to do it, right? They expect it and so forth.
0:46:30 LB: Well, you said than you ever would be. Well, I would disagree with that. I think if you…
0:46:35 SC: I’m old and stuck now, I mean, if I’d started young then sure, but now, I don’t know.
0:46:38 LB: No, you can learn lots of things.
0:46:40 SC: Okay.
0:46:40 LB: It’s this idea that you can’t learn things later in life is really silly.
0:46:44 SC: Okay. I actually, I agree with you.
0:46:44 LB: Think about all the things, complex things you’ve learned since you were six years old.
0:46:50 SC: It’s true.
0:46:52 LB: I think we have this somewhat magical idea that children are the sponges for information and they can acquire these really complex things and sure, children are sponges and they learn lots of things. It’s very impressive, but adults do pretty well. We come up with some pretty clever stuff. I’m on team adults.
0:47:08 SC: Yeah, no, actually, I’m very glad that you called me out on that because I am a big believer that you can and should try to learn things even in your dotage, such as I am, but okay, still, I do think that the practice does affect your capabilities, yeah, this other…
0:47:24 LB: Oh, absolutely.
0:47:24 SC: Yeah.
0:47:25 LB: Cultural practice, especially something that’s built into your language. It’s something you are required to do, you have to do it just in order to be a normal member of your society. You’re going to do it and so it’s a daily practice. And if there’s anything we know from cognitive psychology is the things you practice, you get better at.
0:47:41 SC: Yeah. Okay. I mean, I do want to think that we can keep learning things no matter how old we get, maybe, but I sometimes wonder whether I’m just whistling Dixie, like, what about learning languages? Is it true that we were better at that when we were younger?
0:47:56 LB: It’s definitely easier to learn languages when you’re younger than when you’re older. It gets progressively harder, but people often use that as an excuse to not learn another language. I often have people tell me, “Oh, it’s too late for me. I’ll never, if I start learning French now, I’ll never be perfect at it. I’ll never be native like.” and I always wonder, like, why do you want to be perfect? Are you trying to be an international spy? ‘Cause that’s the only reason why you’d need to be, pass for a native speaker. It’s actually really fun and useful to speak a language. Even if it’s not perfect, you could speak it pretty well.
0:48:30 SC: Do you do sort of discipline yourself to learn more languages occasionally? Is this part your…
0:48:35 LB: I’m trying to learn Spanish now.
0:48:36 SC: Spanish? Okay. Good, yeah.
0:48:37 LB: I think it’s super fun. It’s a fun puzzle where you can actually go in and have an interaction with someone. It feels like you’ve solved, you’ve like unlocked some kind of mystery like you said some words and they said some words back and you got the taco that you wanted, and you’re like, achievement unlocked.
0:48:51 SC: Success. Yes.
0:48:53 LB: It worked.
0:48:54 SC: I actually think this more broadly about academics. I think that, there’s this idea that we’re creative when we’re young, and we become less creative when we’re older. And maybe there’s some of that that is true but there’s an equally good hypothesis that says when we’re young, we don’t know anything, so we have to work hard to learn and become an expert in something. And when we’re older, like we’re already an expert in something, so we can just keep doing that thing over and over again. And that makes us less creative, completely irrespective of our cognitive capacities.
0:49:23 LB: Yeah, so we definitely get set in habits and we get set in patterns, but once you recognize that about yourself, you can do something consciously about that, right? And you can go and learn new things, you can go and have new experiences. This is one of the reasons that people travel, for example, you end up in a different context. And those times that you’re travelling, that you’re away, they expand in memory, so you might have a week of vacation, and that week of vacation takes up so much more space in your memory of the year than the rest of the year.
0:49:54 SC: Yeah. Yeah.
0:49:54 LB: Because you have new experiences in a different context, they aren’t just automatic repetitions of the, your normal routine. And so whether it’s learning languages or having new experiences, jostling yourself to do something new creates that opportunity for creativity.
0:50:14 SC: So as a professional cognitive scientist, would you sign on to the idea that continually surprising yourself and trying new things keeps you young in terms of your brain function?
0:50:26 LB: There are definitely lots of studies that show that. There’s a use it or lose it feature. It’s true with languages, so people who acquire a second language are somewhat protected from Alzheimer’s and onset of dementia late in life, but that’s also true for any active hobby that people keep up, right? So whether it’s digital photography, or something else that requires you to use your brain in new creative ways that will help you stay active. And I always tell people that the right time to learn other language is now.
[laughter]
0:51:00 LB: It does get harder as you get older, but unless you have a time machine and you could go back to when you were younger, your only option is now and now is better than any other time that’s later.
0:51:09 SC: I need to get some like language learning course to advertise on the podcast. I’d feel good about that.
0:51:15 LB: It’s a great idea.
0:51:16 SC: And it’s not just time, you have another example which speaks to this point about colors, about the light blue and dark blue?
0:51:23 LB: Yeah, so it’s a very simple example. Again, when language makes a distinction between two things, it requires you to make a distinction between two things, you get a lot of practice distinguishing them. So in Russian, there isn’t a single word that covers the entire spectrum of blues in English, so there’s not a word that covers everything from the lightest blues to the darkest blues. Instead, there is a separate word for light blue, goluboy, and as another word for dark blue, which is siniy, and so Russian speakers have to call different shades of blue by these two different names. And when you test their ability to distinguish blues that either fall in one Russian category or in two different Russian categories, they’re faster to tell the difference between what they would call goluboy and what they would call siniy. Whereas for English speakers, they’re all just blue.
0:52:11 SC: So we can tell that they’re different, but it takes us longer to recognize the difference than it would a Russian.
0:52:15 LB: Yeah, in general this is true across languages. You can test English speakers across the blue-green distinction and things that you would call blue as opposed to green, colors that fall on either side of that boundary, you will be faster to tell the difference between than two different blues or two different greens that you would call by the same name.
0:52:33 SC: There’s nothing spooky about that, it’s practice, that’s what they’re used to doing.
0:52:36 LB: It’s practice.
0:52:37 SC: Yeah, yeah, I mean, so now we’re bumping up against the big question, which is how we talk versus what is real? Does language bring reality into existence? Or is it a simple representation of reality, like, I think even men and women, even in the United States, label colors slightly differently, right? And certainly, the evidence you just said, Russians and English speakers label colors slightly differently. Does that mean that we see differently? Are we perceiving the world differently? And we’re going to go way beyond colors to much more deep and important concepts there.
0:53:11 LB: Yeah. So, of course, all we can measure in experiments is how people behave, right? So I can say, does it take you longer to make this distinction or not? Are you more likely to confuse these two colors in memory? Are you more likely to make an error when I’m asking you to make a distinction? What I can’t tell you from any of those results is what your experience of that color is, right? So if your question is, do Russian speakers see those colors as differently, experience them as somehow differently, I can’t tell you what anyone sees.
0:53:44 SC: That’s a problem. It’s a problem with consciousness in all these questions.
0:53:48 LB: Yes. Perception is a private experience. So ultimately, that’s beyond our tools of measurement. So all we can do is say how efficiently can you make this judgement? How likely are you to be correct if we stress the system, things like that. And from that, we can say, well, the brain seems to have an easier time making this distinction than that. We can also make measurements directly from the brain and say, oh, the brain of a Russian speaker responds. If you shift the colors from light blue to dark blue, you’ll get a surprise response.
0:54:23 SC: Is it like an MRI machine or something? How do you poke into their brains?
0:54:28 LB: I’m describing EG results, where you’re measuring a very fast response that just kind of says something has changed, right? So it’s like a surprise marker. And if I show you a series of blues, when I’ve crossed the boundary from light blue to dark blue, the brain of a Russian speaker, a Greek speaker, for example, will give that surprise response that says, oh, we’ve shifted category, something new is happening. Whereas the same series of colors will not give that response in an English speaker’s brain, because nothing, the category isn’t changing, right? So again, we can tell that the brain is treating these things differently, but I can’t tell you that people see things and anything about how anyone sees anything, really.
0:55:08 SC: Right. What was it, was it the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Am I getting it right? That…
0:55:11 LB: Sapir-Whorf, yeah.
0:55:13 SC: Sapir?
0:55:13 LB: Sapir.
0:55:14 SC: Sapir-Whorf, that basically said that our language controls what we see. How would you phrase the hypothesis?
0:55:21 LB: There are many different versions of the hypothesis. So Benjamin Lee Whorf died young and a lot of his writings were published posthumously. So they’re like, imagine all your notes that you haven’t…
0:55:33 SC: Oh, no, they’re going to be burned.
0:55:35 LB: But in his writings, he says lots of different things. A very strong hypothesis might be that language controls thought and you can never have thoughts that are outside of your language. Another version might be that language is one of the contributors to how we come to see the world. And it might be a stronger influence in some domains where there’s less information from the world, there might be a less strong influence than others. But in general, there is this interesting idea out there that says maybe language is a straitjacket for thought, maybe we can’t think outside of the bounds of our language. And I think this is a particularly odd idea, because you can always learn new ways of talking, right? And also, to invent any feature of a language, you have to have at least partially the thought first. And so it seems to me that language can’t be truly a straitjacket for thought, but language can certainly encourage patterns and entrench us into ways of thinking so that we don’t even consider other options.
0:56:44 SC: I mean, I always thought of, what about an instrumental piece of music? I can think of that, like it’s in my brain, but it’s in the form of language, so like the most naive reading of that hypothesis can’t be quite right.
0:56:56 LB: Yeah. So Wittgenstein makes this wonderful example or to just to show that some things are very expressible in the language and others not. So he says, if I ask you, what’s the height of Mount Kilimanjaro? If you know the answer, you can easily express it in language but if I ask you, what does a clarinet sound like? It’s going to be really hard, right?
0:57:13 SC: Yeah, it’s hard to do, right.
0:57:14 LB: If you don’t already know what a clarinet sounds like, I’m not going to be able to say very many useful things that will really help you. And so, there are definitely a lot of, there’s a lot of mental activity that exists outside of the purview of language or is not as effable as other things.
0:57:32 SC: And my impression is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was popular and then faded and maybe it’s getting a little bit of comeback?
0:57:40 LB: It was popular when Whorf was writing, people were…
0:57:44 SC: So when was that?
0:57:47 LB: He was writing in the ’30s and ’40s, but a lot of his writings were then published after his death. There was a collection of them published in the ’50s, but there wasn’t really any research about it, right?
0:58:01 SC: Just talk.
0:58:02 LB: So it’s one thing for the idea to be popular, right? It’s another thing to actually go and do experiments. And one of the reasons is that all of the people doing work in communities that were not just colleges in the US with English speakers, English-speaking sophomores who are subjects.
0:58:19 SC: Who are test subjects, yes.
0:58:22 LB: All of those people weren’t using the tools of cognitive psychology or psychology in general. They were linguists or anthropologists, they were doing descriptive work. And so when they would come back from their field sites and say, “Well, I worked in this community and they do this,” psychologists would treat that as like interesting stories in travel journals. They would be like, “Oh, well, it’s lovely that you had that trip.”
0:58:44 SC: A little a color… Okay.
0:58:45 LB: You had that experience, but it’s not science. And but at the same time, psychologists were completely shielded from being able to discover any of these fascinating differences because they never left their labs and the only people they ever tested were English-speaking sophomores. And so if that’s the only people you ever test, you never see evidence of diversity. So you’ve conveniently protected yourself from discovering any interesting phenomena, right? And so…
0:59:10 SC: I mean, is there a time when that began to shift?
0:59:14 LB: In the mid-1990s finally there started to be a marriage where inspiration from field linguistics and linguistic anthropology started filtering into psychology, and then psychologists started collaborating with linguists and anthropologists to design experiments. It’s a relationship of building trust across those, disciplines because different fields have different ways of knowing and different things they trust to be true. Definitely, I’m trained as an experimentalist, so I believe data. I want things to come from a controlled experiment, and if there’s not two columns of numbers I can compare, it’s not… Nothing is true, right?
0:59:53 LB: But at the same time, I’ve also come to see how much of our interpretation of the data has to rely on a rich understanding of the context in which you collected the data. So, if I go to a community for a week and do an experiment, 5% of what I learn is the data that I got in the experiment, and 95% of what I learn is just being there and seeing how people interact and how, whatever practice I’m trying to measure in this little toy experiment actually lives in the community and how it performs. That gives me so much more comfort in interpreting the data and making sure that I’m not just grossly misinterpreting what the two columns of numbers were saying.
1:00:33 SC: Does that pose a challenge for the practice of science in that it’s harder to objectively communicate what you’ve learned in a journal article than it is for some quantitative data?
1:00:43 LB: Well, I’m still an experimentalist, so I’m always… I always am, at the end of the day, doing a controlled experiment and doing statistics on the data, so that’s true. But I think it is a really interesting challenge for all of the behavioral sciences and all of the social sciences to think who our subjects of study are. So, when we’re talking about humans…
1:01:10 SC: ‘Cause they’re people, right? As a physicist, I can avoid this problem, but you can’t, yeah.
1:01:13 LB: Yeah, when we’re talking about humans, usually people will just test American undergrads and say we’ve discovered how humans do something. They’re a very strange kind of human. It’s a very, very unusual kind of human. So, how do you actually create a rich understanding of the human mind in all of the different contexts that it exists, and the incredible ingenuity and flexibility that you see around the world in all of these different contexts? That, to me, is the real cool stuff that human minds do. The more we constrain the set of people that we study, the less we’re actually allowing ourselves to understand the real meat of what it is to be human and what it is to have this cool human brain that can do all these things and is so flexible.
1:02:00 SC: And even if language does not absolutely restrict what we can understand, so it does seem that the pendulum is swinging towards thinking that it affects how we understand things, and maybe in a profound way, maybe not just colors and directions.
1:02:13 SC: It definitely creates habits of thought. It lays down patterns that are easy to follow, and then you follow those patterns. In some cases, it creates foundations for whole realms of thought. The domain of number is a good example of that. Of course, in English, we have numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Everyone learns those numbers as a kid.
1:02:35 SC: Did we always have those? In Indo-European, did we… I guess the zero came late.
1:02:40 LB: Zero is very late. Yeah, well, the decimal positional system that we use now for representing numbers, I think comes to Europe in the 1700s with Fibonacci. So he takes it from the Arab world, which took it from India. The idea of…
1:02:55 SC: But counting numbers were always there in Indo-European languages.
1:02:58 LB: Always is a long time.
1:03:00 SC: Always is a long time, I should… Yeah.
1:03:01 LB: We don’t know about always, because language doesn’t leave a physical trace in the fossil record. So, when you go beyond the written record, which is very, very short for the human race, we actually can only make inferences about what might have been there. So, it’s extremely unlikely that always is true.
1:03:24 SC: Yeah, I was exaggerating again, you’ve helped me, very good.
1:03:27 LB: But there are lot of languages that don’t have exact number words or have words that are just 1, 2, 3, few and many. Some languages don’t use a base 10 system for their number system. They use base 6 or base 8 or base 12 or base 87.
1:03:40 SC: Yeah, 87, okay, they’re nuts.
1:03:45 LB: 81 is true. I definitely know of a language that has…
1:03:47 SC: I think 120 was something, but…
1:03:51 LB: The Babylonians had a lot of things that were based on 60s and 20s. So 120, you get from units of 20. That was a common thing. In general, body parts are good, so, 5, 10, 20 are common. But then some people use a different way of thinking about body parts. For example, they might use links on your fingers and so you get 12. Some might use knuckles, in which case you get 8.
1:04:18 SC: Okay.
1:04:19 LB: Some people, for example, there’s a group in Papua New Guinea that has a base 27 that just starts with the fingers on one hand and goes across the top of your body, including parts of your face and your head and goes on the other side. Then when you need to go above 27, you just go in the other direction and so you say a second elbow, second time back. The body part terms are actually the names of the numbers. So, if you want eight potatoes, that’s elbow potatoes. So languages have all of these different systems for numbers, and some don’t have exact numbers at all.
1:04:54 LB: That’s a case where, as you said, zero came late in human civilization. So there are millions of humans running around trying to think about things, and it takes a very special one or a group of humans to come up with this very useful innovation of zero that makes it a really good number system that you can then… Better than the Roman numerals that the Europeans had before, certainly for mental calculation, right? But we all have… We all now completely take it for granted. You and I know the number system. It’s impossible to imagine not knowing it. It’s impossible to imagine it ever not being in your language. But someone had to invent it, and it’s not something that’s a project for a Tuesday.
1:05:36 SC: No, no, no.
1:05:37 LB: It took a really long time for that to come about, and it didn’t happen in very many places in the world. But now we have it, and so we’re such ungrateful punks. We take it for granted. We’re like, of course, it always existed. I would have thought of it even if someone didn’t. But it’s all this cognitive labor of all these people that is just built into language, and now five-year-olds have the cognitive skills that used to be only available to a very few adepts, even just 500 years ago.
1:06:09 SC: Because of that legacy, of the built-in structure of the language they get to learn.
1:06:12 LB: Because it’s just… Now it’s part of the language, and everyone is trained on it from early on. You don’t even remember learning it, and you’re completely ungrateful for it.
1:06:20 SC: But even notions like causality, influence, and you mentioned the billiard balls, blame and intentionality; these are all built into how we talk also.
1:06:31 LB: Yeah, whenever something happens, you have to construe it in some way. There is a physical event that occurs, but then you also have to think about, did it just happen? Did someone do it?
1:06:40 SC: Whose fault is it, right?
1:06:42 LB: Whose fault is it?
1:06:43 SC: Is it an accident?
1:06:44 LB: Yeah, and there are so many different ways that language allows you to construe or describe any given event. For example, let me give you a famous accident, when Dick Cheney went out hunting with his buddy, Harry Whittington, and shot him accidentally in the face.
1:07:03 SC: In the face.
1:07:03 LB: Yeah. So, you could say Cheney shot Whittington. You could say Whittington got shot by Cheney. You could just say Whittington got shot, leave Cheney out of it altogether. You could focus on the manner, so you could say Whittington got peppered pretty good. That was a headline from a Texas newspaper. Cheney himself, when he was apologizing, said, “Ultimately, I’m the guy that pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry.” So, I’m the guy that pulled the trigger… So, he takes this… It doesn’t take a very long time to shoot your friend in the face. It’s a split second physical event. You think it’s pretty simple, but he takes a split second event and breaks it up into a long chain, and he just happens to be on one end of that causal chain. Bush actually did one better. He said something like, he heard a bird flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded. In that description, Cheney transforms from agent to mere witness by the end of the sentence. This is a masterful exculpation.
1:08:11 SC: Yeah.
1:08:12 LB: I give you those examples. They’re funny examples of linguistic wiggling, but we have to do this all the time. Whenever you’re choosing a verb, you’re choosing how much time you’re going to compress into an event. So, I could say, we built Rome. We cured polio. Well, a whole lot of things had to happen. It’s a lot of events. There’s a lot of time for any of those things. So I can use one verb for those extremely complex, long-standing processes, or I could use four verbs to say I shot my friend in the face. So, you’re always taking a perspective when you’re choosing a verb, and you’re also taking a perspective, depending on whether you say I broke the vase, or the vase broke, or it so happened to me that the vase broke. You’re shifting blame. You’re shifting responsibility. Languages choose differently how to describe events. So, in English, for example, we are not that careful about distinguishing accidents from intentional actions. So, you can say things like I broke my arm, where in lots of other languages, you wouldn’t say that unless you’re a lunatic looking to go break your arm, and you succeeded. You would say something like…
1:09:18 SC: You didn’t intentionally…
1:09:18 LB: My arm got broken. It so happened to me that my arm broke. But in English, whether it’s intentional or accidental, it’s common to say an agentive thing, like he broke the vase, I broke my arm, I lost the library book. If you try to say “I lost a library book” in Spanish, people look at you and say, why would you do that?
1:09:34 SC: Why would you do that?
1:09:34 LB: What kind of person would do that?
1:09:35 SC: So in Spanish it would be different constructions for I lost the library book intentionally or I lost it by accident.
1:09:43 LB: Well, yeah, if you’re a weird person who intentionally loses a book, but you would express it as something like the book got lost or the book lost itself to me, or something like that.
1:09:54 SC: Yeah.
1:09:55 LB: Because you didn’t intend to do it. But in the case where, say, you broke a vase by accident; in English you would still say, I broke it. That’s normal. If you don’t say, I broke it, if you say something like, it broke, people think it’s evasive. Whereas in lots of languages, you would have to use a different construction.
1:10:15 SC: Writers are taught not to use the passive voice because it is less active. It’s weaker, right?
1:10:20 LB: Yeah, this is… Agentive, non-agentive is a little different from…
1:10:23 SC: It’s a little different, yeah.
1:10:24 LB: Passive, active. Let me give you an example I love. So, take Caesar, Romeo, Socrates. Socrates drank the poison. Socrates was forced to drink poison. He knew that he was drinking poison. He had to do it. He was sentenced to death by poison, right? Romeo drank the poison. He meant to drink poison. He was intentionally drinking poison. Caesar drank the poison. Caesar thought he was drinking wine, but his wine was poisoned. So, he’s intentionally drinking but, unknowingly to him, it’s poison. In English, we can say, he drank the poison, in each case. Caesar drank the poison. Romeo drank the poison. Socrates drank the poison. There are languages were those three would require different grammatical constructions because in those languages, it’s important whether someone is doing something knowingly, whether they’re doing something willfully, whether it’s volitional. In Dhivehi, for example, this is a language spoken in the Maldives, you would use three different constructions for those three different guys because they are circumstances that are importantly different and have to be marked grammatically differently in those languages.
1:11:38 SC: And just like the ability to keep track of numbers and so forth, I presume this does have an effect on how we conceptualize the world a little bit. This is probably full employment for you and people in your lab to figure out, do we assign praise and blame differently if we speak one of these slightly different languages? Are we more willing to let things slide, or are we more dodgy?
1:12:02 LB: Yeah, well, so let me give you an example just from English. We did this experiment right after the Super Bowl where Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake performed together, and they had this very famous incident that became the world’s first wardrobe malfunction.
1:12:17 SC: Right.
1:12:17 LB: So the term wardrobe malfunction was born after that incident. And the reason we chose that incident was we wanted something that was saturated for people, that they had seen it many times before, and they knew a lot about it, they’d seen it discussed in the news. In case people don’t remember, in the final dance move, Justin Timberlake reached across Janet Jackson’s chest and then for 9/16ths of a second one of her breasts was partially exposed on national television and this was extremely scandalous.
1:12:49 SC: Decline of the West. Yeah.
1:12:50 LB: Yes. The FCC tried to fine CBS $550,000 for the indecency and people were so outraged it quickly became the most tivo’d event of all time. [chuckle] I assume they just had to go…
1:13:03 SC: So outraged.
1:13:04 LB: Go back and review it, just to make sure they were extremely outraged yet again. So we thought, well, what if you take an event that’s even this saturated, and you can see it yourself with your own eyes, you can “go to the tape,” right? So we have this sense, we have this expression in English, “let’s go to the tape,” as if, if you just see it with your own eyes, you’ll have a direct perception of reality, right? So we say, okay, well, let’s go to the tape for something that you’ve already seen many times anyway. Could we still change the way people blame and punish the people involved, depending on what grammatical construction we use to describe it?
1:13:39 SC: Okay.
1:13:39 LB: And so we show the people the video, we tell them, “Either, he unfastened the snap, or the snap unfastened,” and then we ask, “How much is he to blame and how much of the $550,000 should he pay?” And not only do people blame Timberlake more if we say, “He unfastened the snap,” but they also want to charge him 55% more in fines. Alright, so…
1:14:02 SC: So the rubber hits the road, as it were… Yeah, like they really…
1:14:04 LB: Yeah, so even though you have this feeling like, “I can see what happened, I can see it with my own eyes,” the way that we describe things, the way we tend to describe this, things or the way things are framed for us by other people makes a real difference even when you can see things with your own eyes.
1:14:20 SC: Yeah. And presumably, this pervades everything in ways that we don’t even know. I mean, an obvious thing to discuss is gender in language, right? There are ongoing questions about pronouns in English, but other languages are way more gendered than English is.
1:14:35 LB: And some are way less gendered.
1:14:37 SC: And some are way less, right. So, I mean, one question is, when I took German in high school, I was told, sure, there’s der, die and das, that there’s these genders, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with the sex of human beings or anything like that. And I was always a little bit suspicious that there was zero connotation in the brain. Do we know anything about how the existence of those different labels affects how people perceive the different things?
1:15:02 LB: Yeah, so this is coming back to the question you asked earlier about to what extent does language reflect reality or to what extent is it creating its own reality? I think this is a really wonderful example of how language creates something that is completely unrelated to reality, right?
1:15:19 SC: Yeah.
1:15:20 LB: So we have these grammatical gender systems where every noun is masculine or feminine, so chairs, tables, watering cans, toasters, all are either masculine or feminine. And the amazing thing is speakers of those languages actually take those as meaningful, right? So if you ask, even young kids, for example, can you assign voices for animated characters? So we’re going to have a toaster be the star of this animated film, what voice should it have? Young kids who are learning Spanish or French as their first language will pick a boy voice or a girl voice, depending on the grammatical gender of the noun. Adults will give you different descriptions of an object like a bridge, depending on whether it’s masculine or feminine in their language. And if you ask monolinguals of one of these languages, “Why is this word masculine in your language?” Or, “Why is it feminine?” They’ll say, “Well, it reflects some reality about the world.” It’s my…
1:16:11 SC: It’s completely different in a different language.
1:16:13 LB: Exactly. “My language has intuited something that is otherwise invisible about this object. The sun is masculine because it is truly masculine and my language is simply picking up, like, isn’t it amazing that French is such a sensitive language? It’s picked up on true genders of all these inanimate things.” Whereas, once you find bilinguals who speak two languages that have different gender systems, then they start to see, “Oh, well, this is just a formal property of the language.” And they won’t say that. So, I think we believe the structures of our languages a lot more than we should. We often believe that the categories that happen to exist in our language are the structure of reality, but in fact, lots of other categories are possible and those categories could be collapsed or they could be refined.
1:17:00 LB: And all of those are simply models. So when we go back to gender for humans, for example, if you have a language that requires humans to be either male or female in the language, you have to have he or she, and there’s no other way, it’s easy to come to believe that that’s a necessary distinction and you could not think of a human unless you put them in one of those two categories. But if you speak a language that doesn’t actually make that distinction, lots of languages don’t have any gender marking, in that case, it’s not a problem. It actually doesn’t even occur to you as a thing to worry about.
1:17:30 SC: Yeah. I mean, it’s only one of a million different ways we could distinguish between people.
1:17:35 LB: Right, yeah.
1:17:36 SC: That we assign a pronoun to.
1:17:38 LB: Well, it is interesting that gender is one of the only things that languages mark on pronouns. Some languages will worry about age. So there are a couple of other things that get encoded, but gender is one of the only things that you encode.
1:17:53 SC: It’s a big one, yeah.
1:17:55 LB: And you could argue that from an information point of view, other things might be more useful, like you could encode height or eye color or education level or ability to curl 20 pounds, whatever it is that you could want to know about someone, but we focus on this. But also people often feel very attached to whichever specific way their language does gender. So for example, in English, people might be very adamant that you can’t replace he and she with they because you have to have gendered pronouns, and how could you speak a language that doesn’t have gender? What would pronouns even mean? And I always point out that, in fact, almost all pronouns in English are already gender-neutral. So I, we, they, you.
1:18:45 LB: In fact, only third person singular pronouns have gender. And I’ve never heard someone say, “You know what, we really need to add more gender to the other pronouns.” Some languages do that. Thai has different gender words for I. Hebrew has different gender words for you. Spanish has different gender words for they, plural, right? So you could advocate for that, but I’ve just never heard someone say that. People feel very attached to whichever way their language happens to be in the moment. But these things do, can and do change, so…
1:19:14 SC: Do you think it is changing? Do you think we’re going to switch to a, they, third person universal pronoun? Do you think we should?
1:19:22 LB: So, singular they has existed in English for a really long time. There are lots of classical uses of it that people don’t even hear as strange at all. So if I say, “If anybody calls, tell them I’m not home,” that’s an indeterminate person…
1:19:35 SC: [1:19:35] ____. Yes, exactly.
1:19:37 LB: Oh, yeah. You can find these examples in Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It’s an old use in English…
1:19:42 SC: If you know the gender of the person, then you use he or she, but if you don’t, use they.
1:19:46 LB: Yeah. And so the use of singular they is on the rise in English. People like it. They use it. And so as it becomes more popular, if people continue to like it and use it, it’s going to sound more and more normal. And the few cases where there is some ambiguity or difficulty in parsing, ’cause you don’t know if it’s singular or plural, you’ll just resolve those with context over time, or people will come up with other solutions.
1:20:14 LB: Whether something… Whether I would prescribe something, is like they should or shouldn’t, I think it really depends on what purpose you’re trying… What goal you’re trying to achieve. So a lot of languages are trying to come up with gender neutral ways of speaking, because categorizing people into just two categories misses a lot of people who don’t feel like they could cleanly be categorized into those two categories, or sometimes because they feel like it puts too much emphasis on gender. And the first thing that you experience about someone is gender. It allows implicit bias to creep in, and so on. But other languages are adding more gender, so for example in French, the Académie Française, this is the body that decides what is and isn’t officially part of the French language.
1:21:00 SC: The king of French, yeah.
1:21:00 LB: Yeah. They have just approved a whole bunch of new feminine forms for professions, and so the idea is that it creates visibility for the fact that there are female surgeons and there are female soldiers and there are female bosses and there are female presidents, right? And so you could say that’s a good thing, because if there are women doing those jobs and you hear the feminine form, it creates a norm that women do exist in these positions of power. But at the same time, it has a potential to backfire, because for a lot of cases it doesn’t matter, the gender of the person doesn’t matter for their job. So if I say, “The statistician delivered the results,” or something like that, well, if I’m required to mark that it’s a female statistician as opposed to a male statistician, does that allow you to start thinking about your gender biases, about who can do math and who can’t do math? Is a female statistician a different job than a male statistician, in the same way that actress is seen as a less prestigious job than actor, or a waitress is seen as a less prestigious job than waiter?
1:22:09 SC: The female actors I know in Hollywood like to be called actors.
1:22:12 LB: Exactly, because there’s more prestige associated with the male term and there’s more pay associated.
1:22:18 SC: But I don’t know French very well. Are the existing French nouns implicitly male marked and they’re trying to add a female version of it? So, like… I can imagine women not wanting to say, “Well, I’m doing… I’m a man doing that job either,” so it’s a sticky situation. I don’t know what, where to go.
1:22:35 LB: The forms, for a lot of jobs, the forms that exist are explicitly masculine forms, and so the Académie Française has just approved the feminine form… Almost any profession can be easily feminized in French the way that French is constructed, it’s just that they weren’t approved as official things that you could put in a newspaper, for example.
1:22:54 SC: So like, you turn E-N into E-N-N-E, or something like that?
1:22:56 LB: Yeah, yes. Or add an E at the end to some… Depending on the structure.
1:23:02 SC: Yeah, okay. Well, I don’t know… How… So this is a good place to wrap up. I mean, you’re a scientist. You describe what happens in the world, how people talk, how it affects their lives and things like that. But you’re also a person. You have some preferences. How much do you either feel or need to resist the urge to be judgy to say, “Well, it would be better if we spoke this way”? You know, you appreciate a lot more than the average person how the way that we use language affects how we think about things. Does it make you want to go, “Oh, just talk this way”?
1:23:38 LB: Oh, well, I think of language as a tool, and so I think that the way you talk should serve the purposes that you’re trying to achieve. And so for me, for example, with respect to gender, I think it would be really great to have gender as something that’s optional. So when you want to include it, when it’s relevant, you include it, and when you don’t want to include it, or it’s not relevant, you don’t include it, in the same way that you do for almost any other personal characteristic. So I can talk about you without ever mentioning your height or your eye color or your religion or your profession. And if I want to include that information, it’s optional, I can do it. It’s not hard, it’s not forbidden, but it’s just not part of every single utterance.
1:24:20 LB: And so I think that system would be really nice. So if I had to make a new language, I would make a language that makes it possible to not include information when it’s harmful or problematic to include it, and then to include it when it’s useful.
1:24:38 SC: And in this language, would time move from left to right or right to left?
[chuckle]
1:24:42 LB: Well, actually, you know in English time doesn’t move left to right or right to left in the language itself.
1:24:42 SC: The language doesn’t. Do some languages do it?
1:24:42 LB: There is… So, every time I say on the radio that English doesn’t lay out time from left to right in metaphor, so we don’t say Tuesday is left of Wednesday, for example, I get a phone call from someone in the military that says, “Actually, we say that.” And it’s because in the military, they have this calendar, this perpetual calendar that runs from left to right, and everything is scheduled in that left to right stream. And in fact, it’s starting to become a linguistic metaphor. So, people, when they’re shifting schedules will say, “I’m shifting left.” Or, what… And so it is… And some of my collaborators here at UCSD have started testing speakers of military English, and in fact, they do say things that speakers of non-military English, civilian English, would find to be odd or ungrammatical. But they have a structured particular way of using left and right and there are metaphors that have come from this artifact of this perpetual left, right stream calendar.
1:25:44 SC: Well, you already noted that for every rule we try to invent there’s going to be exceptions, and so we keep finding them.
1:25:48 LB: Yeah, humans keep innovating. That’s the wonderful thing about the human mind, is we have infinite possibility in there.
1:25:54 SC: I agree with that one. Alright, Lera Boroditsky, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.
1:25:58 LB: Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.
[music][/accordion-item][/accordion]
There seem to be modifications of spoken English forcing more “resposibilty” on the listener. Wondering where it’s coming from.
I have “less” gribnuficitie. My wife knows I have “less” of a “substance.” A 24 year old graduate student may think I have FEWER things or LESS stuff. No clue, unless they know something about grinuficitie. It’s up to him/her/it to go figure out something about gribnuficitie. So, my wife knows something, almost immediately, the grad student may need to spend minutes to figure out…. Stuff or things. This can’t be an improvement. Thoughts?
Jeff
On my previous ramble, just pointing out the seemily sudden loss of the use of “number” in American English. Everything, people, water, cars, trees, wheat, sewage, peanuts, etc., are described by the “amount” of it/them.
I actually remember the first time I heard this. 2000, driving to work. Switched to an FM rock station to hear the “amount of people at the concert was less than expected.” 43 years on the planet. Had lived in 7 states in the US. Visited and listened to the local news in dozens of cities, north, south, east and west. I had never heard people referred to by an amount. I assumed the 22 year old, on air talent was going to giggle and describe the population of concert attendees in gallons, or pounds, maybe acre-feet. But no.
Now, 87 year old “bright people” refer to amounts of people, trees, etc…. continuously. I am shocked when someone uses “number” to describe a group of things.
Could your guest post something, somewhere that might shed light on how/when/why everyone can rapidly dumb down in this way?
Many thanks,
Jeff
I once read of a quote, supposedly written on a public restroom wall, that time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
In the matter of how we visualize concepts, I have always wondered if anyone else visualizes the months of the year the way I do. I assume that most people visualize months as they appear in a calendar, but I see them on a horizontal line that runs perpendicular to my eyes from January to May then June through August take a 90 degree turn to the left on the same plane before September through December turn back to the original direction. This zig zag pattern has always puzzled me.
@Jim Wade
So basically what you are saying is that your own visualization of the months of the year has always puzzled you? Doesn’t really make much sense to be honest. Especially since what you’re describing is far from complicated to visualize.
Hi Sean—As an old psycholinguist I loved this episode. You seemed interested in learning a language, something with which I have much experience. My goal is to learn to read, to enjoy literature. (Speaking is not my thing, nor is travel, but learning to read a language is an excellent platform for learning to speak.) The best way I know to learn to read a language is this: Pick a text… a novel or whatever you like. Learn to type in your target language. (Easy on your computer.) Type the first sentence of page one of your text into Google Translate, which has gotten very good fairly recently. Look at the results. Depending on how far your target language is from English, you’ll probably be able to figure out what’s happening. If not, don’t worry. Do that again…and again…and again. Do NOT work at this. Don’t try to memorize anything. Just pay attention. Your brain will do the work. After a few days you’ll begin to pick up a few words. After a few weeks you’ll be getting phrases, maybe sentences. After a few months or maybe a year or two if you’re working on a harder language (for English speakers) you’ll be reading the text pretty well without lookups. Somewhere along the way you’ll become curious enough and have enough of a feel for the language that it would be useful to look at a grammar (not a primer; a descriptive grammar) and to use a dictionary now and then. But all the way through, just let your brain do the work. It will pleasantly surprise you. Enjoy watching your brain do its fascinating work. Never worry about what you don’t know; just congratulate yourself on what you do know. Oh…and be patient…and stay motivated. Keep burning in front of you the vision of being able to pick up a book in your target language and simply read it. It’s both easier and harder than most people think. You cannot get the whole job done in a month or two, but, on the other hand, there is no trick to it. It’s no harder than making a habit of walking around the block to improve your fitness. You can do it!
I’m working now on Polish, and have used this technique with Dutch, Italian, and to improve my German (which was already not too bad).
Aloha, Pohaku Nezami
Looking forward to YouTube videos yet to come. Maybe one on why can’t quantum physics make proper use of the English language. The wave function does not collapse.
Wow..interesting conversation…How those island people always know which way is north in their geography. We mock the flat earthers but we are all evolved flat earthers by heart. Now we drive by GPS satellites which have to take into account the curvature of the earth to calculate to inches which Lane we are actually driving. Is that child on that island that follows a tradition centuries old to know north any different from our child who knows how to navigate the iPhone?
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