And I would really guess that in a few decades men will be doing it, too. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy thats all around us. That's because change is hard. My big fat greek wedding, an american woman of greek ancestry falls in love with a very vanilla, american man. For example, he might take a bunch of pictures of boys and girls and sort them and say, OK, this is a boy. BORODITSKY: And when they were trying to act like Wednesday, they would act like a woman BORODITSKY: Which accords with grammatical gender in Russian. We'll also look at how languages evolve, and why we're sometimes resistant to those changes. VEDANTAM: As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang. And MIT linguist Ken Hale, who's a renowned linguist, said that every time a language dies, it's the equivalent of a bomb being dropped on the Louvre. To request permission, please send an email to [emailprotected]. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Because were a small team, we dont have a publicly-available list of every piece of music that we use. : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, by Lawrence S. Krieger and Kennon M. Sheldon, George Washington Law Review, 2015. So I just think that it's something we need to check ourselves for. So you might say, there's an ant on your northwest leg. What techniques did that person use to persuade you? VEDANTAM: If you have teenagers or work closely with young people, chances are you'll be mystified by their conversations or even annoyed. 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. Whats going on here? Could this affect the way, you know, sexism, conscious or unconscious, operates in our world? Updated privacy policy: We have made some changes to our Privacy Policy. VEDANTAM: I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? Put this image on your website to promote the show -, Happiness 2.0: The Only Way Out Is Through, Report inappropriate content or request to remove this page. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. I just don't want to do it. How so? We always knew that certain species of animals had abilities to orient that we thought were better than human, and we always had some biological excuse for why we couldn't do it. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. How do you balance the imperative of teaching correct usage? BORODITSKY: The way to say my name properly in Russian is (speaking foreign language), so I don't make people say that. Newsletter: Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around. He's a defender of language on the move, but I wanted to know if there were things that irritated even him. If you take literally in what we can think of as its earliest meaning, the earliest meaning known to us is by the letter. 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. Language was talk. Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. They're supposed to be painting something very personal. And so I was trying to keep track of which way is which. All episodes of Hidden Brain - Chartable Hidden Brain Episodes Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. And if it was feminine, then you're likely to paint death as a woman. Newer episodes are unlikely to have a transcript as it takes us a few weeks to process and edit each transcript. We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. Cholera and malnourishment await Somalis fleeing . For more of our Relationships 2.0 series, check out one of our most popular episodes ever about why marriages are so hard. Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. There are different ways to be a psychologist. I decided it was very important for me to learn English because I had always been a very verbal kid, and I'd - was always the person who recited poems in front of the school and, you know, led assemblies and things like that. (Speaking Japanese). But, you know, John, something gnaws at me every time I hear the word used wrong. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. VEDANTAM: One of the things I found really interesting is that the evolution of words and language is constant. 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. BORODITSKY: One thing that we've noticed is this idea of time, of course, is very highly constructed by our minds and our brains. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? They're more likely to say, well, it's a formal property of the language. ), Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy, 2004. 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. VEDANTAM: (Laughter) All right, I think it might be time for me to confess one of my pet peeves. I said, you know, this weird thing happened. It's exactly how old English turned into modern English. It seems kind of elliptical, like, would it be possible that I obtained? Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. And they suggest that differences across languages do, in fact, predict some of these measures of gender equality across countries. MCWHORTER: Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, by Kennon M. Sheldon, 2022. How to Foster Perceived Partner Responsiveness: High-Quality LIstening is Key, by Guy Itzchakov, Harry Reis, and Netta Weinstein, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2021. We don't want to be like that. And after listening to you, I realize I might have to finally give in. So the question for us has been, how do we build these ideas? 437 Episodes Produced by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Website. Just saying hello was difficult. There was no way of transcribing an approximation of what people said and nobody would have thought of doing it. GEACONE-CRUZ: It describes this feeling so perfectly in such a wonderfully packaged, encapsulated way. Another possibility is that it's a fully integrated mind, and it just incorporates ideas and distinctions from both languages or from many languages if you speak more than two. Stay with us. That is the most random thing. And they said, well, of course. It is a great, free way to engage the podcast community and increase the visibility of your podcasts. Opening scene of Lady Bird Flight attendant Steven Slater slides from a plane after quitting Transcript Podcast: Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. It can be almost counterintuitive to listen to how much giggling and laughing you do in ordinary - actually rather plain exchanges with people. It's testament to the incredible ingenuity and complexity of the human mind that all of these different perspectives on the world have been invented. When she was 12, her family came to the United States from the Soviet Union. Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. What techniques did that person use to persuade you? 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. FEB 27, 2023; Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button . That's the way words are, too. 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. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. And, I mean, just in terms of even sounds changing and the way that you put words together changing bit by bit, and there's never been a language that didn't do that. This is HIDDEN BRAIN. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. 4.62. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #16: Not figuratively, it's literally MCWHORTER: Yeah. Copyright 2023 Steno. And I kind of sheepishly confessed this to someone there. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. BORODITSKY: Well, you would be at sea at first. You're not going to do any of the things that are seen as a foundation of our technological society. In the United States, we often praise people with strong convictions, and look down on those who express doubt or hesitation. MCWHORTER: Yes, Shankar, that's exactly it. 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. In the second episode of our "Relationships 2.0" series, psychologist Do you ever struggle to communicate with your mom? 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. June 20, 2020 This week on Hidden Brain, research about prejudices so deeply buried, we often doubt their existence. Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors, by Philip Tetlock, Psychology Review, 2002. Only a couple hundred languages - or if you want to be conservative about it, a hundred languages - are written in any real way and then there are 6,800 others. And a girl goes in this pile. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and you're listening to HIDDEN BRAIN. Well never sell your personal information. But it's a lovely example of how language can guide you to discover something about the world that might take you longer to discover if you didn't have that information in language. This is Hidden Brain. If you're bilingual or multilingual, you may have noticed that different languages make you stretch in different ways. 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Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. BORODITSKY: Yeah, that's true. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-being: The Self-Concordance Model, Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. MCWHORTER: Thank you for having me, Shankar. If you're like most people, you probably abandoned those resolutions within a few weeks. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. 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. Lera said there's still a lot of research to be done on this. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. If you're studying a new language, you might discover these phrases not in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Speaking foreign language). And what's cool about languages, like the languages spoken in Pormpuraaw, is that they don't use words like left and right, and instead, everything is placed in cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. I think it's a really fascinating question for future research. 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. Shankar Vedantam, host of the popular podcast "Hidden Brain" has been reporting on human behavior for decades. VEDANTAM: Around the world, we often hear that many languages are dying, and there are a few megalanguages that are growing and expanding in all kinds of ways. 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. But I find that people now usually use the word to mean very soon, as in we're going to board the plane momentarily. But what if there's a whole category of people in your life whose impact is overlooked? BORODITSKY: It's certainly possible. We can't help, as literate people, thinking that the real language is something that sits still with letters written all nice and pretty on a page that can exist for hundreds of years, but that's not what language has ever been. All of the likes and, like, literallies (ph) might sometimes grate on your nerves, but John McWhorter says the problem might be with you, not with the way other people speak. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Shelly. Transcript - How language shapes the way we think by Lera Boroditsky.docx, The Singapore Quality Award requires organisations to show outstanding results, The following lots of Commodity Z were available for sale during the year, b The authors identify 5 types of misinformation in the abstract but discuss 7, 17 Chow N Asian value and aged care Geriatr Gerontol Int 20044521 5 18 Chow NWS, Writing Results and Discussion Example.docx, A 6 month old infant weighing 15 lb is admitted with a diagnosis of dehydration, ng_Question_-_Assessment_1_-_Proposing_Evidence-Based_Change.doc, The Social Security checks the Government sends to grandmothers are considered A, 03 If a covered member participates on the clients attest engagement or is an, AURETR143 Student Assessment - Theory v1.1.docx. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page, sponsorship opportunities on Hidden Brain. You can't smell or taste time. 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. But time doesn't have to flow with respect to the body. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I'm willing to get involved. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. John is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. This week, we launch the first of a two-part mini-series on the scie, If you think about the people in your life, it's likely that they share a lot in common with you. Trusted by 5,200 companies and developers. The dictionary says both uses are correct. Maybe they like the same kinds of food, or enjoy the same hobbies. It is the very fabric, the very core of your experience. 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. 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. And so language changed just like the clouds in the sky. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button Transcript Speaker 1 00:00:00 this is hidden brain. They can be small differences but important in other ways. Are the spoken origins of language one reason that words so often seem to be on the move? Can I get some chicken? : A Data-Driven Prescription to Redefine Professional Success, Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. 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? al (Eds. The size of this effect really quite surprised me because I would have thought at the outset that, you know, artists are these iconoclasts. This week, we continue our look at the science of influence with psychologist Robert Cialdini, and explore how these techniques can be used for both good and evil. 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? It's too high. I just don't want to do it. So for example, if Sam grabbed a hammer and struck the flute in anger, that would be one description, like, Sam broke the flute. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different leg. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where. This is a database with millions of art images. And as soon as I saw that happen, I thought, oh, this makes it so much easier. ), The Sourcebook of Listening Research: Methodology and Measures, 2018. 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. Think back to the last time someone convinced you to do something you didn't want to do, or to spend money you didn't want to spend. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Because it was. BORODITSKY: Actually, one of the first people to notice or suggest that this might be the case was a Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. Refusing to Apologize can have Psychological Benefits, by Tyler Okimoto, Michael Wenzel and Kyli Hedrick, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2013. So these speakers have internalized this idea from their language, and they believe that it's right. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. All rights reserved. Imagine this. And so I set myself the goal that I would learn English in a year, and I wouldn't speak Russian to anyone for that whole first year. Rightly Crossing the Rubicon: Evaluating Goal Self-Concordance Prior to Selection Helps People Choose More Intrinsic Goals, by Kennon M. Sheldon, Mike Prentice, and Evgeny Osin, Journal of Research in Personality, 2019. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. In a lot of languages, there isn't. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. If you are a podcaster, the best way to manage your podcasts on Listen Notes is by claiming your Listen Notes Copyright 2018 NPR. We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more elusive the harder we chase it, and what we can do instead to build a lasting sense of contentment. - you would have to say something like, my arm got broken, or it so happened to me that my arm is broken. And maybe the convenience store or the shop is really not that far away. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. And I was telling this person about someone I knew back in America. But we have plenty of words like that in English where it doesn't bother us at all. Each generation hears things and interprets things slightly differently from the previous one. So if you took a bunch of those tendencies, you could make up, say, the English of 50 years from now, but some of the things would just be complete chance. 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. Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale (PPRS), by Harry T. Reis et. And I don't think any of us are thinking that it's a shame that we're not using the language of Beowulf. But, if you dig a little deeper, you may find that they share much more: they might make the same amount of money as you, or share the, We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. There's not a bigger difference you could find than 100 percent of the measurement space. Hidden Brain - Transcripts Hidden Brain - Transcripts Subscribe 435 episodes Share Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. You-uh (ph). This week on Hidden Brain, we revisit a favorite episode exploring what this culture means Jesse always wanted to fall in love. If it is the first time you login, a new account will be created automatically. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) If you're so upset about it, maybe you can think of a way to help her. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Speaking foreign language). VEDANTAM: In the English-speaking world, she goes by Lera Boroditsky. What do you think the implications are - if you buy the idea that languages are a very specific and unique way of seeing the world, of perceiving reality, what are the implications of so many languages disappearing during our time? All rights reserved. So we did an analysis of images in Artstor. The only question was in which way. 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. The Effects of Conflict Types, Dimensions, and Emergent States on Group Outcomes, by Karen Jehn et. It has to do with the word momentarily. In English, actually, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, I broke my arm. BORODITSKY: Yeah. JENNIFER GEACONE-CRUZ: My name is Jennifer Geacone-Cruz. Sociologist Lisa Wade believes the pervasive hookup culture on campuses today is different from that faced by previous generations. Of course that's how you BORODITSKY: And so what was remarkable for me was that my brain figured out a really good solution to the problem after a week of trying, right?