VEDANTAM: It took just one week of living in Japan for Jennifer to pick up an important new term. I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's how we think about anything that's abstract, that's beyond our physical senses. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words so often seem to be on the move? When the con was exposed, its victims defended the con artists. That is the most random thing. And so what that means is if someone was sitting facing south, they would lay out the story from left to right. We don't want to be like that. You may also use the Hidden Brain name in invitations sent to a small group of personal contacts for such purposes as a listening club or discussion forum. You're not going to do any of the things that are seen as a foundation of our technological society. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Speaking foreign language). UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Speaking foreign language). But actually, it's something that's not so hard to learn. 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. And a girl goes in this pile. So that's a measurement difference of 100 percent of performance. They shape our place in it. Languages are not just tools. So what happens is that once literally comes to feel like it means really, people start using it in figurative constructions such as I was literally dying of thirst. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. If you are a podcaster, the best way to manage your podcasts on Listen Notes is by claiming your Listen Notes You know, endings are going to tend to drop off. Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. Take the word bridge - if it's feminine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are beautiful and elegant. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. So we did an analysis of images in Artstor. When we come back, we dig further into the way that gender works in different languages and the pervasive effects that words can play in our lives. According to neuroscientists who study laughter, it turns out that chuckles and giggles often aren't a response to humorthey're a response to people. We love the idea of Hidden Brain helping to spark discussions in your community. 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. 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, if Sam grabbed a hammer and struck the flute in anger, that would be one description, like, Sam broke the flute. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. MCWHORTER: Yeah, I really do. Or feel like you and your spouse sometimes speak different languages? Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. BORODITSKY: Well, I think it's a terrible tragedy. VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? And I thought, wow, first of all, it would be almost impossible to have a conversation like that in English where you hadn't already revealed the gender of the person because you have to use he or she. al (Eds. 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. Hidden Brain Claim By Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Podcasts RSS Web PODCAST SEARCH EPISODES COMMUNITY PODCASTER EDIT SHARE Listen Score LS 84 Global Rank TOP 0.01% ABOUT THIS PODCAST Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking foreign language). So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. Which I think is probably important with the reality that this edifice that you're teaching is constantly crumbling. And if it was feminine, then you're likely to paint death as a woman. 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. The size of this effect really quite surprised me because I would have thought at the outset that, you know, artists are these iconoclasts. All of these are very subjective things. In this favorite 2021 episode, psychologistAdam Grantpushes back against the benefits of certainty, and describes the magic that unfolds when we challenge our own deeply-held beliefs. And the answer should be, north, northeast in the far distance; how about you? GEACONE-CRUZ: And you're at home in your pajamas, all nice and cuddly and maybe, watching Netflix or something. So new words are as likely to evolve as old ones. native tongue without even thinking about it. That's because change is hard. GEACONE-CRUZ: It's a Sunday afternoon, and it's raining outside. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? And one thing that we've noticed is that around the world, people rely on space to organize time. We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more el, When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. BORODITSKY: One thing that we've noticed is this idea of time, of course, is very highly constructed by our minds and our brains. My big fat greek wedding, an american woman of greek ancestry falls in love with a very vanilla, american man. That is the direction of writing in Hebrew and Arabic, going from right to left. Hidden Brain Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Science 4.6 36K Ratings; Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. 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. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. In this favorite episode from 2021, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isnt something to be found its something we can develop from within. VEDANTAM: Lera now tries to understand languages spoken all over the world. You're not going to do trigonometry. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. This is HIDDEN BRAIN. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. It's never happened. There was no such thing as looking up what it originally meant. If you're like most people, you probably abandoned those resolutions within a few weeks. 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? I'm shankar Vedantam in the 2002 rom com. But can you imagine someone without imagining their gender? 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. And it ended up becoming less a direct reflection of hearty laughter than an indication of the kind of almost subconscious laughter that we do in any kind of conversation that's meant as friendly. And you say that dictionaries in some ways paint an unrealistic portrait of a language. And if people heard the sounds a little differently and produced them a little differently, if there were new meanings of words - very quickly whatever the original meaning was wouldn't be remembered. Lera is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. 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. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Everyone wants to be loved and appreciated. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. It might irritate you slightly to hear somebody say something like, I need less books instead of fewer books. The dictionary says both uses are correct. ROB LOWE: (As Chris Traeger) Dr. Harris, you are literally the meanest person I have ever met. We'd say, oh, well, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales or whatever. ADAM COLE, BYLINE: (Singing) You put your southwest leg in, and you shake it all about. MCWHORTER: Oh, yeah, I'm a human being. This week, we continue our look at the science of influence with psychologist Robert Cialdini, and explore how th, We all exert pressure on each other in ways small and profound. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. Physicist Richard Feynman once said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." One way we fool ourselves is by imagining we know more than we do; we think we are experts. JENNIFER GEACONE-CRUZ: My name is Jennifer Geacone-Cruz. BORODITSKY: Yeah. There's a lowlier part of our nature that grammar allows us to vent in the absence of other ways to do it that have not been available for some decades for a lot of us. : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, 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. We'll begin with police shootings of unarmed Black men. something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. 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. We post open positions (including internships) on our jobs page. In The Air We Breathe . And to our surprise, 78 percent of the time, we could predict the gender of the personification based on the grammatical gender of the noun in the artist's native language. Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, by Kennon M. Sheldon, 2022. : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. And so to address that question, what we do is we bring English speakers into the lab, and we teach them grammatical genders in a new language that we invent. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy. BORODITSKY: Actually, one of the first people to notice or suggest that this might be the case was a Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. Imagine you meet somebody, they're 39 and you take their picture. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. VEDANTAM: As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Speaking foreign language). Welcome to HIDDEN BRAIN. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button And maybe the convenience store or the shop is really not that far away. This is NPR. And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused. And if you teach them that forks go with women, they start to think that forks are more feminine. June 20, 2020 This week on Hidden Brain, research about prejudices so deeply buried, we often doubt their existence. Copyright 2018 NPR. We're speaking today with cognitive science professor Lera Boroditsky about language. 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. But things can be important not just because they're big. Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors, by Philip Tetlock, Psychology Review, 2002. If you dont see any jobs posted there, feel free to send your resume and cover letter to [emailprotected] and well keep your materials on hand for future openings on the show. The Effects of Conflict Types, Dimensions, and Emergent States on Group Outcomes, by Karen Jehn et. It's not something that you typically go out trying to do intentionally. VEDANTAM: I asked Lera how describing the word chair or the word bridge as masculine or feminine changes the way that speakers of different languages think about those concepts. They believe that their language reflects the true structure of the world. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Of course, eventually, the Finnish kids also figured it out because language isn't the only source of that information, otherwise it would be quite surprising for the Finns to be able to continue to reproduce themselves. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. You can't know, but you can certainly know that if could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd. But if you prefer life - the unpredictability of life - then living language in many ways are much more fun. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. VEDANTAM: The word chair is feminine in Italian. But what most people mean is that there'll be slang, that there'll be new words for new things and that some of those words will probably come from other languages. MCWHORTER: Yes, Shankar, that's exactly it. 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. BORODITSKY: Yeah. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. But she told me a story about a conversation she had with a native speaker of Indonesian. Lots of languages make a distinction between things that are accidents and things that are intentional actions. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. In the second episode of our "Relationships 2.0" series, psychologist Do you ever struggle to communicate with your mom? VEDANTAM: Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego.