edit transcripts, Improve the presence of your podcasts, e.g., self-service, If you share your Listen Notes page and at-mention. But also, I started wondering, is it possible that my friend here was imagining a person without a gender for this whole time that we've been talking about them, right? So there are these wonderful studies by Alexander Giora where he asked kids learning Finnish, English and Hebrew as their first languages basically, are you a boy or a girl? This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. 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? And as soon as I saw that happen, I thought, oh, this makes it so much easier. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking foreign language). But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, by Amy Edmondson, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999. And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused. LERA BORODITSKY: The categorization that language provides to you becomes real - becomes psychologically real. That hadn't started then. Lera is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. 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. Language was talk. And then he would take a Polaroid of the kid and say, well, this is you. If you take literally in what we can think of as its earliest meaning, the earliest meaning known to us is by the letter. 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. You-uh (ph). But she told me a story about a conversation she had with a native speaker of Indonesian. 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. Hidden Brain Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. 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 they said, well, of course. Transcript 585: In Defense of Ignorance Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. 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. Copyright 2023 Steno. So we did an analysis of images in Artstor. al, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004. Well, that's an incredibly large set of things, so that's a very broad effect of language. Today's episode was the first in our You 2.0 series, which runs all this month. Who Do You Want To Be? - Hidden Brain (pdcast) | Listen Notes Long before she began researching languages as a professor, foreign languages loomed large in her life. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. VEDANTAM: How the languages we speak shape the way we think and why the words we use are always in flux. BORODITSKY: Well, there may not be a word for left to refer to a left leg. If a transcript is available, youll see a Transcript button which expands to reveal the full transcript. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. And so I was trying to keep track of which way is which. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:This is HIDDEN BRAIN. You also see huge differences in other domains like number. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. 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. something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. 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. Parents and peers influence our major life choices, but they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. 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. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Stay with us. 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. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. GEACONE-CRUZ: And you're at home in your pajamas, all nice and cuddly and maybe watching Netflix or something. I know-uh (ph) is there, or something along the lines of babe-uh (ph). VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? Whats going on here? (LAUGHTER) VEDANTAM: In the English-speaking world, she goes by Lera Boroditsky. Or feel like you and your spouse sometimes speak different languages? MCWHORTER: Those are called contronyms, and literally has become a new contronym. For more on decision-making, check out our episode on how to make wiser choices. They're more likely to say, well, it's a formal property of the language. 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. Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? 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. Imagine how we would sound to them if they could hear us. I just don't want to do it. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. 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. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: (Speaking German). 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. You can find all Hidden Brain episodes on our website. What a cynical thing to say, but that doesn't mean that it might not be true. Hidden Brain: The Easiest Person to Fool on Apple Podcasts There are many scholars who would say, look, yes, you do see small differences between speakers of different languages, but these differences are not really significant; they're really small. Relationships 2.0: What Makes Relationships Thrive | Hidden Brain Media Persuasion: Part 1 - Transcripts 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. ADAM COLE, BYLINE: (Singing) You put your southwest leg in, and you shake it all about. BORODITSKY: Yeah, that's true. Interpersonal Chemistry: What Is It, How Does It Emerge, and How Does it Operate? How To Breathe Correctly For Optimal Health, Mood, Learning That's how much cultural heritage is lost. But if I give that same story to a Hebrew or an Arabic speaker, they would organize it from right to left. They're more likely to see through this little game that language has played on them. Something new will have started by then, just like if we listen to people in 1971, they sound odd in that they don't say like as much as we do. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, by Jamil Zaki, Niall Bolger, Kevin Ochsner, Psychological Science, 2008. If you're bilingual or multilingual, you may have noticed that different languages make you stretch in different ways. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. 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. In a lot of languages, there isn't. Look at it. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? 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. . And dead languages never change, and some of us might prefer those. 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. HIDDEN BRAIN < Lost in Translation: January 29, 20189:00 PM ET VEDANTAM: Well, that's kind of you, Lera. And you can just - it rolls off the tongue, and you can just throw it out. So in terms of the size of differences, there are certainly effects that are really, really big. 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. And it sounds a little bit abrupt and grabby like you're going to get something instead of being given. 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. And so for me, that question was born in that conversation of are there some languages where it's easier to imagine a person without their characteristics of gender filled in? Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. This is NPR. 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. That is exactly why you should say fewer books instead of less books in some situations and, yes, Billy and I went to the store rather than the perfectly natural Billy and me went to the store. 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. BORODITSKY: The way to say my name properly in Russian is (speaking foreign language), so I don't make people say that. Hidden Brain : NPR When the con was exposed, its victims defended the con artists. And if they were facing east, they would make the cards come toward them, toward the body. 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. And you can even teach people to have a little bit of fun with the artifice. Hidden Brain - Transcripts But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? 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. 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. MCWHORTER: Thank you for having me, Shankar. So if the word for death was masculine in your language, you were likely to paint death as a man. But, if you dig a little deeper, you may find that they share much more: they might make the same amount of money as you, or share the, We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. BORODITSKY: I spoke really terrible Indonesian at the time, so I was trying to practice. Watch Your Mouth | Hidden Brain : NPR 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 But what we should teach is not that the good way is logical and the way that you're comfortable doing it is illogical. So for example, if Sam grabbed a hammer and struck the flute in anger, that would be one description, like, Sam broke the flute. It turns out, as you point out, that in common usage, literally literally means the opposite of literally. JERRY SEINFELD: (As Jerry Seinfeld) The second button literally makes or breaks the shirt. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. podcast pages. : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Shelly. That kind of detail may not appear. 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. There are different ways to be a psychologist. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. Laughter: The Best Medicine | Hidden Brain : NPR 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. So it's easy to think, oh, I could imagine someone without thinking explicitly about what they're wearing. Later things are on the right. So that's a measurement difference of 100 percent of performance. 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. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. Now I can stay oriented. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). So in English, I might say that Sam (ph) broke the flute. Additional Resources Book: A brief history of relationship research in social psychology, by Harry T. Reis, in Handbook of the History of Social Psychology, 2011. 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. 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. Whats going on here? MCWHORTER: Yeah. 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. 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. And, I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that. 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. So act like Monday. 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. So the way you say hi in Kuuk Thaayorre is to say, which way are you heading? ), Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, 2004. What Makes Lawyers Happy? Hidden Brain Not without written permission. I had this cool experience when I was there. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) If you're so upset about it, maybe you can think of a way to help her. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. Because it was. 585: In Defense of Ignorance - This American Life And what he noticed was that when people were trying to act like Monday, they would act like a man. I think that it's better to think of language as a parade that either you're watching, or frankly, that you're in, especially because the people are never going to stand still. Now, in a lot of languages, you can't say that because unless you were crazy, and you went out looking to break your arm, and you succeeded - 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. In The Air We Breathe . If you still cant find the episode, try looking through our most recent shows on our homepage. So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. So for example, English speakers, because they're very likely to say, he did it or someone did it, they are very good at remembering who did it, even if it's an accident. Bu The fun example I give my students is imagine playing the hokey pokey in a language like this. Perceived Responses to Capitalization Attempts are Influenced by Self-Esteem and Relationship Threat, by Shannon M. Smith & Harry Reis, Personal Relationships, 2012. But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? We love the idea of Hidden Brain helping to spark discussions in your community. In many languages, nouns are gendered. You're not going to do trigonometry. But if you prefer life - the unpredictability of life - then living language in many ways are much more fun. It might irritate you slightly to hear somebody say something like, I need less books instead of fewer books. Transcript Podcast: Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. And then question 21 was, is this person a man or a woman? 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.