Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

http://weblog.noahburney.com/language-scripts/mind-powers-via-language

by samdjohnson • 14 years ago

26 31 14 years ago

weblog.noahburney.com

spodek• 14 years ago

From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon."

A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature.

I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?

simonsarris• 14 years ago

"A different language is a different version of life" - Fellini

I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.

Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.

By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.

tdr2• 14 years ago

Every experience changes the way you think.

The question is: how and by how much?

(could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)

mike_ivanov6• 14 years ago

"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon."

This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.

vitno2• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

what were the languages? they may be very similar.

mike_ivanov6• 14 years ago

Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.

noahburney• 14 years ago

Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.

mike_ivanov6• 14 years ago

Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two.

Edit: clarity.

seanos2• 14 years ago

Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

vitno2• 14 years ago

I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place. the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).

tdr2• 14 years ago

From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and necessity), not the other way around.

There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure.

Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?

drostie• 14 years ago

Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto.

And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?"

Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.

[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.

[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."

[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."

Produce• 14 years ago

I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.

mike_ivanov6• 14 years ago

How one can think in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?

ThePawnBreak• 14 years ago

This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.

I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-...

http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie...

among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving.

The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented,

http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban.

Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.

httpitis• 14 years ago

I'm impressed by your vast experience with different languages! I'm also curious to learn why one language contrasted with another language have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think. The authors post seem to prove the opposite:

>An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south instead. And as a result: they develop an internal compass—always knowing which way is north, even if you blindfold them and spin them around.

I for sure don't know the direction after being spun blindfolded :)

(edit: grammar)

seanos2• 14 years ago

It may be possible that they developed their internal compass due to their nomadic lifestyle and the use of absolute directions within language resulted from that (rather than vice versa). I have no idea if this is the case.

klenwell2• 14 years ago

Heard this story on RadioLab recently. Very interesting but it's hard to see how language itself was the mechanism behind their unusually sensitive internal compass.

More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape. Their language just seems to reinforce that more subliminal attentiveness to these cues.

I found this to be one of the more interesting points made in the RadioLab story: while the majority of the limited number of modern languages in use today do not have this spatial-directional feature, it seems to have been a feature of a large number of the languages that have ever existed. (Edit: per Dr. Lera Boroditsky [great website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/], it's a third of the world's (current?) languages, though not speakers.)

Which makes sense. Imagine our unsettled, migratory ancestors trying to keep their bearings without the aid of compasses or standardized maps. One of the first features you'd probably ask for in your language is a feature that helps you keep track of your approximate location.

Radiolab link: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/

jkn5• 14 years ago

You fail to address the point of the New York Times story referenced in the original post: There is a tribe that uses cardinal directions all the time, instead of left, right, front and back, and it does have a big effect on their spatial orientation abilities. This looks like an example where the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applies. One example, that's all it takes to prove that the phenomenon exists.

So the OP might very well be right: maybe we can hack our minds to get new abilities simply by changing our language. Maybe not much beyond this spatial orientation example, but who knows...

Radix• 14 years ago

Using cardinal directions really isn't a strong feature of the language though is it? It's secondary to the language itself and any culture could do that with their own language because it isn't a central feature of the language. It isn't in the grammar. Which makes it not an example of strong Sapir-Whorf but an example of weak Sapir-Whorf. The former is all token adult claimed and the latter is something that is, I think, more accepted.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

Wow.

Regarding constructed languages, I like Interlingua the best, but nobody knows it. It certainly appears to me to be both easy to learn and productive, but I'm very poor at it. I tried Esperanto a while back, but didn't like it.

Lojban, I think, is great fodder for science fiction. Unfortunately, the language was designed without any real interest in how the human brain processes language. It's full of wizzy tricks and neat stuff, and I like the idea of it, but it seems to resist being learned. When I was last looking into it ~2 years ago, there had essentially been one actual conversation in it, and there was reason to suspect the participants were talking past each other. I do think one could create an actual language from Lojban, but it would have to have a really restricted subset of the grammar.

Anyway, thanks for your insights. I often wish I had put the energy into human languages I put into programming languages.

khyryk• 14 years ago

Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.

Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

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