Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. But actually, that's exactly how people in those communities come to stay oriented - is that they learn it, (laughter) right? Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. And if it was feminine, then you're likely to paint death as a woman. He's also the author of the book, "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". And I thought, wow, first of all, it would be almost impossible to have a conversation like that in English where you hadn't already revealed the gender of the person because you have to use he or she. This week, in the fourth and final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes . It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. And dead languages never change, and some of us might prefer those. So we've done a lot of studies looking at how speakers of Spanish and German and Russian actually think about objects that have opposite grammatical genders. I think it's a really fascinating question for future research. VEDANTAM: I want to talk in the second half of our conversation about why the meanings of words change, but I want to start by talking about how they change. Hidden Brain on Apple Podcasts LERA BORODITSKY: The categorization that language provides to you becomes real - becomes psychologically real. In this month's Radio Replay, we ask whether the structure of the languages we speak can change the way we see the world. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? We couldnt survive without the many public radio stations that support our show and they cant survive without you. in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. In this favorite 2021 episode, psychologist Adam Grant pushes back against the benefits of certainty, and describes the magic that unfolds when we challenge our own deeply-held beliefs. And they suggest that differences across languages do, in fact, predict some of these measures of gender equality across countries. VEDANTAM: One of the things I found really interesting is that the evolution of words and language is constant. In the final episode of our "Mind Reading 2.0" series, we bring back one of our favorite conversations, with linguist Deborah Tannen. We love the idea of Hidden Brain helping to spark discussions in your community. How big are the differences that we're talking about, and how big do you think the implications are for the way we see the world? Hidden Brain Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Subscribe Visit website Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our. And so what that means is if someone was sitting facing south, they would lay out the story from left to right. And then he would take a Polaroid of the kid and say, well, this is you. GEACONE-CRUZ: And I ended up living there for 10 years. Perspectives on the Situation by Harry T. Reis, and John G. Holmes, in The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012. Decoding Emotions - Transcripts I had this cool experience when I was there. Does a speaker of a language, like Spanish, who has to assign gender to so many things, end up seeing the world as more gendered? (LAUGHTER) VEDANTAM: In the English-speaking world, she goes by Lera Boroditsky. Lera said there's still a lot of research to be done on this. 4.62. VEDANTAM: Would it be possible to use what we have learned about how words and languages evolve to potentially write what a dictionary might look like in 50 years or a hundred years? And it's not just about how we think about time. I saw this bird's-eye view, and I was this little red dot. They're more likely to say, well, it's a formal property of the language. But the reason that it seems so elusive is because we don't really think about the, quote, unquote, "meaning" of things like our conversation-easing laughter. I think language can certainly be a contributor into the complex system of our thinking about gender. That's the way words are, too. BORODITSKY: It's certainly possible. Reframing Your Reality: Part 1 | Hidden Brain Media We call this language Gumbuzi. Bu It is a great, free way to engage the podcast community and increase the visibility of your podcasts. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. How to Foster Perceived Partner Responsiveness: High-Quality LIstening is Key, by Guy Itzchakov, Harry Reis, and Netta Weinstein, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2021. And they asked me all kinds of questions about them. Of course, eventually, the Finnish kids also figured it out because language isn't the only source of that information, otherwise it would be quite surprising for the Finns to be able to continue to reproduce themselves. VEDANTAM: So all this raises a really interesting question. VEDANTAM: I understand there's been some work looking at children and that children who speak certain languages are actually quicker to identify gender and their own gender than children who are learning other languages in other cultures. It seems kind of elliptical, like, would it be possible that I obtained? And so to address that question, what we do is we bring English speakers into the lab, and we teach them grammatical genders in a new language that we invent. But I don't think that it's always clear to us that language has to change in that things are going to come in that we're going to hear as intrusions or as irritating or as mistakes, despite the fact that that's how you get from, say, old Persian to modern Persian. In The Air We Breathe : NPR What do you do for christmas with your family? Laughter: The Best Medicine | Hidden Brain : NPR Trusted by 5,200 companies and developers. You can support Hidden Brain indirectly by giving to your local NPR station, or you can provide direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page. Perceived Responses to Capitalization Attempts are Influenced by Self-Esteem and Relationship Threat, by Shannon M. Smith & Harry Reis, Personal Relationships, 2012. You also see huge differences in other domains like number. And so he suggested it might be the case that the arbitrarily assigned grammatical genders are actually changing the way people think about these days of the week and maybe all kinds of other things that are named by nouns. I think that it's better to think of language as a parade that either you're watching, or frankly, that you're in, especially because the people are never going to stand still. VEDANTAM: One of the ultimate messages I took from your work is that, you know, we can choose to have languages that are alive or languages that are dead. Which I think is probably important with the reality that this edifice that you're teaching is constantly crumbling. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore how unconscious bias can infect a culture and how a police shooting may say as much about a community as it does about individuals. L. Gable, et. This week, in the second installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Todd Kashdan looks at the relationship between distress and happiness, and how to keep difficult emotions from sabotaging our wellbeing. And, I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that. You're also not going to do algebra. So that's a measurement difference of 100 percent of performance. If you missed it, Think back to the last time someone convinced you to do something you didn't want to do, or to spend money you didn't want to spend. You can't know, but you can certainly know that if could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd. But might we allow that there's probably a part of all human beings that wants to look down on somebody else. And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. So we did an analysis of images in Artstor. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn helps us map out the unexpected ways we can find joy and happiness in our everyday lives. MCWHORTER: Oh, yeah, I'm a human being. How To Breathe Correctly For Optimal Health, Mood, Learning So there are some differences that are as big as you can possibly measure. Imagine this. You may link to our content and copy and paste episode descriptions and Additional Resources into your invitations. It's too high. Young people have always used language in new and different ways, and it's pretty much always driven older people crazy. Later things are on the right. Dictionaries are wonderful things, but they create an illusion that there's such thing as a language that stands still, when really it's the nature of human language to change. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. The categorization that language provides to you becomes real, becomes psychologically real. So what happens is that once literally comes to feel like it means really, people start using it in figurative constructions such as I was literally dying of thirst. Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, by Harry T. Reis, et. Those are quirks of grammar literally in stone. You can't touch time. And we teach them, for example, to say that bridges and apples and all kinds of other things have the same prefix as women. VEDANTAM: Jennifer moved to Japan for graduate school. So LOL was an internet abbreviation meaning laugh out loud or laughing out loud, but LOL in common usage today doesn't necessarily mean hysterical laughter. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) If you're so upset about it, maybe you can think of a way to help her. You know, lots of people blow off steam about something they think is wrong, but very few people are willing to get involved and do something about it. What turns out to be the case is that it's something in between - that bilinguals don't really turn off the languages they're not using when they're not using them. So there are these wonderful studies by Alexander Giora where he asked kids learning Finnish, English and Hebrew as their first languages basically, are you a boy or a girl? JENNIFER GEACONE-CRUZ: My name is Jennifer Geacone-Cruz. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Dont Know, Refusing to Apologize can have Psychological Benefits, The Effects of Conflict Types, Dimensions, and Emergent States on Group Outcomes, Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, The Effective Negotiator Part 1: The Behavior of Successful Negotiators, The Effective Negotiator Part 2: Planning for Negotiations, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. How come you aren't exactly the way you were 10 years ago? There are different ways to be a psychologist. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. But if you ask bilinguals, who have learned two languages and now they know that some genders disagree across the two languages, they're much less likely to say that it's because chairs are intrinsically masculine. Well never sell your personal information. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. There's a lowlier part of our nature that grammar allows us to vent in the absence of other ways to do it that have not been available for some decades for a lot of us. They're more likely to see through this little game that language has played on them. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different leg. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values. They shape our place in it. But somehow they've managed, not just by randomly bumping into each other. And that is an example of a simple feature of language - number words - acting as a transformative stepping stone to a whole domain of knowledge. Another possibility is that it's a fully integrated mind, and it just incorporates ideas and distinctions from both languages or from many languages if you speak more than two. podcast pages. Could this affect the way, you know, sexism, conscious or unconscious, operates in our world? For example, he might take a bunch of pictures of boys and girls and sort them and say, OK, this is a boy. FDA blocks human trials for Neuralink brain implants. They are ways of seeing the world. It's just how I feel. If you grew up speaking a language other than English, you probably reach for words in your native tongue without even thinking about it. In The Air We Breathe . VEDANTAM: Many of us have dictionaries at home or at work, John. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. So earlier things are on the left. Hidden Brain : NPR And I don't think any of us are thinking that it's a shame that we're not using the language of Beowulf. Transcript - How language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky.docx, The Singapore Quality Award requires organisations to show outstanding results, The following lots of Commodity Z were available for sale during the year, b The authors identify 5 types of misinformation in the abstract but discuss 7, 17 Chow N Asian value and aged care Geriatr Gerontol Int 20044521 5 18 Chow NWS, Writing Results and Discussion Example.docx, A 6 month old infant weighing 15 lb is admitted with a diagnosis of dehydration, ng_Question_-_Assessment_1_-_Proposing_Evidence-Based_Change.doc, The Social Security checks the Government sends to grandmothers are considered A, 03 If a covered member participates on the clients attest engagement or is an, AURETR143 Student Assessment - Theory v1.1.docx. VEDANTAM: How the languages we speak shape the way we think and why the words we use are always in flux. And I kind of sheepishly confessed this to someone there. Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university. Each language comprises the ideas that have been worked out in a culture over thousands of generations, and that is an incredible amount of cultural heritage and complexity of thought that disappears whenever a language dies. Parents and peers influence our major life choices. 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VEDANTAM: I love this analogy you have in the book where you mention how, you know, thinking that a word has only one meaning is like looking at a snapshot taken at one point in a person's life and saying this photograph represents the entirety of what this person looks like. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:This is HIDDEN BRAIN. Welcome to HIDDEN BRAIN. GEACONE-CRUZ: It's a Sunday afternoon, and it's raining outside. They shape our place in it. Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedantam in the classic TV series Star Trek Mister Spock has a foolproof technique for accurately reading the thoughts and feelings of others the Vulcan mind I am Spock you James our minds are moving closer most most here are kind of hard we have new technology that gives us direct access to the minds of others so Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words so often seem to be on the move? MCWHORTER: Yeah. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. So I think it's an incredible tragedy that we're losing all of this linguistic diversity, all of this cultural diversity because it is human heritage. VEDANTAM: Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. VEDANTAM: One of the points you make in the book of course is that the evolution of words and their meanings is what gives us this flowering of hundreds or thousands of languages.

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