Welcome to Sentivia

Okay, so let me tell you a little bit about who I am, or rather, what I do. I'm someone deeply fascinated by the magic of human communication. I'm constantly marveling at this incredible ability we have to transmit complex ideas using something as seemingly simple as sounds coming out of our mouths. It's truly a marvel that the puffs of air I'm creating right now, these hisses and tones, are somehow making their way to your eardrums, being interpreted by your brains, and, hopefully, turning into the same thoughts I'm having. That's just wild!

This ability, language, is what allows us to share knowledge and even plant completely novel ideas in each other's minds. I mean, I can say something like, "imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while pondering quantum mechanics" and boom! Suddenly that's a thought that exists in your head, perhaps for the very first time. It's remarkable.

Of course, what's also fascinating is that this process isn't uniform across the globe. There aren't just one set of sounds and structures we use to form thoughts, no, there are over 7000 languages in the world. These languages differ in sounds, vocabulary and, crucially, in their *structure*. This leads to the question I spend a lot of time thinking about: does the language we speak actually shape how we think?

Now, this isn't a new question. People have been pondering this for centuries. We see evidence of this speculation throughout history. Charlemagne, for example, believed that a second language meant a second soul, suggesting language shapes our reality. However, we also have Shakespeare, who, through Juliet, suggested that a rose would smell just as sweet, regardless of the name it's given, implying language doesn’t change anything about how we see the world. These ideas have been debated for millennia, but it's only recently, through research happening in my lab and others around the world, that we’ve been able to collect actual data to try to answer this. And let me tell you, some of the findings have been extraordinary.

One of my favorite examples is from my work with the Kuuk Thaayorre people of Australia. What’s so interesting about them is that they don't use words like "left" or "right," they use cardinal directions – north, south, east and west for *everything*. I mean absolutely everything. You might hear them say, "There's an ant on your southwest leg," or "move your cup north-northeast a bit." When they greet each other, they even ask, "Which way are you going?" It’s pretty incredible. This is ingrained in their communication and their thinking. If you literally can't get past saying hello without having to report your heading, it’s going to orient you pretty quickly. Turns out they stay oriented much better than we give humans credit for. We used to chalk it up to biology, saying we lack the magnetic capabilities other animals have, but it's not that, it’s that if language and culture train you to, you can absolutely do it.

To show just how different this is, I asked you all to close your eyes for a moment and point southeast. And as I looked around, well, let's just say accuracy wasn't very high. It's fascinating, one group of people – an intelligent group like yourselves, I might add – have difficulty pointing in cardinal directions while in other cultures I could ask a five-year old and they’d know with ease. This huge difference in cognitive ability is directly impacted by our language.

That’s just the beginning, there are differences in how people think about time, as well. We looked at how people organize the concept of time. English speakers often go from left to right when thinking about time, while Hebrew and Arabic speakers often go from right to left, likely based on the direction of their writing system. But the Kuuk Thaayorre again, do it differently. Their concept of time is not tied to the body but to the landscape. When facing south, they lay time out left to right. When facing north, right to left. And when they face east, time comes toward them. For them, time is locked on the east to west path of the sun. It's this really wild difference, right? For me, time chases me around, going one direction when I face one way and another direction when I turn another. It is incredibly egocentric but for them, time is fixed to the landscape.

There’s also the linguistic trick of numbers. We learned as kids to count; you use a list of words to describe the quantity of something. You learn that one, two, three, and the final number is the total. Not all languages work like that. Some lack exact number words like “seven” or “eight,” these people don’t count, and actually struggle to track precise quantities. If I ask them to match a group of penguins to an equal group of ducks, they can’t do it. That linguistic tool of numbers that we have is quite essential for doing math and understanding the world around us.

Even when we get to something as basic as color, language is involved. We have languages with lots of words for color and languages with only a few like, “light” and “dark”. Even languages that do have words for colors divide up the color spectrum differently. For example, in English, we have one word for “blue”, but in Russian, there are two: “goluboy” (light blue) and “siniy” (dark blue). This difference has a tangible effect. Russian speakers can actually identify these light and dark blues faster than English speakers, and when looking at colors shifting between light and dark blue, the brains of Russian speakers give a reaction as if something new had occurred.

Languages also have grammatical gender, another fascinating area of difference. In many languages, nouns get gendered, either as masculine or feminine. Take the sun. It’s feminine in German, but masculine in Spanish. Same with the moon, the reverse. It turns out this has real consequences for how people think. If I ask German and Spanish speakers to describe a bridge – a word that is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish – they tend to describe the bridge with words that align with the gender of the word in their language. Germans might say a bridge is “beautiful” and “elegant” while Spanish speakers might say it’s “strong” and “long”, reflecting the gender of the word in their language.

Even how we describe events differs between languages. Think about an accident where someone broke a vase. In English we say “He broke the vase”, putting agency in the person. In Spanish, however, someone might say “The vase broke”, or “The vase broke itself”. This is far less focused on the individual and more on the action of the object. In English it’s even strange that we can say “I broke my arm” like it was some action we chose when we very obviously just hurt ourselves. This affects how we remember things. If an English speaker saw an accident, they would likely remember who did the breaking, since it's built into the language. The Spanish speaker would be more focused on the fact that it was an accident and that is very important to remember, because it isn't as easy to do in their language. What's really fascinating is that even if I showed you all the same video of a vase breaking and told you "he broke the vase" you would likely assign more blame to him than if I just said "the vase broke". It’s as if language is shaping how we think about responsibility and punishment.

So, language influences our thinking in profound ways, from how we perceive space and time to how we think about color, number, gender and even something as emotionally charged as blame and responsibility. These aren't isolated quirks, they are a fundamental part of how we organize and understand the world.

It highlights just how incredibly diverse the human mind is. We haven't created just one way of thinking, but 7,000. It's incredible, the vast array of cognitive universes we have created. It also means we can create so many more, given that language is a living thing, always changing and adjusting to meet our needs.

The tragic part of all of this is that we’re losing this linguistic diversity. It is estimated we are losing about one language a week and will lose half of the world’s languages within the next 100 years. It’s made worse by the fact that most studies are done on American English speaking undergraduates, which provides a really narrow and biased look at the human mind. We have to do better science.

The point I want to leave you with is that I’m not talking about how people elsewhere think but how *you* think. It's the language *you* speak that is shaping the way you understand the world. And this gives you the opportunity to ask, "Why do I think the way that I do?" "How could I think differently?" And perhaps more importantly, "What thoughts do I wish to create?".