How Language Shapes the Way We Think | Lera Boroditsky | TED

[0:13]So, I'll be speaking to you using language because I can. This is one of these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I'm doing right now is I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. I'm making tons and hisses and puffs and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your air drums. And then your brain takes those vibrations from your air drums and transform them into thoughts. I hope. I hope that's happening. So, because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time, right? We're able to transmit knowledge across uh across minds. I can put uh bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say imagine a jellyfish wallowing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics. Right? Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before. But now I've just made you think it through language, right? Now, of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabulary, they also have different structures, very importantly different structures. That beggs the question, does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now this is an ancient question, people have been speculating about this question for forever. Uh, Holy Roman Empire said to have a second language is to have a second soul. Strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Julia say, what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell a sweet. Well, that's suggest that maybe language doesn't craft reality. These arguments have gone back and forth for uh thousands of years. But until recently there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research and now we have actual scientific data to way in on this question. So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an altruistic community in Australia that I had a chance to work with. These are the Cook Tier people. They live in Pompano at the very west edge of Cape York. And what's cool about Cook Tier is in Cook Tier, they don't use words like left and right. And instead, everything is in cardinal directions, north, south east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg. Uh, or move your cup to the north-north east a little bit. In fact, the way that you say hello and cook tire is you say which where you going? And the answer should be north-north east and the far distance. How about you? So, imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction. That would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past hello uh if you didn't know which way you going. Uh, in fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really, really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. Uh, we used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because some biological excuse, oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales. No, if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually you can do it. They're humans around the world who stay oriented really well. And just to get us um, in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it. I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point south east. Now keep your eyes close point. Okay, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there, there. I don't know which way it is myself. You have not been a lot of help. So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group group uh very distinguished group like you guys doesn't know which ways which but in another group I could ask a 5-year-old and they would know. There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have uh pictures of my grandfather at different ages and if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew, you might do it going in the opposite direction from right to left. Uh how would the cook tire this ordinary group I just told you about do it? They don't use words like left and right. Let me give you a hint. When we sat people facing south, they organize time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organize time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way. Very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. Uh for the Cookier, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time. Here's another really smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there? Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solve it. you went 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. You counted them, right? You named each one with a number and the last number you said was the number of penguins. Now this is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. You learn a number list and you know you learn how to apply it. Uh a little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don't do this because some languages don't have exact number words. There are languages that don't have a word like seven or a word like eight. Uh and if people who speak these languages don't count and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, uh you would be able to do that by counting, but folks who don't have that linguistic uh trick can't do that. Language is also different how they divide up the color spectrum, the visual world. Uh some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, light and dark and languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So for example in English there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen but in Russian there isn't a single word instead Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue and dark blue. So Russians have this lifetime of experience of in language distinguishing these two colors when we test people's ability to perceive these colors. What we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be to tell the difference between a light and a dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors, say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue. The brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprise reaction as the color shift from light to dark as if, oh, something has categorized changed. Where is the brains of English speakers for example that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise because nothing is categorical changing. Languages have all kinds of structural works. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender. So every noun gets assigned to gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So for example, the son is feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish and the moon the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun is somehow more female like and the moon more male like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to say describe a bridge like the one here. Bridge happens to be uh grammatially feminine in German, grammatially masculine in Spanish. German speakers are more likely to say bridges are beautiful, elegant, stereotypically feminine words. whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're strong or long these masculine words. Um. Language also differ in how they describe events, right? Uh, so you take an event like this, an accident. In English it's fine to say he broke the vase. In uh a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say the vase broke or the vase broke itself. Uh, if it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English quite weirdly, we can even say things like, I broke my arm. Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunar and you went out looking to break your arm and you succeeded, right? Uh if it was an accident, you would use a different construction. Now, this has consequences. So, uh people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So, uh we show the same accent to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will uh remember who did it. Uh because English requires you to say he did it, he broke the vase. Where Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watched the same event, witnessed the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications of course for the evening testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase and I say he broke the vase as opposed to I say the vase broke. Even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase. Uh, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said he broke it as opposed to it broke, right? The language guides are reasoning about uh events. Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can fully shape the way we think and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects like we saw with space and time where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course if you don't count you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? Uh this little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into whole cognitive realm. Language can also have really early effects. What we saw in the case of uh color, right? Uh these are really simple basic perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time and yet language is getting in there and uh fuss even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. It's a lot of stuff. Um, and finally I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us, ideas like blame and punishment or yourselves memory. These are important things in our daily lives. Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us uh just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but 7,000, 7,000 languages spoken around the world. Uh and we can create many more. languages of course are living things, things that we can hone and uh change to suit our needs. Now the tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. So we're losing about one language a week and by some estimates half of the world's languages will be gone in the next 100 years. And the even worse news is that right now almost everything we know about the human mind and the human brain is based on studies of usually American English speaking undergraduates at universities, right? Um that excludes almost all humans, right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and bias and our our our science has to do better. I want to leave you with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think, right? And that has gives you the opportunity to ask, why do I think the way that I do? How could I think differently? And also, what thoughts do I wish to create? Thank you very much.