How the language you speak changes how you see the world | Lera Boroditsky

If you show people a bunch of colors, hues that are changing slowly from light blue to dark blue, in the brains of people who call those colors by categorically different names, there's this surprise marker that goes off as you switch from categorically

light blue to categorically dark blue. Whereas for English speakers, that surprise marker never goes off because they're all just blue. And so even very early on, the brain treats those colors as being categorically different. It goes, " wait, something has importantly shifted." But only if you speak that

shifted." But only if you speak that language that distinguishes those two by different words. Lera Boroditsky, welcome to How the Light Gets In. Thank you so much for having me.

the Light Gets In. Thank you so much for having me. Lera, your research within cognitive science and linguistic studies has transformed our understanding of thought. How does language affect culture? well, language can shape thought in lots of ways. in my own work, I

lots of ways. in my own work, I focused on how language shapes the fundamentals of thought. So basic things like how we organize space, time, how we process color, how we think about events. And what we find is even at these very, very basic levels, the

these very, very basic levels, the building blocks of cognition, language can have a really profound effect on how we put the world together in our minds. So within linguistic relativity, has been dismissed before and revived in

certain areas? what do you think earlier researchers got wrong in their methods compared to yours now? Yeah, so there was a strong idea coming out of Chomskyan linguistics that languages didn't substantially differ

from one another at the core. now no one had discovered what that core is. It was a hypothetical core. but it was just a claim. The claim was languages don't fundamentally differ. And so if your claim is that languages don't fundamentally differ, it doesn't even make sense to ask whether

even make sense to ask whether different lang- speakers of different languages will think differently. But, the more linguists went out into the field and studied in detail different languages, the more really striking differences between languages they uncovered. And so then, it no

they uncovered. And so then, it no longer became the question of do languages differ? It was very clear that they do. And then, you could start asking the question of how do those differences reflect in thinking? There is another part of skepticism, which is cognition something that's

which is cognition something that's malleable? So, it's one thing that languages differ, but if thinking can't be changed, then it doesn't matter if languages differ. Speakers of all languages will think the same. But then, decades and decades of research in cognitive psychology showed

research in cognitive psychology showed how malleable cognition is and how flexible it is. So, once you have those two puzzle pieces, languages really differ and cognition is really malleable, you put those together, that creates an environment where you can find these incredibly profound

find these incredibly profound differences between speakers of different languages. And within your own research and your own experiments, how did you go about designing those experiments? , I'm trained as a cognitive psychologist, so I started by

designing the most classic kinds of basic experiments that you would do just to study cognition. So, test people's memory or test people's ability to make categories, test how quickly people can solve a problem. Really basic designs. And I think that was part of the success

And I think that was part of the success of the research program that I pursued because in the past, a lot of claims had come either from anthropologists or from linguists. And so, they came back with data that looked like field reports. And psychologists, ,

reports. And psychologists, , every field has their own standards for what they count as evidence, and psychologists would look at those field reports and say, "Well, these are just stories. It's like your travel journal. It's not really data." And because I was doing things that seemed so traditional as cognitive psychology, but I wasn't

as cognitive psychology, but I wasn't just testing American undergraduates. I was also testing people who lived in all kinds of locations around the world, that became data that people could really believe and take seriously and say, " , well, the methodology is very familiar. It's very sound. This is a controlled experiment. They've made

controlled experiment. They've made proper measurements, but now we have to really take it seriously." So, that really changed how the field treated the idea. And within those experiments, I know you talk about memory and intention and how that differs between languages. Can you walk me through those