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| Language and How You Think |
All humans communicate through a language, either vocally or
through sign. Over the past sixty to seventy years, researchers have been
studying what our brains actually do with spoken words. A recent study found
that the sounds of languages are identified in the brain in much smaller scale
than features. Dr. Edward Chang and his peers at the University of California,
San Francisco and Berkeley unraveled a bit of the mystery. “It’s about how
small or microscopic neural responses can be recorded” Scientists Map Your Brain. In the process of watching the
brain listen to sounds in English, they were able to measure in more finite
terms how the superior temporal gyrus translates “auditory signals into
something the brain ‘hears’” by putting electrodes directly onto the
participants' brains Scientists Map Your Brain.
Learning what and how the brain hears may
have tremendous effect on what and how we think the world over. Benjamin Lee
Whorf's infamous notions in his 1940 article said "that talking is merely
an incidental process concerned strictly with communication, not with
formulation of ideas” Science and Linguistics. As we grow, humans become
unconscious of what Whorf calls natural logic due to the confines of their
language. Each language creates a parameter of sorts with how we think, not
just how we hear. “Talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to
“express” what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically. Formulation
is an independent process, called thought or thinking, and is supposed to be
largely indifferent to the nature of particular languages” Science and Linguistics.
Language confines the natural space of a
culture according to Whorf. If we were to really analyze the language of Native
American tribes or African groups we would see that their form of communication
and grammatical sense varies tremendously. This led Whorf to the idea that we
do not all think alike. It is the language and the structure of sounds and
words that formulate our thoughts. “The Hopi actually call insect, airplane,
and aviator all by the same word, and feel no difficulty about it” Science and Linguistics.
Whorf was eventually debunked as there was
no factual evidence to support his claims. The New York Times Magazine in 2010 revisited the ideas Whorf
wrote about and stated that the question remains how we actually do view life
with our separate languages. “The renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out
a crucial fact about differences between languages…‘Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” Language and How You Think.
How we say what we think may influence us
perhaps to pay attention to specific details in one language over another. For
example, “When I speak English, I may say about a bed that ‘it’ is too soft,
but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel ‘she’ is too soft. ‘She stays
feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when
she reaches the tip of the tongue” Language and How You Think. Perhaps one day soon we will be able to put it all together and be able to communicate no matter the language!
