1. How language shapes the way we think （subtitles)

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So, I'll be speaking to you using language ...

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because I can.

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This is one of these magical abilities that we humans have.

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We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another.

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So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth

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as I'm exhaling.

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I'm making tones and hisses and puffs,

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and those are creating air vibrations in the air.

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Those air vibrations are traveling to you,

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they're hitting your eardrums,

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and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums

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and transforms them in o thoughts.

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I hope.

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(Laughter)

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I hope that's happening.

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So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas

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across vast reaches of space and time.

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We're able to transmit knowledge across minds.

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I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now.

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I could say,

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"Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library

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while thinking about quantum mechanics."

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(Laughter)

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Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far,

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you probably haven't had that thought before.

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(Laughter)

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But now I've just made you think it,

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through language.

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Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world,

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there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world.

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And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways.

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Some languages have different sounds,

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they have different vocabularies,

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and they also have different structures --

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very importantly, different structures.

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That begs the question:

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Does the language we speak shape the way we think?

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Now, this is an ancient question.

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People have been speculating about this question forever.

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Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said,

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"To have a second language is to have a second soul" --

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strong statement that language crafts reality.

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But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say,

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"What's in a name?

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A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

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Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality.

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These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years.

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But until recently, there hasn't been any data

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to help us decide either way.

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Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world,

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we've started doing research,

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and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.

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So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples.

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I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia

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that I had the chance to work with.

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These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people.

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They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York.

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What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is,

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in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like "left" and "right,"

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and instead, everything is in cardinal directions:

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north, south, east and west.

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And when I say everything, I really mean everything.

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You would say something like,

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"Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg."

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Or, "Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit."

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In fact, the way that you say "hello" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say,

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"Which way are you going?"

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And the answer should be,

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"North-northeast in the far distance.

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How about you?"

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So imagine as you're walking around your day,

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every person you greet,

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you have to report your heading direction.

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(Laughter)

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But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right?

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Because you literally couldn't get past "hello,"

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if you didn't know which way you were going.

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In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well.

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They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could.

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We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures

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because of some biological excuse:

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"Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales."

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No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it,

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actually, you can do it.

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There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.

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And just to get us in agreement

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about how different this is from the way we do it,

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I want you all to close your eyes for a second

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and point southeast.

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(Laughter)

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Keep your eyes closed. Point.

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OK, so you can open your eyes.

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I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ...

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I don't know which way it is myself --

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(Laughter)

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You have not been a lot of help.

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(Laughter)

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So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high.

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This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right?

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Where one group -- very distinguished group like you guys --

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doesn't know which way is which,

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but in another group,

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I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.

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(Laughter)

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There are also really big differences in how people think about time.

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So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages.

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And if I ask an English speaker to organize time,

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they might lay it out this way,

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from left to right.

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This has to do with writing direction.

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If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic,

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you might do it going in the opposite direction,

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from right to left.

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But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre,

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this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it?

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They don't use words like "left" and "right."

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Let me give you hint.

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When we sat people facing south,

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they organized time from left to right.

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When we sat them facing north,

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they organized time from right to left.

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When we sat them facing east,

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time came towards the body.

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What's the pattern?

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East to west, right?

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So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all,

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it gets locked on the landscape.

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So for me, if I'm facing this way,

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then time goes this way,

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and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way.

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I'm facing this way, time goes this way --

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very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around

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every time I turn my body.

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For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape.

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It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time.

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Here's another really smart human trick.

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Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there.

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Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it.

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You went, "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight."

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You counted them.

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You named each one with a number,

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and the last number you said was the number of penguins.

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This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids.

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You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it.

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A little linguistic trick.

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Well, some languages don't do this,

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because some languages don't have exact number words.

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They're languages that don't have a word like "seven"

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or a word like "eight."

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In fact, people who speak these languages don't count,

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and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities.

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So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins

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to the same number of ducks,

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you would be able to do that by counting.

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But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that.

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Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum --

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the visual world.

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Some languages have lots of words for colors,

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some have only a couple words, "light" and "dark."

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And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors.

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So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue

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that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen,

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but in Russian, there isn't a single word.

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Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate

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between light blue, "goluboy,"

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and dark blue, "siniy."

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So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language,

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distinguishing these two colors.

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When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors,

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what we find is that Russian speakers are faster

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across this linguistic boundary.

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They're faster to be able to tell the difference

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between a light and dark blue.

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And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors --

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say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue --

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the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue

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will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark,

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as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed,"

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whereas the brains of English speakers, for example,

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that don't make this categorical distinction,

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don't give that surprise,

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because nothing is categorically changing.

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Languages have all kinds of structural quirks.

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This is one of my favorites.

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Lots of languages have grammatical gender;

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every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine.

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And these genders differ across languages.

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So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish,

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and the moon, the reverse.

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Could this actually have any consequence for how people think?

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Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like,

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and the moon somehow more male-like?

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Actually, it turns out that's the case.

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So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge,

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like the one here --

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"bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German,

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grammatically masculine in Spanish --

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German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant"

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and stereotypically feminine words.

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Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say

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they're "strong" or "long,"

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these masculine words.

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(Laughter)

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Languages also differ in how they describe events, right?

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You take an event like this, an accident.

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In English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase."

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In a language like Spanish,

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you might be more likely to say, "The vase broke,"

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or, "The vase broke itself."

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If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it.

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In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like,

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"I broke my arm."

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Now, in lots of languages,

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you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic

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and you went out looking to break your arm --

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(Laughter)

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and you succeeded.

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If it was an accident, you would use a different construction.

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Now, this has consequences.

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So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things,

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depending on what their language usually requires them to do.

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So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers,

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English speakers will remember who did it,

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because English requires you to say, "He did it; he broke the vase."

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Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it

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if it's an accident,

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but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident.

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They're more likely to remember the intention.

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So, two people watch the same event,

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witness the same crime,

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but end up remembering different things about that event.

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This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony.

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It also has implications for blame and punishment.

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So if you take English speakers

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and I just show you someone breaking a vase,

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and I say, "He broke the vase," as opposed to "The vase broke,"

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even though you can witness it yourself,

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you can watch the video,

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you can watch the crime against the vase,

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you will punish someone more,

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you will blame someone more if I just said, "He broke it,"

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as opposed to, "It broke."

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The language guides our reasoning about events.

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Now, I've given you a few examples

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of how language can profoundly shape the way we think,

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and it does so in a variety of ways.

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So language can have big effects,

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like we saw with space and time,

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where people can lay out space and time

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in completely different coordinate frames from each other.

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Language can also have really deep effects --

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that's what we saw with the case of number.

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Having count words in your language,

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having number words,

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opens up the whole world of mathematics.

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Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra,

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you can't do any of the things

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that would be required to build a room like this

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or make this broadcast, right?

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This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone

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in o a whole cognitive realm.

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Language can also have really early effects,

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what we saw in the case of color.

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These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions.

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We make thousands of them all the time,

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and yet, language is getting in there

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and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make.

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Language can have really broad effects.

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So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly,

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but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns.

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That means language can shape how you're thinking

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about anything that can be named by a noun.

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That's a lot of stuff.

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And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things

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that have personal weight to us --

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ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory.

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These are important things in our daily lives.

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Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us

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just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is.

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Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 --

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there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world.

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And we can create many more --

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languages, of course, are living things,

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things that we can hone and change to suit our needs.

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The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity

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all the time.

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We're losing about one language a week,

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and by some estimates,

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half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years.

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And the even worse news is that right now,

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almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain

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is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates

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at universities.

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That excludes almost all humans. Right?

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So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased,

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and our science has to do better.

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I want to leave you with this final thought.

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I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently,

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but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think.

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It's about how you think.

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It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think.

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And that gives you the opportunity to ask,

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"Why do I think the way that I do?"

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"How could I think differently?"

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And also,

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"What thoughts do I wish to create?"

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)