Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers(weblog.noahburney.com)
weblog.noahburney.com
Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers
http://weblog.noahburney.com/language-scripts/mind-powers-via-language
6 comments
"A different language is a different version of life" - Fellini
I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.
Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.
By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.
I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.
Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.
By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.
Every experience changes the way you think.
The question is: how and by how much?
(could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)
The question is: how and by how much?
(could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)
From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and necessity), not the other way around.
There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure.
Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?
There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure.
Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?
Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto.
And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?"
Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.
[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.
[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."
[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."
And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?"
Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.
[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.
[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."
[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."
Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.
"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon."
This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.
This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
what were the languages? they may be very similar.
what were the languages? they may be very similar.
Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.
Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.
Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two.
Edit: clarity.
Edit: clarity.
It's worth noting that they are from the same linguistic family. Having studied Latin, to me Russian seemed pretty familiar conceptually once I got past the whole cyrillic thing. I am admittedly nowhere near fluent, and I realize the experience would be different for someone without previous 2nd-language exposure.
About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.
About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.
Russian is my native language. I picked up English when I was about 30. Also I learned some German in school, but I can't speak it.
Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place.
the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).
I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.
How one can think in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?
This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.
Well, I don't think in C++ or Python when I'm programming. I think in... well, that's probably weird -- in algorithms, flows, bubbles, pocket-like thingies holding values and that stuff. Then I express my thoughts in a programming language. And yes, some languages are definitely better for certain things than others.
A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature.
I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?