The Challenge of Understanding the Human Mind

6min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The decimal positional system that we use now for representing numbers came to Europe in the 1700s with Fibonacci, right? So he takes it from the Arab world, which took it from India. There are lots of languages that don't have exact number words or have words that are just one, two, three, few and many. And some people, for example, there's a group in Papua New Guinea that has a base 27 that just starts with the fingers on one hand and goes across the top of your body.

What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.