The Power of Causality

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There's so many different ways that language allows you to construe or describe any good given event. So for example, let me give you a famous accident when Dick Cheney went out hunting with his buddy Harry Whittington and shot him accidentally in the face. In that description, Cheney transforms from agent to mere witness by the end of the sentence. This is a masterful ex-calcation. Bush actually did one better. He said something like he heard a bird flush and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded.

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.

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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.

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