Hidden Brain: The NPR Archive : NPR - NPR.org And you've conducted experiments that explore how different conceptions of time in different languages shape the way we think about the world and shape the way we think about stories. 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. And they asked me all kinds of questions about them. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. So for example, for English speakers - people who read from left to right - time tends to flow from left to right. So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. Whats going on here? GEACONE-CRUZ: It's this phrase that describes something between I can't be bothered or I don't want to do it or I recognize the incredible effort that goes into something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. We'll begin with police shootings of unarmed Black men. 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 Hidden Brain: You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose on Apple Podcasts Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. Each generation hears things and interprets things slightly differently from the previous one. MCWHORTER: No, because LOL was an expression; it was a piece of language, and so you knew that its meaning was going to change. And so what that means is if someone was sitting facing south, they would lay out the story from left to right. 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. He's also the author of the book, "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". Which I think is probably important with the reality that this edifice that you're teaching is constantly crumbling. 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. So it's easy to think, oh, I could imagine someone without thinking explicitly about what they're wearing. 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. You can't know, but you can certainly know that if could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd. 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. What do you think the implications are - if you buy the idea that languages are a very specific and unique way of seeing the world, of perceiving reality, what are the implications of so many languages disappearing during our time? All sponsorship opportunities on Hidden Brain are managed by SXM Media. There's been a little bit of research from economists actually looking at this. And so, for example, can I get a hamburger? But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? Hidden Brain Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. 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. We use a lot of music on the show! 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). People who breathe too much put their bodies in a hypoxic state, with not enough oxygen to the brain How breath moves in the body: air comes in through the nose and mouth; the larynx (rigid tube to avoid closing) brings air from the nose and mouth to the lungs Lungs can expand and contract to bring in or expel air This is HIDDEN BRAIN. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. The fun example I give my students is imagine playing the hokey pokey in a language like this. See you next week. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. It turns out, as you point out, that in common usage, literally literally means the opposite of literally. In this favorite episode from 2021, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isnt something to be found its something we can develop from within. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. And if it was feminine, then you're likely to paint death as a woman. But actually, that's exactly how people in those communities come to stay oriented - is that they learn it, (laughter) right? But what we should teach is not that the good way is logical and the way that you're comfortable doing it is illogical. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Speaking foreign language). BORODITSKY: My family is Jewish, and we left as refugees. VEDANTAM: So this begs the question, if you were to put languages on something of a spectrum, where you have, you know, languages like Spanish or Hindi where nouns are gendered and languages like English where many nouns are not gendered but pronouns are gendered, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have languages like Finnish or Persian where you can have a conversation about someone without actually mentioning their gender, it would seem surprising if this did not translate, at some level, into the way people thought about gender in their daily activities, in terms of thinking about maybe even who can do what in the workplace. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. When the con was exposed, its victims defended the con artists. And then when I turned, this little window stayed locked on the landscape, but it turned in my mind's eye. And we looked at every personification and allegory in Artstor and asked, does the language that you speak matter for how you paint death, depending on whether the word death is masculine or feminine in your language? VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? 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. Imagine you meet somebody, they're 39 and you take their picture. Well, if you have a word like that and if it's an intensifier of that kind, you can almost guess that literally is going to come to mean something more like just really. GEACONE-CRUZ: And I ended up living there for 10 years. There's not a bigger difference you could find than 100 percent of the measurement space. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? I'm Shankar Vedantam, and you're listening to HIDDEN BRAIN. My Unsung Hero: A belated thank you : NPR They shape our place in it. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different leg. GEACONE-CRUZ: It describes this feeling so perfectly in such a wonderfully packaged, encapsulated way. 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? And as odd as that sounds, I can guarantee you if you watch any TV show with women under a certain age or if you just go out on an American street and listen, you'll find that that's a new kind of exclamatory particle. Which pile do you go in, right? And maybe the convenience store or the shop is really not that far away. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, What Do You Do When Things Go Right? In this episode, we explore how long-term relationships have changed over time and whether we might be able to improve marriage by asking less of it. And you can even teach people to have a little bit of fun with the artifice. al, Group Decision and Negotiation, 2008. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:This is HIDDEN BRAIN. So you have speakers of two different languages look at the same event and come away with different memories of what happened because of the structure of their languages and the way they would normally describe them. In this month's Radio Replay, we ask whether the structure of the languages we speak can change the way we see the world. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Right. This is HIDDEN BRAIN. Imagine this. And we're all going to have feelings like that. They are ways of seeing the world. Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. Going the Distance on the Pacific Crest Trail: The Vital Role of Identified Motivation, by Kennon M. Sheldon, Motivation Science, 2020. Maybe it's, even less than 100 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, 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. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. Writing has come along relatively recently. VEDANTAM: Well, that's kind of you, Lera. VEDANTAM: Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button 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. al (Eds. Perspectives on the Situation by Harry T. Reis, and John G. Holmes, in The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012. If you still cant find the episode, try looking through our most recent shows on our homepage. VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? BORODITSKY: I had this wonderful opportunity to work with my colleague Alice Gaby in this community called Pormpuraaw in - on Cape York. 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. 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. MCWHORTER: Those are called contronyms, and literally has become a new contronym. So if the word for death was masculine in your language, you were likely to paint death as a man. . And so language changed just like the clouds in the sky. So earlier things are on the left. As you're going about your day, you likely interact with family, friends and coworkers. edit transcripts, Improve the presence of your podcasts, e.g., self-service, If you share your Listen Notes page and at-mention. 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. Many people have this intuition that, oh, I could never learn that; I could never survive in a community like this. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. But I find that people now usually use the word to mean very soon, as in we're going to board the plane momentarily. But it's a lovely example of how language can guide you to discover something about the world that might take you longer to discover if you didn't have that information in language. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. As someone who works in media, I often find that people who can write well are often people who know how to think well, so I often equate clarity of writing with clarity of thought. Happiness 2.0: The Only Way Out Is Through. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy. And I can't help surmising that part of it is that the educated American has been taught and often well that you're not supposed to look down on people because of gender, because of race, because of ability. And I was telling this person about someone I knew back in America. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #16: Not figuratively, it's literally MCWHORTER: Yeah. VEDANTAM: (Laughter) All right, I think it might be time for me to confess one of my pet peeves. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. VEDANTAM: Many of us have dictionaries at home or at work, John. Hidden Brain (podcast) - Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam - Listen Notes VEDANTAM: The moment she heard it, Jennifer realized mendokusai was incredibly useful. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? Whats going on here? But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. 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. There are signs it's getting even harder. BORODITSKY: And when they were trying to act like Wednesday, they would act like a woman BORODITSKY: Which accords with grammatical gender in Russian. They can be small differences but important in other ways. There was no such thing as looking up what it originally meant. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Lawrence S. Krieger, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2004. But if you seed a watermelon, nobody assumes that you're taking seeds and putting them in the watermelon, you're taking them out. 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. I think that the tone that many people use when they're complaining that somebody says Billy and me went to the store is a little bit incommensurate with the significance of the issue. That's how much cultural heritage is lost. How come you aren't exactly the way you were 10 years ago? If you dont see any jobs posted there, feel free to send your resume and cover letter to [emailprotected] and well keep your materials on hand for future openings on the show. 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. VEDANTAM: Languages orient us to the world. 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. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, by Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999. And maybe the convenience store or the shop is really not that far away. It's part of a general running indication that everything's OK between you and the other person, just like one's expected to smile a little bit in most interactions. And as soon as I saw that happen, I thought, oh, this makes it so much easier. Listen on the Reuters app. And they have correlated this with gender features in the language, just like the ones you were talking about. 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? You're not going to do trigonometry. There are different ways to be a psychologist. by Harry T. Reis, Annie Regan, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2021. Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. And I would really guess that in a few decades men will be doing it, too. VEDANTAM: If you're bilingual or you're learning a new language, you get what Jennifer, experienced - the joy of discovering a phrase that helps you perfectly encapsulate a. feeling or an experience. LERA BORODITSKY: The categorization that language provides to you becomes real - becomes psychologically real. Read the episode transcript. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I'm willing to get involved. MCWHORTER: Yes, Shankar, that's exactly it. You know, endings are going to tend to drop off. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. You know, we spend years teaching children about how to use language correctly. Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. All rights reserved. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values. Or feel like you and your spouse sometimes speak different languages? She shows how our conversational styles can cause We all know casual sex isn't about love. You can't smell or taste time. We recommend movies or books to a friend. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. So the question for us has been, how do we build these ideas? Bu All episodes of Hidden Brain - Chartable You would give a different description to mark that it was not intentional. Athletic Scholarships are Negatively Associated with Intrinsic Motivation for Sports, Even Decades Later: Evidence for Long-Term Undermining, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Arlen C. Moller, Motivation Science, 2020. If it is the first time you login, a new account will be created automatically. We couldnt survive without the many public radio stations that support our show and they cant survive without you. 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. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. 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. Hidden Brain - KQED | News, Radio, Podcasts, TV Hidden Brain: You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose on Apple Podcasts 51 min You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose Hidden Brain Social Sciences Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. This is a database with millions of art images. We're speaking today with cognitive science professor Lera Boroditsky about language. This is Hidden Brain. VEDANTAM: I'm Shankar Vedantam. And then he would take a Polaroid of the kid and say, well, this is you. But it is a completely crucial part of the human experience. This week, in the fourth and final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Long before she began researching languages as a professor, foreign languages loomed large in her life. VEDANTAM: There are phrases in every language that are deeply evocative and often, untranslatable. This week, in the final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes what happens when we stop to savor the beauty in nature, art, or simply the moral courage of those around us. 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. And very competent adults of our culture can't do that. The dictionary says both uses are correct. Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page, sponsorship opportunities on Hidden Brain. 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 if the word bridge is masculine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are strong and long and towering - these kind of more stereotypically masculine words. 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. VEDANTAM: How the languages we speak shape the way we think and why the words we use are always in flux. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. Updated privacy policy: We have made some changes to our Privacy Policy. They give us a sense that the meanings of words are fixed, when in fact they're not. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, Going the Distance on the Pacific Crest Trail: The Vital Role of Identified Motivation, Athletic Scholarships are Negatively Associated with Intrinsic Motivation for Sports, Even Decades Later: Evidence for Long-Term Undermining, Rightly Crossing the Rubicon: Evaluating Goal Self-Concordance Prior to Selection Helps People Choose More Intrinsic Goals, What Makes Lawyers Happy? They know which way is which. 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).". I just don't want to do it. 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. BORODITSKY: Yeah. We'll also look at how languages evolve, and why we're sometimes resistant to those changes. 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. Whats going on here? You also see huge differences in other domains like number. When she was 12, her family came to the United States from the Soviet Union. So you can't see time. And there are consequences for how people think about events, what they notice when they see accidents. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. VEDANTAM: It took just one week of living in Japan for Jennifer to pick up an important new term. For more of our Relationships 2.0 series, check out one of our most popular episodes ever about why marriages are so hard. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. VEDANTAM: Our conversation made me wonder about what this means on a larger scale. Later things are on the right. Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. But then you start writing things down and you're in a whole new land because once things are sitting there written on that piece of paper, there's that illusion. JERRY SEINFELD: (As Jerry Seinfeld) The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. out. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. 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. Those are quirks of grammar literally in stone. How to Really Know Another Person - Transcripts If you're bilingual or multilingual, you may have noticed that different languages make you stretch in different ways. Newsletter: So for example, if Sam grabbed a hammer and struck the flute in anger, that would be one description, like, Sam broke the flute. This week, a story about a con with a twist. So in English, I might say that Sam (ph) broke the flute. This week, in the fourth and final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes . Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors, by Philip Tetlock, Psychology Review, 2002. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. 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. How To Breathe Correctly For Optimal Health, Mood, Learning You can find the transcript for most episodes of Hidden Brain on our website. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. For example, he might take a bunch of pictures of boys and girls and sort them and say, OK, this is a boy. He. Hidden Brain | Hidden Brain Media Who Do You Want To Be? | Hidden Brain Media UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11: (Speaking Russian). But if they were sitting facing north, they would lay out the story from right to left. John, you've noted that humans have been using language for a very long time, but for most of that time language has been about talking. He didn't like that people were shortening the words. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. You 2.0: How to Open Your Mind | Hidden Brain Media Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. ), The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures, 2018. VEDANTAM: As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang.