It goes in this pile. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. Just saying hello was difficult. This is Hidden Brain. in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. podcast pages. So for example, grammatical gender - because grammatical gender applies to all nouns in your language, that means that language is shaping the way you think about everything that can be named by a noun. And MIT linguist Ken Hale, who's a renowned linguist, said that every time a language dies, it's the equivalent of a bomb being dropped on the Louvre. VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Whats going on here? BORODITSKY: Thank you so much for having me. ADAM COLE, BYLINE: (Singing) You put your southwest leg in, and you shake it all about. So I think that nobody would say that they don't think language should change. Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button. So I just think that it's something we need to check ourselves for. If you prefer to listen through a podcast app, here are links to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher. You can also connect directly with our sponsorship representative by emailing [emailprotected]. After claiming your Listen Notes podcast pages, you will be able to: Respond to listener comments on Listen Notes, Use speech-to-text techniques to transcribe your show and I've always found that a very grating way to ask for something at a store. JERRY SEINFELD: (As Jerry Seinfeld) The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. Thank you! : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. BORODITSKY: The way to say my name properly in Russian is (speaking foreign language), so I don't make people say that. And what he noticed was that when people were trying to act like Monday, they would act like a man. Learn more. The best Podcast API to search all podcasts and episodes. Well, that's an incredibly large set of things, so that's a very broad effect of language. See you next week. So to go back to the example we were just talking about - people who don't use words like left and right - when I gave those picture stories to Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, who use north, south, east and west, they organized the cards from east to west. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. You can find the transcript for most episodes of Hidden Brain on our website. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. But if you seed a watermelon, nobody assumes that you're taking seeds and putting them in the watermelon, you're taking them out. I decided it was very important for me to learn English because I had always been a very verbal kid, and I'd - was always the person who recited poems in front of the school and, you know, led assemblies and things like that. And so I set myself the goal that I would learn English in a year, and I wouldn't speak Russian to anyone for that whole first year. VEDANTAM: This episode of HIDDEN BRAIN was produced by Rhaina Cohen, Maggie Penman and Thomas Lu with help from Renee Klahr, Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah and Chloe Connelly. For example, when we started talking about navigation, that's an example where a 5-year-old in a culture that uses words like north, south, east and west can point southeast without hesitation. And if you can enjoy it as a parade instead of wondering why people keep walking instead of just sitting on chairs and blowing on their tubas and not moving, then you have more fun. BORODITSKY: And when they were trying to act like Wednesday, they would act like a woman BORODITSKY: Which accords with grammatical gender in Russian. And they said, well, of course. VEDANTAM: You make the case that concerns over the misuse of language might actually be one of the last places where people can publicly express prejudice and class differences. You're also not going to do algebra. VEDANTAM: My guest today is - well, why don't I let her introduce herself? So the question for us has been, how do we build these ideas? They're supposed to be painting something very personal. Sociologist Lisa Wade believes the pervasive hookup culture on campuses today is different from that faced by previous generations. We'll begin with police shootings of unarmed Black men. 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. That's the way words are, too. You know, it's Lady Liberty and Lady Justice. If you're a monolingual speaker of one of these languages, you're very likely to say that the word chair is masculine because chairs are, in fact, masculine, right? We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more el, When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. All of the likes and, like, literallies (ph) might sometimes grate on your nerves, but John McWhorter says the problem might be with you, not with the way other people speak. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. Hidden Brain. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values. 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. And it's just too much of an effort, and you can't be bothered to do it, even though it's such a small thing. So it's easy to think, oh, I could imagine someone without thinking explicitly about what they're wearing. So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. (LAUGHTER) VEDANTAM: In the English-speaking world, she goes by Lera Boroditsky. If you liked . I said, you know, this weird thing happened. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. He's a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the book "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". It should just be, here is the natural way, then there's some things that you're supposed to do in public because that's the way it is, whether it's fair or not. Rightly Crossing the Rubicon: Evaluating Goal Self-Concordance Prior to Selection Helps People Choose More Intrinsic Goals, by Kennon M. Sheldon, Mike Prentice, and Evgeny Osin, Journal of Research in Personality, 2019. Just go to the magnifying glass in the top right corner, click on it, and use the search function at the top of the page. And there are consequences for how people think about events, what they notice when they see accidents. Sometimes you just have to suck it up. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. I think language can certainly be a contributor into the complex system of our thinking about gender. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you're studying a new language, you might discover these phrases not in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. They are ways of seeing the world. BORODITSKY: So quite literally, to get past hello, you have to know which way you're heading. - you would have to say something like, my arm got broken, or it so happened to me that my arm is broken. If a transcript is available, youll see a Transcript button which expands to reveal the full transcript. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-being: The Self-Concordance Model, Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. They know which way is which. Long before she began researching languages as a professor, foreign languages loomed large in her life. Of course that's how you BORODITSKY: And so what was remarkable for me was that my brain figured out a really good solution to the problem after a week of trying, right? But I find that people now usually use the word to mean very soon, as in we're going to board the plane momentarily. Lots of languages make a distinction between things that are accidents and things that are intentional actions. al, Group Decision and Negotiation, 2008. Long before she began researching languages as a professor, foreign languages loomed large in her life. In The Air We Breathe . Language was talk. VEDANTAM: I asked Lera how describing the word chair or the word bridge as masculine or feminine changes the way that speakers of different languages think about those concepts. The Effective Negotiator Part 1: The Behavior of Successful Negotiators and The Effective Negotiator Part 2: Planning for Negotiations, by Neil Rackham and John Carlisle, Journal of European Industrial Training, 1978. There's been a little bit of research from economists actually looking at this. MCWHORTER: Thank you for having me, Shankar. You know, there's no left leg or right leg. So in terms of the size of differences, there are certainly effects that are really, really big. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, What Do You Do When Things Go Right? Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words so often seem to be on the move? So you can think about an un-gendered person in the same way that I might think about a person without a specific age or specific height or specific color shirt. That said, if you hear one or two pieces of music that you really love, feel free to email us at [emailprotected] and well do our best to respond to your request. And what he found was kids who were learning Hebrew - this is a language that has a lot of gender loading in it - figured out whether they were a boy or a girl about a year sooner than kids learning Finnish, which doesn't have a lot of gender marking in the language. : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, by Lawrence S. Krieger and Kennon M. Sheldon, George Washington Law Review, 2015. She once visited an aboriginal community in northern Australia and found the language they spoke forced her mind to work in new ways. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). 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. But what I am thinking is, you should realize that even if you don't like it, there's nothing wrong with it in the long run because, for example, Jonathan Swift didn't like it that people were saying kissed instead of kiss-ed (ph) and rebuked instead of rebuk-ed (ph). And so somebody will say, well, who was it who you thought was going to give you this present? Imagine this. I know-uh (ph) is there, or something along the lines of babe-uh (ph). In this favorite 2021 episode, psychologistAdam Grantpushes back against the benefits of certainty, and describes the magic that unfolds when we challenge our own deeply-held beliefs. VEDANTAM: So all this raises a really interesting question. And you say that dictionaries in some ways paint an unrealistic portrait of a language. . Each generation hears things and interprets things slightly differently from the previous one. We can't help, as literate people, thinking that the real language is something that sits still with letters written all nice and pretty on a page that can exist for hundreds of years, but that's not what language has ever been. Lera 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. Transcript Speaker 1 00:00:00 this is hidden brain. Now, many people hear that and they think, well, that's no good because now literally can mean its opposite. So I think it's something that is quite easy for humans to learn if you just have a reason to want to do it. But does a person who says that really deserve the kind of sneering condemnation that you often see? The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Copyright 2023 Steno. It is the very fabric, the very core of your experience. You may also use the Hidden Brain name in invitations sent to a small group of personal contacts for such purposes as a listening club or discussion forum. So - but if I understand correctly, I would be completely at sea if I visited this aboriginal community in Australia because I have often absolutely no idea where I am or where I'm going. Stay with us. We always knew that certain species of animals had abilities to orient that we thought were better than human, and we always had some biological excuse for why we couldn't do it. There's a way of speaking right. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. We're speaking today with cognitive science professor Lera Boroditsky about language. There was no way of transcribing an approximation of what people said and nobody would have thought of doing it. Mistakes and errors are what turned Latin into French. All of these are very subjective things. So for example, for English speakers - people who read from left to right - time tends to flow from left to right. BORODITSKY: It's certainly possible. That kind of detail may not appear. VEDANTAM: Languages seem to have different ways of communicating agency. So these speakers have internalized this idea from their language, and they believe that it's right. Why researchers should think real-world: A conceptual rationale, by Harry T. Reis, in Handbook of Research Methods for Studying Daily Life, 2012. 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. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. And they suggest that differences across languages do, in fact, predict some of these measures of gender equality across countries. Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, by Kennon M. Sheldon, 2022. Newsletter: It might irritate you slightly to hear somebody say something like, I need less books instead of fewer books. Newer episodes are unlikely to have a transcript as it takes us a few weeks to process and edit each transcript. And some people would say it's a lot more because it's, you know, irrecoverable and not reduplicated elsewhere. VEDANTAM: So I find that I'm often directionally and navigationally challenged when I'm driving around, and I often get my east-west mixed up with my left-right for reasons I have never been able to fathom. All rights reserved. Can I get some chicken? But what if it's not even about lust? Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. I'm Shankar Vedantam. And then he would take a Polaroid of the kid and say, well, this is you. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. native tongue without even thinking about it. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). Hidden Brain Feb 23, 2023 Happiness 2.0: Surprising Sources of Joy Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. But they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Maybe it's even less than a hundred meters away, but you just can't bring yourself to even throw your coat on over your pajamas and put your boots on and go outside and walk those hundred meters because somehow it would break the coziness. But what if there's a whole category of people in your life whose impact is overlooked? June 20, 2020 This week on Hidden Brain, research about prejudices so deeply buried, we often doubt their existence. According to neuroscientists who study laughter, it turns out that chuckles and giggles often aren't a response to humorthey're a response to people. Marcus Butt/Getty Images/Ikon Images Hidden Brain Why Nobody Feels Rich by Shankar Vedantam , Parth Shah , Tara Boyle , Rhaina Cohen September 14, 2020 If you've ever flown in economy class. BORODITSKY: Yeah. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. FEB 27, 2023; Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button . And so what that means is if someone was sitting facing south, they would lay out the story from left to right. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, by Jamil Zaki, Niall Bolger, Kevin Ochsner, Psychological Science, 2008. How do you balance the imperative of teaching correct usage? What a cynical thing to say, but that doesn't mean that it might not be true. But, you know, John, something gnaws at me every time I hear the word used wrong. So there are some differences that are as big as you can possibly measure. A free podcast app for iPhone and Android, Download episodes while on WiFi to listen without using mobile data, Stream podcast episodes without waiting for a download, Queue episodes to create a personal continuous playlist, Web embed players designed to convert visitors to listeners in the RadioPublic apps for iPhone and Android, Capture listener activity with affinity scores, Measure your promotional campaigns and integrate with Google and Facebook analytics, Deliver timely Calls To Action, including email acquistion for your mailing list, Share exactly the right moment in an episode via text, email, and social media, Tip and transfer funds directly to podcastsers, Earn money for qualified plays in the RadioPublic apps with Paid Listens. MCWHORTER: You could have fun doing such a thing. So it's mendokusai. So for example, you might not imagine the color shirt that he's wearing or the kinds of shoes that he's wearing. VEDANTAM: Our conversation made me wonder about what this means on a larger scale. VEDANTAM: It took just one week of living in Japan for Jennifer to pick up an important, VEDANTAM: There isn't a straightforward translation of this phrase in English. In this week's My Unsung Hero, Sarah Feldman thanks someone for their gift more than 20 years ago. 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. Toward Understanding Understanding:The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships, by Harry Reis, Edward P. Lemay Jr, and Catrin Finkenauer, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2017. Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at Hidden Brain telling the stories of . : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. Listen on the Reuters app. Assessing the Seeds of Relationship Decay: Using Implicit Evaluations to Detect the Early Stages of Disillusionment, by Soonhee Lee, Ronald D. Rogge, and Harry T. Reis, Psychological Science, 2010. But if I give that same story to a Hebrew or an Arabic speaker, they would organize it from right to left. Of course, if you can't keep track of exactly seven, you can't count. You can't know, but you can certainly know that if could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd. And the way you speak right is not by speaking the way that people around you in your life speak, but by speaking the way the language is as it sits there all nice and pretty on that piece of paper where its reality exists. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. He says that buying into false beliefs, in other words, deluding ourselves can . When we come back, I'm going to ask you about why languages change and whether there are hidden rules that shape why some words are more likely to evolve than others. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. So when I ask you to, say, imagine a man walking down the street, well, in your imagery, you're going to have some details completed and some will be left out. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. VEDANTAM: If languages are shaped by the way people see the world, but they also shape how people see the world, what does this mean for people who are bilingual? It seems kind of elliptical, like, would it be possible that I obtained? Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. Those are quirks of grammar literally in stone. We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more elusive the harder we chase it, and what we can do instead to build a lasting sense of contentment. Trusted by 5,200 companies and developers. But it's exactly like - it was maybe about 20 years ago that somebody - a girlfriend I had told me that if I wore pants that had little vertical pleats up near the waist, then I was conveying that I was kind of past it. Transcript Podcast: Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. But it turns out humans can stay oriented really, really well, provided that their language and culture requires them to keep track of this information. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. 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. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This week, we continue our look at the science of influence with psychologist Robert Cialdini, and explore how th, We all exert pressure on each other in ways small and profound. 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? So act like Monday. The size of this effect really quite surprised me because I would have thought at the outset that, you know, artists are these iconoclasts. And you suddenly get a craving for potato chips, and you realize that you have none in the kitchen, and there's nothing else you really want to eat. Physicist Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." One way we fool ourselves is by imagining we know more than we do; we think we are experts. 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. And if that is true, then the educated person can look down on people who say Billy and me went to the store or who are using literally, quote, unquote, "wrong" and condemn them in the kinds of terms that once were ordinary for condemning black people or women or what have you. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn helps us map out the unexpected ways w, Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. Languages are not just tools. If you're studying a new language, you might discover these phrases not. VEDANTAM: Jennifer moved to Japan for graduate school. You're not going to do any of the things that are seen as a foundation of our technological society. So that's an example of how languages and cultures construct how we use space to organize time, to organize this very abstract thing that's otherwise kind of hard to get our hands on and think about. Flight attendant Steven Slater slides from a plane after quitting. To request permission, please send an email to [emailprotected]. (Speaking Japanese). 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. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. to describe the world. That was somehow a dad's fashion, and that I should start wearing flat-fronted pants. It's inherent. 4.62. He's also the author of the book, "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". It turns out, as you point out, that in common usage, literally literally means the opposite of literally. I think it's a really fascinating question for future research. We couldnt survive without the many public radio stations that support our show and they cant survive without you. - so one skull but two different minds, and you shift from one to the other. But it's so hard to feel that partly because our brains are on writing, as I say in the book. Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, by Harry T. Reis, et. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. They're more likely to see through this little game that language has played on them. And to our surprise, 78 percent of the time, we could predict the gender of the personification based on the grammatical gender of the noun in the artist's native language. BORODITSKY: Yeah. He didn't like that people were shortening the words. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. It's not something that you typically go out trying to do intentionally. So the way you say hi in Kuuk Thaayorre is to say, which way are you heading? When language was like that, of course it changed a lot - fast - because once you said it, it was gone. Today's episode was the first in our You 2.0 series, which runs all this month. Young people have always used language in new and different ways, and it's pretty much always driven older people crazy. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. How else would you do it? They're more likely to say, well, it's a formal property of the language. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. This week on Hidden Brain, psychologist Adam Grant describes the magic th 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. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: (Speaking Russian). 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. And nobody wishes that we hadn't developed our modern languages today from the ancient versions. And one day, I was walking along, and I was just staring at the ground. VEDANTAM: There are phrases in every language that are deeply evocative and often untranslatable. LERA BORODITSKY: The categorization that language provides to you becomes real - becomes psychologically real. Hidden Brain Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Science 4.6 36K Ratings; Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. GEACONE-CRUZ: And I ended up living there for 10 years. 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: So I want to talk about a debate that's raged in your field for many years. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. And then when I turned, this little window stayed locked on the landscape, but it turned in my mind's eye. This week, in the fourth and final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes . There's not a bigger difference you could find than 100 percent of the measurement space. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page, sponsorship opportunities on Hidden Brain. And what's cool about languages, like the languages spoken in Pormpuraaw, is that they don't use words like left and right, and instead, everything is placed in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west.
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