And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused. something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. But it is a completely crucial part of the human experience. 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. The dictionary says both uses are correct. Lera, thank you so much for joining me on HIDDEN BRAIN today. Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. This week, in the final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes what happens when we stop to sav, Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. And if you teach them that forks go with women, they start to think that forks are more feminine. This is a database with millions of art images. MCWHORTER: Yeah, I really do. I've always found that a very grating way to ask for something at a store. But the reason that it seems so elusive is because we don't really think about the, quote, unquote, "meaning" of things like our conversation-easing laughter. So for example, you might not imagine the color shirt that he's wearing or the kinds of shoes that he's wearing. Bu Hidden Brain Feb 23, 2023 Happiness 2.0: Surprising Sources of Joy Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. 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. How do certain memes go viral? Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. And then 10 years later when they're 49, you say, well, that picture of you at 39 is what you really are and whatever's happened to you since then is some sort of disaster or something that shouldn't have happened. Podcasters use the RadioPublic listener relationship platform to build lasting connections with fans. Take the word bridge - if it's feminine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are beautiful and elegant. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where. You couldn't have predicted this I know-uh move-uh (ph). (Speaking Japanese). Whats going on here? What do you do for christmas with your family? But if you prefer life - the unpredictability of life - then living language in many ways are much more fun. Yes! Transcript 585: In Defense of Ignorance Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and you're listening to HIDDEN BRAIN. And you can just - it rolls off the tongue, and you can just throw it out. BORODITSKY: That's a wonderful question. You know, it's Lady Liberty and Lady Justice. How do you balance the imperative of teaching correct usage? 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. GEACONE-CRUZ: It's a Sunday afternoon, and it's raining outside. Shankar Vedantam, host of the popular podcast "Hidden Brain" has been reporting on human behavior for decades. Lera is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. 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. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. I had this cool experience when I was there. What Do You Do When Things Go Right? al (Eds. They are ways of seeing the world. You can also connect directly with our sponsorship representative by emailing [emailprotected]. Copyright 2018 NPR. 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. Interpersonal Chemistry: What Is It, How Does It Emerge, and How Does it Operate? And the answer should be, north, northeast in the far distance; how about you? You would never know, for example, that - give you an example I've actually been thinking about. And there are consequences for how people think about events, what they notice when they see accidents. You can't touch time. But it's so hard to feel that partly because our brains are on writing, as I say in the book. Writing has come along relatively recently. 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. We use a lot of music on the show! 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 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. And I was telling this person about someone I knew back in America. This week, we revisit a favorite episode from 2021, bringing you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality even when the facts dont back us up. So it's mendokusai. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. MCWHORTER: Oh, yeah, I'm a human being. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. But if I give that same story to a Hebrew or an Arabic speaker, they would organize it from right to left. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. 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 The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. But I think that we should learn not to listen to people using natural language as committing errors because there's no such thing as making a mistake in your language if a critical mass of other people speaking your language are doing the same thing. So LOL was an internet abbreviation meaning laugh out loud or laughing out loud, but LOL in common usage today doesn't necessarily mean hysterical laughter. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. We'll also look at how languages evolve, and why we're sometimes resistant to those changes. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Speaking foreign language). But as Bob Cialdini set out to discover the keys to influence and persuasion, he decided to follow the instincts of his childhood. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. So earlier things are on the left. BORODITSKY: Well, there may not be a word for left to refer to a left leg. Newer episodes are unlikely to have a transcript as it takes us a few weeks to process and edit each transcript. My big fat greek wedding, an american woman of greek ancestry falls in love with a very vanilla, american man. BORODITSKY: Thank you so much for having me. All episodes of Hidden Brain - Chartable Hidden Brain Episodes Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. Stay with us. Can I get some chicken? And if you don't have a word for exactly seven, it actually becomes very, very hard to keep track of exactly seven. Now I can stay oriented. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. GEACONE-CRUZ: It describes this feeling so perfectly in such a wonderfully packaged, encapsulated way, and you can just - it rolls off the tongue, and you can just throw it. Sometimes you just have to suck it up. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button We lobby a neighbor to vote for our favored political candidate. 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. 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. So you may start with moving your southwest leg in, but then you have to move your northeast leg out. So they've compared gender equality, gender parity norms from the World Health Organization, which ranks countries on how equal access to education, how equal pay is, how equal representation in government is across the genders. But, you know, John, something gnaws at me every time I hear the word used wrong. It seems kind of elliptical, like, would it be possible that I obtained? You can run experiments in a lab or survey people on the street. VEDANTAM: John McWhorter, thank you so much for joining me on HIDDEN BRAIN today. You can't smell or taste time. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. In this week's My Unsung Hero, Sarah Feldman thanks someone for their gift more than 20 years ago. In English, actually, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, I broke my arm. 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).". Now, many people hear that and they think, well, that's no good because now literally can mean its opposite. Which I think is probably important with the reality that this edifice that you're teaching is constantly crumbling. . Later things are on the right. VEDANTAM: So I want to talk about a debate that's raged in your field for many years. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn helps us map out Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. MCWHORTER: Those are called contronyms, and literally has become a new contronym. 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. 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. We also look at how. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. And you say that dictionaries in some ways paint an unrealistic portrait of a language. 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? podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9rd1djMGxoZg==, open.spotify.com/show/20Gf4IAauFrfj7RBkjcWxh. : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, by Lawrence S. Krieger and Kennon M. Sheldon, George Washington Law Review, 2015. That was somehow a dad's fashion, and that I should start wearing flat-fronted pants. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. You can find the transcript for most episodes of Hidden Brain on our website. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, by Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999. This week, we continue our look at the science of influence with psychologist Robert Cialdini, and explore how these techniques can be used for both good and evil. It goes in this pile. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I'm willing to get involved. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? And, I mean, just in terms of even sounds changing and the way that you put words together changing bit by bit, and there's never been a language that didn't do that. That is the direction of writing in Hebrew and Arabic, going from right to left. Thank you! And then if you are going to be that elliptical, why use the casual word get? Put this image on your website to promote the show -, Happiness 2.0: The Only Way Out Is Through, Report inappropriate content or request to remove this page. There's not a bigger difference you could find than 100 percent of the measurement space. 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. I'm Shankar Vedantam. MCWHORTER: No, because LOL was an expression; it was a piece of language, and so you knew that its meaning was going to change. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. MCWHORTER: Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. VEDANTAM: (Laughter) All right, I think it might be time for me to confess one of my pet peeves. Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. 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. And then when I turned, this little window stayed locked on the landscape, but it turned in my mind's eye. You may link to our content and copy and paste episode descriptions and Additional Resources into your invitations. For example, he might take a bunch of pictures of boys and girls and sort them and say, OK, this is a boy. 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. 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. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. 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. As you're going about your day, you likely interact with family, friends and coworkers. 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. And they have correlated this with gender features in the language, just like the ones you were talking about. 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. So for example, for English speakers - people who read from left to right - time tends to flow from left to right. BORODITSKY: Actually, one of the first people to notice or suggest that this might be the case was a Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. How to Foster Perceived Partner Responsiveness: High-Quality LIstening is Key, by Guy Itzchakov, Harry Reis, and Netta Weinstein, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2021. If the language stayed the way it was, it would be like a pressed flower in a book or, as I say, I think it would be like some inflatable doll rather than a person. Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university. How does that sound now? That is utterly arbitrary that those little slits in American society look elderly, but for various chance reasons, that's what those slits came to mean, so I started wearing flat-fronted pants. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. 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. So that, again, is a huge difference. You know, I was trying to stay oriented because people were treating me like I was pretty stupid for not being oriented, and that hurt. You're not going to do any of the things that are seen as a foundation of our technological society. Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button. al, Group Decision and Negotiation, 2008. Hidden Brain. And so I was trying to keep track of which way is which. VEDANTAM: The moment she heard it, Jennifer realized mendokusai was incredibly useful. We're speaking today with cognitive science professor Lera Boroditsky about language. 00:55:27 Hidden Brain Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button Which pile do you go in, right? Languages are not just tools. I'm Shankar Vedantam. VEDANTAM: So all this raises a really interesting question. So maybe they're saying bridges are beautiful and elegant, not because they're grammatically feminine in the language, but because the bridges they have are, in fact, more beautiful and elegant. One study that I love is a study that asked monolingual speakers of Italian and German and also bilingual speakers of Italian and German to give reasons for why things are the grammatical genders that they are. 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. in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. It's as if you saw a person - I'm not going to say at 4 because then the person is growing up, and if I use that analogy then it seems like I'm saying that language grows up or it moves toward something or it develops. He. BORODITSKY: Well, I think it's a terrible tragedy. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. This week on Hidden Brain, psychologist Adam Grant describes the magic th How to Foster Perceived Partner Responsiveness: High-Quality LIstening is Key, Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale (PPRS), Toward Understanding Understanding:The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships, Perceived Responses to Capitalization Attempts are Influenced by Self-Esteem and Relationship Threat, Perceived Partner Responsiveness Minimizes Defensive Reactions to Failure, Assessing the Seeds of Relationship Decay: Using Implicit Evaluations to Detect the Early Stages of Disillusionment. MCWHORTER: Yes, that's exactly true. If you're just joining us, I'm talking to John McWhorter. So I think it's an incredible tragedy that we're losing all of this linguistic diversity, all of this cultural diversity because it is human heritage. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Lawrence S. Krieger, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2004. So one possibility for bilinguals would be that they just have two different minds inside - right? And dead languages never change, and some of us might prefer those. VEDANTAM: I understand there's been some work looking at children and that children who speak certain languages are actually quicker to identify gender and their own gender than children who are learning other languages in other cultures. You can find all Hidden Brain episodes on our website. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: (Speaking foreign language). In the final episode of our Relationships 2.0 series, psychologistHarry Reis says theres another ingredient to successful relationships thats every bit as important as love. Lots of languages make a distinction between things that are accidents and things that are intentional actions. BORODITSKY: My family is Jewish, and we left as refugees. And what we find is that if you teach people that forks go with men grammatically in a language, they start to think of forks as being more masculine. and pick the featured episodes for your show. BORODITSKY: And Russian is a language that has grammatical gender, and different days of the week have different genders for some reason. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. ), Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, 2004. So even if I'm speaking English, the distinctions that I've learned in speaking Russian, for example, are still active in my mind to some extent, but they're more active if I'm actually speaking Russian. So if the word for death was masculine in your language, you were likely to paint death as a man. Growing up, I understood this word to mean for a very short time, as in John McWhorter was momentarily surprised.
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