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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 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 into 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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into 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)
