Mindscape 89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time

hello everyone and welcome to the mindscape podcast I'm your host John Carroll we've talked a lot on the podcast about the idea of thinking and consciousness right 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 right 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 they're thinking 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 lets us represent things and then talk about them 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's 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 today's guest is Lear aboard etske who is a neuroscientist and psychologist he'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 right time is one of my favorite things so we end up with the same conferences but the point is when we talk about time interestingly we very often use spatial metaphors you talk about moving the meeting forward what is that supposed to mean how do you move us thing in time forward or backwards just 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 move 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 so Lera has studied how different cultures use language particularly do you talk about time but in other ways as well and you'll fight figure out that not everyone uses just simple forward backward language there are cultures and languages that relate time - up and down there's cultures and languages that related 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 do you have a long way to go to figure it out Belarus research is a wonderful window onto the weird ways in which we without even knowing it shape the way that we think 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 web page and so forth and what I hopefully will be doing is releasing short videos and then a couple 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 you know it's 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] they're aboard to see welcome to mine skate podcast thanks for having me so I am physicist I think about space and time but you know time probably my favorite dimension in in space time I wrote a book about time and but from a physics point of view and one of the little factoids that I got was that the word time is the most used noun in the English language 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 is it less true in other and on your indo-european okay we're 7,000 languages that's a good little HD project but you know we 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 and I'll see you another time all of those are actually different uses of the word time or you could even say time me you know in which case you're using it as a verb so it's a it's a bit of a cheat but still we're talking about time a lot well it indicates because a lot of people think the time somehow mysterious and certainly we're able to use it right we're able to capture it and you know we know what we mean when we say be at the seminar at 1:00 p.m. or something like that we that operationalize is very straightforwardly into the world 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 it's 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 in the flow of time and in fact lots of other cultures have different week structures that they follow well this is I really want to get into this about how the interplay of the language that we use in the reality that we perceive around it but for you know you have all these wonderful examples of the relationship between spatial metaphors and our use of time so I just you know why don't we just start with a classic question of let's move next week's meeting forward mmm 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 and the reason is we can talk about time two different ways in English we can talk about ourselves is moving in time so we can say things like we're approaching the deadline we're coming up on the holidays so we're moving across a stationary path which is time right from the past to the future or we can talk about time is moving so the deadline is coming up the holidays are approaching right so we're stationary and time events in time are moving towards us these are two different perspectives and 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 and 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 way the perspective that they take on time so if you're thinking about yourself moving through space you'll say the meetings on Friday so you prime them in some sense by making them focus yeah we get them to imagine one spatial scenario or another and when they're imagining themselves moving in space they get this 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 the 50-50 is fascinating because 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 or correlations between you know personality types do like nervous people think of it one way and relaxed people think of it the other way people have tried looking for personality correlations and there have been some small studies I think it's I think I'd want to see larger samples really to really be sure but you know what we find is that even though people might have an original intuition like if you don't prime them they have an original intuition that he's either minder Friday you can get a whole lot of people to switch so it's pretty loose it's not deeply English yeah and it's just that that use of the word for word is ambiguous in English just like most other words or ambiguous it's just in this case you can get it to be ambiguous to mean one thing or the opposite of that thing and presumably it's all completely unconscious that we're even using that as a spatial metaphor right we just use the word and people think they know what it means 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 duration you have yeah you say long or you say how much time did it take right so you talk about amount you talk about distance other languages might have dedicated words for 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 o'clock on Tuesday in an hour yeah most people sort of think that the 20th century realization that space and time are part of the same thing was like this big counterintuitive thing but they were always at least very metaphorically related to us they 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 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 this is probably already hinting at some relationship between how the brain works right and how we develop these things oh I did a wonderful podcast with Lynn Kelly about memory palaces mhm you know building these little structures that have interesting shapes and they let you remember things so again and analogizing things in space two things you want to remember makes it much easier 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 and our actual physical experience and so then we can draw on that to reason about lots and lots of other things are we allowed to say that maybe the spatial capacities evolved first before we had a nuanced grasp of time and other things 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 like that the things that we used to think where spatial cells are really more like context and so we were at a meeting together about this very idea right yeah neurons in space-time yeah and so certainly lots of even extremely primitive organisms need to do timing right so 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 and so certainly very basic senses of time exists throughout the evolutionary tree the way that we end up thinking about time once we start thinking about the deep past or thinking thinking about moving events and things like that that of course starts leverage you know it 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 okay but if you're thinking about something that's on an order of a second or more than 30 30 milliseconds over more than 30 yeah more than 30 milliseconds is going to be a little bit further forward in the brain if it's something like a minute it's gonna be the frontal cortex I didn't know that okay so is that clearly sort of monotonically related that it's monotonically related is just there are 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's just reports the mechanisms are totally different for doing those things 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 right I guess when they happen you know and and that relates to how you read and things like that 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 right but if I give the same task 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 or organize events in our minds is set by this very simple convention of which direction your language is written 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 pull Dylan or I 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 and that must be just some arbitrary accident of history which owes what right left to right or right to left it's a little bit less than arbitrary it had to do with what kinds of writing implements you had and how much smudging you would have depending on what you were using to write with or if you're using a hammer and chisel for example you would hold the hammer in your dominant hand the chisel and your less dominant hand as opposed to if you're writing with ink you're gonna 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 yeah I remember thinking when when I first heard about this stuff even just within physics there are subfields 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 you know cosmologists and people who do relativity time flows upward but computer scientists time flows downwards I really don't know why it's not because these different implements or anything like that so it is it is interesting in different cultures have up and down also metaphors for time yeah so in mandarin for example there is a strong up down metaphor so earlier events are above later events are below earlier is above past time flows down well the past is up I don't know are you moving it's time moving if you have to set that also right that's right so if we think of ourselves as stationary then you would say the time is moving events in time are flowing up so that earlier things and up further and further above you but the way you would use the metaphors a 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 we've seen in a lot of studies as that Mandarin speakers actually do use this organization in their minds privately when they're organising events in time how do you test something like that 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's 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 because we like to use our hands 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 very meanly place the button in the wrong place and so you can measure that across lots 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 well the technique I'm describing would broadly be a test of implicit Association so here 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 right you're going to be able to do that task faster and so often we set up exactly the kind of thing I described for you I 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 right if there's one thing that human beings aren't great at its predicting the future we live in a world right now where there's a whole bunch of things going on that we're very hard to predict at the time but what we can do is prepare for a different set of eventualities than we expect one way of doing this is buying insurance in particular buying life insurance it can be a tricky thing to do but that's where policy genius can help policy genius is a website which will let you look through many different possible places you could buy insurance they're not giving you the interns Elves they're helping you find the right policy you could save $1,500 or more a year by using policy genius to compare different life insurance policies once you apply the policy genius team handles the paperwork the red tape all of that stuff so if you haven't found a play-by-play breakdown of the future inside a crystal ball that's okay be prepared for anything by getting the best price on the right life insurance policy for you at policy genius.com policy genius will always get the future wrong better get life insurance right okay I just wanna 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 blown e much more finely than that and some less I suppose yeah well the way that languages treat time grammatically really differs so for example in some languages there is no past tense there is no future tense there's no there's no tense marking on verbs at all in fact verbs never change there are verbs but they're not tensed yeah but some people argue whether or not they're verbs but yeah so the way you would say that you know if someone if I show a picture of someone who's about to kick the ball someone in the process of picking the ball someone has just kicked the ball there are some languages where you would just say hey kickball in all three cases yeah and 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 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 you know there hasn't been an empirical test of exactly that that language that I was just describing as this minority language spoken in Papua New Guinea so it's quite challenging but but it would be 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 so if your language makes a distinction between you know 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 and somehow in your brain they keep changing categories as a week goes by that's just what's weird to me yeah they have to continuously fade fade into new categories yeah I mean I wonder there's probably not a fair 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 that was three weeks ago so okay it's in this category 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 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 maybe 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 in it's in that context of retrieval that that information gets added or it gets reclassified so I guess we have this naive metaphor based on computers or something like that that images or files have timestamps right 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 yeah well we're remembering context right so with every 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 all you can often use context to try to yeah I mean that's interesting it's it's not that it has a timestamp it's that one memory is sort of connected all these other memories and we can reconstruct when it must've been exactly we but we certainly don't have a timestamp and mostly we're terrible at remembering when things happen which you know may be for the best it's not usually that important but imagine if you had an exact timestamp for every every event that occurred how fine-grained would you want that like every time you picked up before I think in general you kind of know the relationship between events in your life more or less 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 because they are pretty different 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 or clay tablets all right and then after clay tablets maybe it was the abacus and then it was a calculator and then it was a telephone switchboard because 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 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 solar system so you have you have these metaphors that drive hypotheses that drive thinking drive debate and they're always evolving and I guess we shouldn't just talk about spatial metaphors for time but even I want to say spatial metaphors for space right how people think about space could be very different how people think about directions in space for example yeah so the way that we orient ourselves in space and which dimensions we think our primary really differs from culture to culture so for example we've been talking a lot about left and right and the organized time from left to right for example but there's 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 and I had a chance to work in a culture like this in Australia actually about a third of the world's languages relies strongly on cardinal directions of some sort so as opposed to saying forward backward left right they say north-south east-west not exactly not necessarily north-south east-west this says a set of directions could it 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 things are important yeah prevailing winds or they could just be an arbitrary set of directions that roughly divide things into quadrants but are 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's a direction that's seaward in a direction that's like inland like a volcano word is a and sometimes you have mixed systems like you might have a C word inland dimension but also an east/west dimension and so people use both east/west that's a 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 scene 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 yeah in fact that's 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 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 northwest and the farthest survive yeah all 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 you know 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 you know this tiny little human you're like how did you do that what about people whose brains are not completely functional does that affect how they perceive these things you know we had a chance to test this looking at patients who've had strokes we looked at patients with strokes in the right parietal lobe this is a common place to have a stroke because there's a lot of vasculature there 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 do right brain controls yeah yes so these patients might only eat food on the right side 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 I mean sorry can I just ask like for the plate thing is there 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 if you rotate it for them they'll be happy and not eat the other side they won't if they will eat food on the right side of the plate and complain that they're still hungry huh so there's something else going wrong in their brains that they can't they're just not able to bring into consciousness those that are on the left is amazing but yeah it does undermine the idea that there's a separate unified consciousness 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 conscious experience yeah 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 you know well they might blush but they might not know why they're blushing and so anyway talking so yeah so we told people these these were patients who read from left to right they're French speaking patients in Switzerland we told them about a guy David who liked doing some things ten years ago in the past and will like doing different things ten years from now these are trivial things like ten years ago he likes cherries but ten years from now he likes strawberries and these are just facts that they had to remember and what we found was when we tested 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 miss attributed them to the future so if they remembered something that we said happened ten years ago if they recognized that they mistakenly thought that it had to be in the future so they kind of squeezed everything in their mental time line into the part that they could attend to which is in the right part of their mental timeline so that to me shows just how deeply ingrained these cultural patterns are right so culturally we've assigned the left side of time to be the past to the right right of time to be the future it's a completely arbitrary convention it's an 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 so somehow encoded in the physical brain it is yeah in ways that we're learning well there's no other option than for things to be encoded in the physical brain we don't have any other hypotheses you think yeah I mean maybe this is a digression but I want to hear more about what this fieldwork is like like how do you find this tribe with this language how do you visit them are they presumably a small tribe it's the particular linguistic community is about 200 people the the entire community is about 500 people and there are speakers of five different languages that live together in this community isolated or there yeah they're pretty isolated they live on the west coast of Cape York on this town called Parral 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 well I wonder and so I ended up doing this work with a wonderful collaborator Alice Gabey who was the first to describe the grammar of the cook Thai language that was spoken here so so she wrote the grammar for the length for the language as her dissertation and she spent a lot of time in the community and I got connected with Alice because I had been bothering one of her advisers for years about hey you're working with people who speak these these languages that have this cool way of thinking about space how did they think about time - have you noticed anything have you noticed anything happen every time it 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 progress of science that's how it works yeah but I then recently was going through some of my college notebooks and I'm a very disorganized note-taker and so my notebook contains some you know notes on who Cyril and then someone's phone number a recipe for lamb stew and then I know a note that said get in touch with such-and-such a person and find out how speakers of this language organized time it would be cool if it's in cardinal directions and I'd have zero memory of writing that note and then of course you know 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 remember did you have to learn the language no Alice was my contact on the language front it's how many languages do you have to know to do your job 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 and but okay so what's the answer does it does speaking of space as cardinal directions affect how you talk about time it affects how people organize time in their mind so when we asked people in this community to for example organize cards that show person aging you know 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 and for me that was just the most amazing thing to see with my own eyes because it's one thing when you make a prediction theoretically you say well here's a bold claim if I think that 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 millions and millions of people have been given a task to organize cards and you've never seen someone do it that way right 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 it's it's the coolest thing to see 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 right like it's not like time revolves around you it's or stuck in here inherent in the earth somehow yeah there's 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 it in a different coordinate frame so actually time always goes in the same direction in the coordinate frame that's important to them right so they're using a qualitatively different set of coordinates and for them it's the court 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 chasing me around every time I turn my body extremely eccentric of me and is it this is again you know maybe future research but are there other correlations so that you know this is a whole nother category I hang about both space and time a little bit differently can we match that up to other ways they think there are lots of things that we would want to explore it's it's too 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 right so for example my colleague here at UCSD Rafael Nunez and Kenzi Cooper writer did work in a community in Papua New Guinea that you've know people and what's cool about the youb knows 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 okay that's just crazy so because we've we have traditionally had all these assumptions about how time must go right so it used to be well it has to go from left to right and maybe it has something to do with handedness because we'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 not backwards and we have eyes in the front of our heads and that in fact that turns out not to be true either for some people that past is impressive all these logical things 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 youb nerve river are really important locations and there's no way to make a straight line between them and hit the village so then time takes a detour to the village stops in the village and then takes a turn and goes in 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 goes in a different direction yeah so if you're looking at the way people gestures they're talking about events in the past in the future you'll see them gesturing along this bent timeline right more things that's that's very cool but I think all of this is a testament to the incredible ingenuity of the human mind right that we've invented not one 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 these all the ones you mentioned are one-dimensional right more trouble to people were thinking of times two-dimensional cuz I don't not make sense of it 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 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 oh I don't know I don't think so I think that um 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 is 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 it 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 circle you only go in one direction well a lot of cultures do go in circle so they think they they legalistic we talk about it that way but well certainly people draw 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 weak cycle where things repeat in 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 yeah I know that I mean the standard paradigmatic clock is a pendulum going back and forth thread repeating itself there are definitely cycles in nature 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 pretty much 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 in small lines I connect into a circle or a rhombus or something and we're talking about weeks and months and years but presumably all these different cultures have their cosmologies or their eschatology x' or whatever and so they might have guesses or hypotheses about what happens on much much much longer time scales that are different from culture to culture right Hindus have a cyclic sort of cosmology that is like way longer than most Western cosmologies yeah definitely people's relationship to deep 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 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 gonna make a shot how I'm you know how important is this shot for all the next shots that I'm going to make it does it happen does it make an impact the second one on the third one and the fourth one and yes 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 though 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 have a deeper causal chain that they allowed to be built it's interesting because 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 that's right but maybe in practice there's enough unpredictability that it doesn't affect it in a noticeable way so it depends on which you care about so you said also about time being one-dimensional as opposed to two-dimensional and cycles and I wanted to tell you about the Balinese calendar because I'm such a cool example people describe Balinese time as dense time so instead of one seven-day week Balinese calendar has ten concurrently cycling two weeks there's a one-day week a two two week a three-day week afford a leader firing and so all of these are you have their own rhythms right and different things happen on different sized 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 that 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 the lunar calendar 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 it's really phenomenal how do they do this before they had laptops and things like that I can't keep track of my appointments next week I think it's I think that's a cultural practice that you see also for example in music and Bali so if you think about the gamelan and all of the cyclic complex cycles of rhythm that happened on the gamla and where if you're playing one part of the gamelan you might be a you know on a I don't know eighty seven count you hit on the thirty-one in the forty seven and someone else is on a much different much different set of times and so I think that that idea of embedded cycles that are recurring but of different lengths and things kind of falling into that rhythm that's cotton that's ever existing it's just a very important part of the culture that permeates lots of and that does sounds like something that would I would expect clearly have an impact on one's cognitive capacities right I bet the typical Balinese person who's better juggling all these rhythms than I ever would be they're trained to do it right they expect it and so forth well you said then you ever would be well I would disagree with that I think if you if I started young then sure but now you can learn lots of things it's this idea that you can't learn things later in life it's really silly think about all the things complex things you've learned since you were six years old it's true we have this mess I think we have this somewhat magical idea that you know children are the sponges for information and they can acquire these really complex things and sure that children are sponges and they learn lots of things that's very impressive but adults do pretty well we come up with some pretty clever stuff imine team adult yeah no actually a dime 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 and such as I am but but okay still I do think that the practice does affect your capabilities yeah this other oh absolutely cultural practice especially something that's built into your language it's something you're 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 psychologists the things you practice you get better at yeah let me pause for a moment to talk about LinkedIn jobs you know that when it comes to hiring people decisions that you make can be the most important decisions for a company whether it's a mature one or one that is just starting up LinkedIn jobs helps match the right talent to the role that you have LinkedIn has over 675 million members worldwide and LinkedIn jobs screens candidates with all the skills that you're looking for whether they're hard skills or soft skills things like collaboration creativity adaptability LinkedIn looks beyond the work skills and puts your job post in front of qualified candidates who match your business requirements perfectly it's no wonder a person is hired every eight seconds with LinkedIn and why companies rate LinkedIn jobs the number one hiring platform for delivering quality hires so find the right person for your business today with LinkedIn jobs you can pay what you want and get the first $50 off just visit linkedin.com slash mind scape again that's LinkedIn calm slash mindscape to get $50 off your first job post there are of course terms and conditions that apply 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 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 that I often have people tell me oh it's too late for me I'll never you know 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 what's what's the cause that's the only reason why you'd need to be passed for a native speaker it's actually a really fun and useful Oh to speak a language even if it's not perfect you could speak it pretty well you do sort of discipline yourself to learn more languages occasionally I'm trying to learn Spanish now Spanish okay good 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 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 I actually think this more broadly about academics I think that you know 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 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 traveling 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 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 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 there definitely lots of studies that show that there's a user 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 you or something else that requires you to use your brain in new creative ways that will that will help you stay active and I always tell people that the right the right time to learn another language is now it does get harder as you get older but unless you have a time machine 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 I need to get some like language learning course to advertise in the podcast it's a great idea and it's not just time you have another example which speaks to this point about colors about the the light blue and dark blue 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 blue boy and another word for dark blue which is singing 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 Google boy and what they would call see me whereas for English speakers they're all just blue so we can tell they're different but it takes us longer to recognize the difference than a word of Russian yeah in general this is true cross languages you can test English speakers across the blue green distinction and things that you would call blue as opposed to green colors have fallen either side of that boundary you will be faster to tell the difference between them two different blues or two different greens that you would call by the same name there's nothing spooky about that is practice that's what they're used doing it's practice yeah yeah I mean it's so now as we're bumping up against the big question which is how we talk versus what is real does the language bring reality into existence or is it a simple representation of reality like I think you 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 we're gonna go way beyond colors to much more deep and important concepts there 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 or 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 is differently experience them it's somehow differently I can't tell you what anyone sees that's a problem it's a problem with consciousness all these yes perception is a private experience so ultimately that's beyond our tools of measurement so all we can do is say how you know how efficiently can you make this judgment how likely are you be correct if we stress the system things like that and from that we can 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 surprise or response so it's like an MRI machine or something I'm just going to the brain I'm describing EEG results whether you're you're measuring a very fast response that just kind of says something has changed right so it's like a surprise marker yeah 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 it says oh we've we've shifted category something new is happening whereas the same series of colors will not give that response and in English speakers 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 what was it was a good asset fear war of hypothesis I'm getting it right anyway yes if you disappear disappear sapir-whorf that basically said that our language controls what we see yeah well how would you phrase the hypothesis 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 have no no but in his writings he has 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 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 there is this interesting idea out there that says maybe language is a straightjacket for thought maybe we can't we can't think outside of the bounds of our language and I think this is a particularly odd idea because you know you can always learn new ways of talking 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 straightjacket for thought but language can certainly encourage patterns and entrench us into ways of thinking so that we don't even consider other options I mean I always you know thought of what about an instrumental piece of music I can think of that like it's in my reign but it's not in the form of language so like the most naive reading of that hypothesis can't be quite right yeah so Vic and Stein makes this wonderful example where just to show that some things are very expressive well in 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 is it clarinet like it's gonna be really hard right if I 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 they're definitely a lot of there's a lot of mental activity that exists outside of the purview of language or is not as effable and my impression is that the sapir-whorf hypothesis was popular and then faded and maybe is getting a little bit to come back it was popular when war force writing people were damn it he was writing in the 30s and 40s but a lot of his writings were then published after after his death there was a collection of them published in the 50s but there wasn't really any research about it right 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 you know colleges in the US with English speakers in you know English speaking sophomores who are subjects yes 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 and travel journals they would be lovely that you had that trip in color 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 our the only people you have a test you never see evidence of diversity so you've conveniently protected yourself from discovering any interesting phenomena right it's I mean is is there a time when that began to shift in the mid 1990s finally there's there's 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 and it 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 and definitely as a you know 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 I know it's not it nothing is true right 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 learned 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 how it performs and 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 are saying does that pose a challenge for the practice of science and that it's harder to objectively communicate what you've learned in a journal article than it is for some quantitative data well I'm you know 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 are subjects of study are right so when we're talking about humans people a physicist I can avoid this problem you can yeah yeah when we're talking about humans usually people will just test American undergrads and say we we've discovered how humans do something they're a very strange kind of human that's a very very unusual kind of human and and 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 and the more we constrain the set of people that we study the less we're actually allowing ourselves to understand they're the real meat of what it is to be human what it is to have this cool human brain that can do all these things and is so flexible and even if language does not absolutely restrict what we can understand it does 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 you know colors and directions it definitely creates habits of thought it lays down patterns that are easy to follow and then you follow those patterns and in some cases it creates foundations for whole realms of thought so 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 I guess 0 came late 0 is very late yeah well the decimal positional system that we use now for representing numbers I think comes to Europe and a 1700 s with Fibonacci right so he takes it from the Arab world which took it from India the idea of counting numbers were always there and always is a long time yeah we don't know about always because you know 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 very good but there are lots 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 based for base 87 you know 81 is true I definitely know of it I think 120 was something the Babylonians had a lot of things that were based on 60s and 20s so 120 you get from units of 20s oh that 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 so for example they might use links on your fingers and so you get 12 some might use knuckles in which case you get 8 and 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 including parts of your face in your head and goes on the other side and so and then when you need to go above 27 you just go in the other direction and so you say you know a second elbow second time back okay and the body part terms are actually the names of the numbers so like if you want eight potatoes that's elbow potatoes so languages have all these different systems for numbers and some don't have exact numbers at all and 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 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 you know like better than the Roman numerals that Europeans had before certainly for mental calculation right but we all have we all now completely take it for granted so 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 in your language but someone had to invent it and it's not something that's a project for a Tuesday it took a really long time for that to come about and it didn't happen in in very many places in the world and so but now we have it and so we're like we're such ungrateful punks we take it for granted or like of course it always existed I I would have thought of it if you know if someone didn't but it's all this cognitive labor of all these people that has 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 because of that legacy of the built-in structure though because it's just now it's part of the language and everyone is trained on it from early on and you don't even remember learning it and I completely unreadable for it but even notions like causality influence and you mentioned the billiard balls blame and intentionality these are all built into how we talk also yeah whenever something happens you have to construe it in some way right so there is a physical event that occurs but then you also have to think about did it just happen did someone do it accident yeah and there's so many different ways that language allows you to construe describe any given event so 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 yeah so you could say Cheney shot Whittington you could say Whittington got shot by Cheney you could just say Weddington got shot leave Cheney out of it altogether you could focus on the matter so you could say Weddington 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 you know it doesn't take a very long time to shoot your friend in the face it's a split-second physical event you'd 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 a to mere witness by the end of the sentence this is my masterful excavation right now those things I give you those examples they're funny like 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 right 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 make 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 you know in lots of other languages you wouldn't say that unless you're a lunatic looking to go break your arm and you succeeded right you would say something to do my arm got broken and 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 the library book in Spanish people look at you and say why would you expand it should be different constructions for I lost the library book intentionally I lost it by accident well yeah I mean if you're a weird person who intentionally but you would you would express it as something like the look the book I lost or the book lost itself to me or something like that right because you didn't intend to do it but in the case where say you're you broke of Oz by accident and in English you would sales to still say I broke it that's normal and if you don't say I broke it if you say something like it broke people think it's evasive right now whereas and lots of languages you would have to use a different constrain writers are taught not to use the passive voice because it is less-active is Weger right yeah this is a like a gentle non-urgent if is a little different perspective but let me give you an example I love so take Caesar Romeo Socrates so Socrates drank the poison Socrates was forced to drink poison he knew that he was drinking poison he had to do it as sentenced to death by poison right Romeo drank the poison he meant to drink poison he was intentionally drinking poison right seize a drink drink the poison what Caesar thought he was drinking wine but his wine was poisoned so he's intentionally drinking but unknowingly to him it's poison right so but 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 where 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 what whether they're you know it's volitional and so in debate for example this is a language spoken in the Maldives you would use three different constructions for those three different guys because there are circumstances that are importantly different and have to be marked dramatically differently in those languages and and just like the ability to you know keep track of numbers and so forth I presume this does have an effect on how we conceptualize the world a little bit I mean mate 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 Dougy 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 so the term wardrobe malfunction was born after that incident and the reason we chose that incident is we wanted something that was saturated for people that they had seen it many times before and they knew a lot about it that seemed to discuss them in the news it you know in case people don't remember in the final dance move Justin Timberlake reached across Janet Jackson's chest and then for 9/16 of a second one of her breasts was partially exposed on national television and this was extremely scandalous according to the works yes the the FCC tried to find CBS $550,000 for the indecency and people were so outraged it quickly became the most TiVoed event of all time 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 quote-unquote go to the tape right so we have the sense in you know we have a depression image let's go to the tape as if if you just see it with your own eyes you'll have direct perception of reality right so I 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 okay and so we showed 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 five hundred and fifty thousand dollars should he pay and not only do people blame Timberlake more if we say he unfastened the snap but they also want to charge in fifty five percent more in fines all right so the rubber hits the road where 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 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 and some are way less gender and some are way that's right and so I mean one question is when I took German in high school I was told sure there's you know dere D and Austin's these genders but there's nothing whatsoever to do with you know the sex of human beings or anything like that I was always a little bit suspicious that there was zero connotation in the marine do we know anything about how the existence of those different labels affects how people perceive the different things yeah so this is a 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 alright yeah so we have these grammatical gender systems where every noun is masculine or feminine so chairs tables watering cans toasters all have all are either masculine or feminine and the amazing thing is speakers of those languages actually take those as meaningful right and so if you ask even young kids for example can you assign voices for animated characters so we're gonna 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 take 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 completely different in a differently exactly my language has intuited something that is otherwise invisible about this object you know the son 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 the genders of all these inanimate things where's 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 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 those categories could be collapsed or they could be refined 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 so 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 right and I mean it's only one of a million different ways we could distinguish between people right yeah assign to pronoun - well I mean it's it it is interesting the gender is one of the only things that languages mark on pronouns some languages will worry about age so there there are a couple of other things that get encoded but gender is one of the only things that you note 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 you know ability to curl twenty pounds or whatever it is that you could want you you could want to know about someone but we focus on this but also people often feel very very attached to whichever specific way like their language does gender so for example in English people might be very adamant that you can't replace P and G with a because you have to have gendered pronouns and how could you speak a language that doesn't have gender like what would pronouns even mean I always point out that in fact almost all pronouns in English are already gender-neutral so I we they you 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 something we just do that Tai has different gendered words for I Hebrew has different gendered 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 do you think it is changing do you think we're gonna switch to a a third-person universal pronoun you think we should so singularly today has existed in English for a really long time there are lots of classical uses that that people don't even hear is strange at all so if I say if anybody calls tell them I'm not home that's an indeterminate person my bones you can find these examples and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and you know it's it's an old use if you know the gender of the person then you use he or she but if you don't use thing yeah and so the use of singular day is on their eyes in English people like it they use it and so as it becomes more popular people continue to like it and use it it's going to sound more and more normal and the few cases where there's some ambiguity or or difficulty in parsing because you don't know if it's singular plural you'll just resolve those with context over time or people will come up with other solutions whether it's something whether I would prescribe something is like they should or shouldn't I think it really depends on what purpose you're trying would goal you're trying to achieve right 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 the those two categories or sometimes because they feel like it puts too much emphasis on gender and the first thing that you experience about it someone is gender it allows implicit bias to creep in and so on but other languages are adding more gender right so for example in French the Academie Francaise that's is the the body that decides what isn't isn't heart officially part of it can you French yeah they've 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 you hear the feminine form it creates a norm that women do exist in these positions of power but at the same time it 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 right 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 middle statistician in the same way that Actress is seen as a less prestigious job than actor or waitress is seen as a less prestigious job than waiter the female actors I know in Hollywood like to be called actors exactly because there's more prestige associated with the male term and there's more Pacey I don't know French very well is that is 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 a man doing that job either so it's a sticky situation I don't know what where to go the forms for a lot of jobs the forms that exist are explicitly masculine forms and so the economy font-size is just to approve the feminine verb almost any profession can be easily feminized in French the way that French's is constructed it's just that they weren't approved as official things that you could put in a newspaper he and in any yes yeah or add an e at the end depending on the right area yeah okay well I don't know I mean 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 know you have some preferences how how much do you either feel or need to resist the urge to be judgey to say well it would be better if we spoke this way like 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 stop this way oh well I think of language as a tool right 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 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 it's not hard it's not forbidden right but it's just not part of every single utterance yeah and so I think that system is that would be really nice so if if I had 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 and in this language would time move from left to right or right actually you know English time doesn't move left to right or right to left in the languages do some languages do it there is so every time I say on the radio that English doesn't layout time from left to right in in metaphors 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 and so it is and some some of my collaborators here at UCSD have started testing speakers of military English and in fact they 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 their metaphors that have come from this artifact of this perpetual left-right stream calendar well you already know that for every rule we try to invent there's gonna be exception since we keep mining humans keep innovating that's the wonderful thing about the human mind is we have infinite possibility in there I agree with that one all right Larry Bard is he thanks so much for the only mine Ski podcast all right thank you for having me it's been fun [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Sean Carroll

Views: 15,708

Rating: 4.8325582 out of 5

Keywords: language, cognition, space, time, neuroscience

Id: XhEvqGkNnrw

Length: 88min 41sec (5321 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020