There are hidden dangers in the field of brain research. For many years, the understanding of brain function was largely in the hands of native English-speaking scientists. Still, the results of their research are considered universal. However, recent research has gradually discovered that there are subtle cognitive differences in perception, memory, mathematics, and decision-making among people who speak different languages. This means that our assumptions about thinking may be inaccurate. Therefore, we need to further investigate the impact of different languages on brain function and re-examine our understanding of the human mind.
2023 Post Sprint A study** published in Trends in Cognitive Science by Oxford University professor Asifa Majid points out that we ignore languages other than English, which leads to a clear knowledge gap. She stressed that what happens in English cannot be considered representative of the whole world. Take, for example, the Piraon language spoken by the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon. They use an approximate counting system called:"1-2-mani"。As a result, they may not perform as well as people who speak other languages, such as English, because there are words with large numbers like 100 in English. The reason why we are able to think accurately about large numbers is because the numbers themselves allow us to think about them accurately. In other words, if you don't have a specific vocabulary in the language, concepts like 17 or 23 don't seem to exist.
This is because English is one of the most widely spoken languages in human history. Today, about one-sixth of the population speaks some form of English. However, there are more than 7,150 languages in existence, many of which express meaning in very different ways, including different levels of phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, and expression. When scientists use English to study how the human brain works, their expression is limited. Therefore, assumptions about concepts such as mind, knowledge, and cognition are based on the English definition of these concepts, and not necessarily on the understanding of these concepts in other languages and cultures. In addition, participants in cognitive research tend to have certain peculiarities, such as being from the West, educated, living in an industrialized society, relatively affluent, and enjoying democracy. However, such a description does not cover the majority of the world's population. Felix Ameka, a professor of ethnolinguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in Majid's research, said:"Academic research is biased like this.
Now you may ask:"How many senses do you have?The answer is definitely five. However, in cultures where West African languages are spoken, including Amika, there are at least nine senses. These senses include a sense of physical and social balance, a sense of perception of the world, and a sense of perception of bodily sensations. However, despite the universality of this knowledge in these cultures, it cannot penetrate the barriers that are considered scientific truths.
Take Kate Knibs, for example. In the past, it was believed that our perception of our surroundings was divided according to the hierarchy of biological senses: first sight, then hearing, touch, taste, and finally smell. However, Majid points out that this general hypothesis was formed on the basis of experimentation with the English language and its vocabulary. Majid's team investigated how participants in 20 different languages prioritized these senses and found that 13 differed from the English rankings. In the Malaysian semai and the Ecuadorian chapala, the sense of smell is ranked first.
Majid argues that everything from Plato to Steven Pinker agrees"It is impossible to describe the smell in words"This is the conventional wisdom. However, in a survey of 7,000 young people in Europe and the United States, half of those surveyed said they would rather lose their sense of smell than lose their phones or laptops. However, Majid's research shows that many languages are rich in olfactory vocabulary. Majid said:"Under experimental conditions, speakers of these languages were better at speaking new scents they first encountered than English or Dutch.
Visual signals show a similar trend. For example, Greek speakers have different representations of light blue and dark blue (cyan and teal) than English and German speakers. This means that they perceive the colors of the world slightly differently. Martin Meyer, a cognitive psychologist at the Humboldt University of Berlin, showed Greek and German speakers two sets of colors in an experiment: one was light blue and dark blue, and the other was light green and dark green. The results showed that Greek speakers were more likely to notice the difference between blue and green.
Greek speakers were slightly better at subtlety, but compared to German-speaking people, their attention to blue stimuli changed by 3-5%, which had a statistically significant effect. Martin Meyer said:"This suggests that language influences our perception at the most basic level"。Specifically, certain language categories may determine whether we notice or ignore something. He added:"We can classify without language, but using language can improve the speed and efficiency of classification.
Research has shown that these language differences affect the way people recall accidents. Spanish speakers often have more difficulty remembering who caused the accident than English speakers. This can have repercussions in court, especially in witness cases. It has been argued that linguistic nuances may influence people's assessment of liability and financial compensation. One study showed that when participants saw scenarios involving accidental fires and property damage, language speakers such as English believed that the plaintiff was more liable and tended to give the plaintiff a higher financial penalty.
Damian Blasi, a researcher in cognitive and linguistic diversity at Harvard University, said:"Grammatical structures ultimately affect our relationship with the world and the things we care about. Blasi is one of the co-authors of Majid, which focuses on English bias in cognitive science. "These differences are very subtle, but they are indicative of the brain adapting to the grammatical patterns of the language being used"。Similarly, recent studies have shown that deviations in English sentence structure can lead to the so-called"Proximate effects"。This refers to the tendency of people to recall the last element mentioned in the list when asked to recall it freely. However, for Japanese speakers, the first element in the list is easier to remember. This may be because in Japanese, the sentence is the case"head", that is, the most important content, usually at the end of the sentence. If the structure of a sentence determines how information is processed, it also seems to affect how information is stored, as Brage points out.
There is no consensus on the impact of language differences on the way people think. Ev Fedorenko, a neuroscience and language researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, believes that there is not enough evidence that there are differences in the neural structure of people who use different characteristic languages, which may mean that language does not affect the way of thinking. She is studying this question to see if language has a universally similar effect on the basic characteristics of the brain. Based on previous studies, the basic features of the brain's language system appear to be generally similar.
Language doesn't fundamentally change the way we think, it reflects the way we think. Fedorenko said that our thinking, whether it comes from our mind or any aspect of our culture, is reflected in our linguistic patterns. There are significant differences in what to prioritize across cultures. For example, if the sense of smell is more important in a person's culture, then he is more likely to find a way to express it in words. Fedorenko argues that research shows that the Piraha people do not have a language to accurately distinguish certain values, which may be an example of how culture influences the way they think, rather than the language itself. She argues that the Pirahan do not do so because it is not important to them to express these concepts.
The consensus among scholars is that in the future, it is necessary to focus on the areas in which all human beings have a common understanding and which aspects do not. Only in this way can it be determined whether language influences cognition, cognition influences language, or culture influences both. Majid said:We don't have enough basic research to solve this problem. I therefore propose to raise this issue again in another 20 years. In the future, scholars will need to find out which aspects of everyone's thinking are the same and which are different. In this way, they can understand whether language shapes the way we think, our thinking shapes our language, or both are culturally influenced. Currently, there is not enough basic research to give a definitive answer. Majid suggested asking again in another 20 years.
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