If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. And so, for example, can I get a hamburger? 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. So for example, for English speakers - people who read from left to right - time tends to flow from left to right. All rights reserved. ), The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures, 2018. 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. The fact is that language change can always go in one of many directions, there's a chance element to it. And I was telling this person about someone I knew back in America. It takes, GEACONE-CRUZ: It's this phrase that describes something between I can't be, bothered or I don't want to do it or I recognize the incredible effort that goes into. And as soon as I saw that happen, I thought, oh, this makes it so much easier. Official Website Airs on: SUN 7pm-8pm 55:27 Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button Feb 27 Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. He's a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the book "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". - you would have to say something like, my arm got broken, or it so happened to me that my arm is broken. : 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. It's too high. If I give you a bunch of pictures to lay out and say this is telling you some kind of story and you - and they're disorganized, when an English speaker organizes those pictures, they'll organize them from left to right. So it's mendokusai. So it's, VEDANTAM: The moment she heard it, Jennifer realized mendokusai was incredibly. Whats going on here? Follow on Apple, Google or Spotify. And there are all kinds of interesting, useful, eye-opening ideas that exist in all of the world's languages. That's what it's all about. . BORODITSKY: So quite literally, to get past hello, you have to know which way you're heading. Hidden Brain explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world. And that is an example of a simple feature of language - number words - acting as a transformative stepping stone to a whole domain of knowledge. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. al (Eds. What a cynical thing to say, but that doesn't mean that it might not be true. VEDANTAM: Languages seem to have different ways of communicating agency. And, I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that. It's never happened. We love the idea of Hidden Brain helping to spark discussions in your community. So I think it's something that is quite easy for humans to learn if you just have a reason to want to do it. So to give you a very quick wrap-up is that some effects are big, but even when effects aren't big, they can be interesting or important for other reasons - either because they are very broad or because they apply to things that we think are really important in our culture. GEACONE-CRUZ: And you're at home in your pajamas, all nice and cuddly and maybe watching Netflix or something. VEDANTAM: Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 00:51:58 - We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button VEDANTAM: I'm Shankar Vedantam. VEDANTAM: As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang. And what he noticed was that when people were trying to act like Monday, they would act like a man. 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. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. Researcher Elizabeth Dunn helps us map out the unexpected ways we can find joy and happiness in our everyday lives. It's not necessarily may I please have, but may I have, I'll have, but not can I get a. I find it just vulgar for reasons that as you can see I can't even do what I would call defending. If it is the first time you login, a new account will be created automatically. Happiness 2.0: The Only Way Out Is Through. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. MCWHORTER: Exactly. And nobody wishes that we hadn't developed our modern languages today from the ancient versions. But I find that people now usually use the word to mean very soon, as in we're going to board the plane momentarily. You may link to our content and copy and paste episode descriptions and Additional Resources into your invitations. And it really is an illusion that what language is, is something that sits still. Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. Growing up, I understood this word to mean for a very short time, as in John McWhorter was momentarily surprised. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. He says that buying into false beliefs, in other words, deluding ourselves can . Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different leg. The size of this effect really quite surprised me because I would have thought at the outset that, you know, artists are these iconoclasts. Whats going on here? Refusing to Apologize can have Psychological Benefits, by Tyler Okimoto, Michael Wenzel and Kyli Hedrick, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2013. Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words so often seem to be on the move? You know, I was trying to stay oriented because people were treating me like I was pretty stupid for not being oriented, and that hurt. I think language can certainly be a contributor into the complex system of our thinking about gender. And we teach them, for example, to say that bridges and apples and all kinds of other things have the same prefix as women. That's how much cultural heritage is lost. It is a great, free way to engage the podcast community and increase the visibility of your podcasts. by Harry T. Reis, Annie Regan, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2021. If you still cant find the episode, try looking through our most recent shows on our homepage. LERA BORODITSKY: The categorization that language provides to you becomes real - becomes psychologically real. And so for example, if the word chair is masculine in your language, why is that? something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. This week, we revisit a favorite episode from 2021, bringing you two stories about how easy it can be to believe in a false reality even when the facts dont back us up. Updated privacy policy: We have made some changes to our Privacy Policy. : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, by Lawrence S. Krieger and Kennon M. Sheldon, George Washington Law Review, 2015. Everyone wants to be loved and appreciated. MCWHORTER: Yes, Shankar, that's exactly it. 437 Episodes Produced by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Website. And so somebody will say, well, who was it who you thought was going to give you this present? Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Our team includes Laura Kwerel, Adhiti Bandlamudi and our supervising producer Tara Boyle. They're supposed to be painting something very personal. Lera is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. See you next week. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, What Do You Do When Things Go Right? And it's sad that we're not going to be able to make use of them and learn them and celebrate them. In many languages, nouns are gendered. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. Newer episodes are unlikely to have a transcript as it takes us a few weeks to process and edit each transcript. VEDANTAM: I understand that if you're in a picnic with someone from this community and you notice an ant climbing up someone's left leg, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to tell that person, look, there's an ant on your left leg. You can't smell or taste time. So LOL was an internet abbreviation meaning laugh out loud or laughing out loud, but LOL in common usage today doesn't necessarily mean hysterical laughter. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page, sponsorship opportunities on Hidden Brain. Lots of languages make a distinction between things that are accidents and things that are intentional actions. And all of a sudden, I noticed that there was a new window that had popped up in my mind, and it was like a little bird's-eye view of the landscape that I was walking through, and I was a little red dot that was moving across the landscape. So there are these wonderful studies by Alexander Giora where he asked kids learning Finnish, English and Hebrew as their first languages basically, are you a boy or a girl? L. Gable, et. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking foreign language). So you can think about an un-gendered person in the same way that I might think about a person without a specific age or specific height or specific color shirt. I'm Shankar Vedantam. It's as if you saw a person - I'm not going to say at 4 because then the person is growing up, and if I use that analogy then it seems like I'm saying that language grows up or it moves toward something or it develops. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. Learn more. And as odd as that sounds, I can guarantee you if you watch any TV show with women under a certain age or if you just go out on an American street and listen, you'll find that that's a new kind of exclamatory particle. BORODITSKY: Yeah, that's true. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values. Each language comprises the ideas that have been worked out in a culture over thousands of generations, and that is an incredible amount of cultural heritage and complexity of thought that disappears whenever a language dies. So you may start with moving your southwest leg in, but then you have to move your northeast leg out. And I would really guess that in a few decades men will be doing it, too. BORODITSKY: Well, there may not be a word for left to refer to a left leg. We convince a colleague to take a different tactic at work. Please note that your continued use of the RadioPublic services following the posting of such changes will be deemed an acceptance of this update. Stay with us. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. But if you seed a watermelon, nobody assumes that you're taking seeds and putting them in the watermelon, you're taking them out. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy. Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-being: The Self-Concordance Model, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Andrew J. Elliot, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999. How come you aren't exactly the way you were 10 years ago? You can find all Hidden Brain episodes on our website. I'm Shankar Vedantam. So the word for the is different for women than for men, and it's also different for forks versus spoons and things like that. We'll also look at how languages evolve, and why we're sometimes resistant to those changes. Well, if you have a word like that and if it's an intensifier of that kind, you can almost guess that literally is going to come to mean something more like just really. This week on Hidden Brain, we revisit a favorite episode exploring what this culture means Jesse always wanted to fall in love. SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:This is HIDDEN BRAIN. We post open positions (including internships) on our jobs page. 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? It's not something that you typically go out trying to do intentionally. VEDANTAM: I love this analogy you have in the book where you mention how, you know, thinking that a word has only one meaning is like looking at a snapshot taken at one point in a person's life and saying this photograph represents the entirety of what this person looks like. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. You would never know, for example, that - give you an example I've actually been thinking about. If a transcript is available, youll see a Transcript button which expands to reveal the full transcript. But actually, that's exactly how people in those communities come to stay oriented - is that they learn it, (laughter) right? In the final episode of our Relationships 2.0 series, psychologistHarry Reis says theres another ingredient to successful relationships thats every bit as important as love. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). And so even though I insist that there is no scientific basis for rejecting some new word or some new meaning or some new construction, I certainly have my visceral biases. MCWHORTER: Oh, yeah, I'm a human being. What Do You Do When Things Go Right? I think it's a really fascinating question for future research. 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. You would give a different description to mark that it was not intentional. Parents and peers influence our major life choices, but they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. I've always found that a very grating way to ask for something at a store. to describe the world. But what I am thinking is, you should realize that even if you don't like it, there's nothing wrong with it in the long run because, for example, Jonathan Swift didn't like it that people were saying kissed instead of kiss-ed (ph) and rebuked instead of rebuk-ed (ph). Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. 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. Could this affect the way, you know, sexism, conscious or unconscious, operates in our world? 00:55:27 Hidden Brain Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button And so he suggested it might be the case that the arbitrarily assigned grammatical genders are actually changing the way people think about these days of the week and maybe all kinds of other things that are named by nouns. Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at Hidden Brain telling the stories of . But if you ask bilinguals, who have learned two languages and now they know that some genders disagree across the two languages, they're much less likely to say that it's because chairs are intrinsically masculine. Does a speaker of a language, like Spanish, who has to assign gender to so many things, end up seeing the world as more gendered? What we think of today as a word undergoing some odd development or people using some new construction is exactly how Latin turned into French. VEDANTAM: So this begs the question, if you were to put languages on something of a spectrum, where you have, you know, languages like Spanish or Hindi where nouns are gendered and languages like English where many nouns are not gendered but pronouns are gendered, and on the other end of the spectrum, you have languages like Finnish or Persian where you can have a conversation about someone without actually mentioning their gender, it would seem surprising if this did not translate, at some level, into the way people thought about gender in their daily activities, in terms of thinking about maybe even who can do what in the workplace. And they asked me all kinds of questions about them. When language was like that, of course it changed a lot - fast - because once you said it, it was gone. This is NPR. So for example, English speakers, because they're very likely to say, he did it or someone did it, they are very good at remembering who did it, even if it's an accident. Transcript The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. FDA blocks human trials for Neuralink brain implants. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: (Speaking Russian). It seems kind of elliptical, like, would it be possible that I obtained? We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. Not without written permission. edit transcripts, Improve the presence of your podcasts, e.g., self-service, If you share your Listen Notes page and at-mention. BORODITSKY: Well, you would be at sea at first. But might we allow that there's probably a part of all human beings that wants to look down on somebody else. VEDANTAM: It took just one week of living in Japan for Jennifer to pick up an important, VEDANTAM: There isn't a straightforward translation of this phrase in English. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. But the reason that it seems so elusive is because we don't really think about the, quote, unquote, "meaning" of things like our conversation-easing laughter. al, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004. I said, you know, this weird thing happened. Later things are on the right. GEACONE-CRUZ: It's a Sunday afternoon, and it's raining outside. VEDANTAM: If you're bilingual or you're learning a new language, you get what Jennifer, experienced - the joy of discovering a phrase that helps you perfectly encapsulate a. feeling or an experience. 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. He's a defender of language on the move, but I wanted to know if there were things that irritated even him. This is Hidden Brain. Course Hero is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university.