Hidden Brain podcast "Lost in Translation"

~Bella Lo

Hidden Brain is a podcast on NPR, hosted by Shankar Vedantam.  A 35 minute and 25 second episode released in late January called “Lost in Translation” explores how speaking different languages shape the way people think.  This was really interesting for those who want to understand how different languages cause people to unconsciously think and view the world in different ways. Vedantam interviews a cognitive science professor of the University of California named Lera Boroditsky.  

With a mixture of music soundbites and people speaking foreign languages, Vedantam conducts the interview where he and Boroditsky talk about different aspects of different cultures’ languages.  Boroditsky explains how she went to an aboriginal community in Australia where they didn’t use the words “left” or “right,” but instead, cardinal directions like north, south, east and west. She observed how people in this community have become much more oriented with directions since they constantly use them.  

Boroditsky also talks about how the concept of time varies in different places.  When different people are given a set of cards to organize from earliest to latest, English speakers, who read from left to right, will place the earliest pictures on the left.  However, those who read from right to left will organize the cards from right to left. And for those who use cardinal directions, it depends on which way they’re facing. They organize cards from east to west, but if they’re facing a different direction, then the way they lay out the cards would vary.  

After a one-minute advertisement, Vedantam and Boroditsky continue to talk about languages, but they move on to how some languages’ nouns have grammatical genders.  For example, in Spanish, German or Russian, the words “chair” or “bridge” will have assigned genders. If the word “bridge” is feminine in one’s language, they would be more likely to describe them as elegant or beautiful, while if it were masculine, one would describe bridges as strong or other stereotypes that accompany masculinity.  This can also affect the way things are drawn or portrayed in art. For those whose languages assign genders to nouns, if they draw, they will be more likely to draw according to the gender assigned.

With music slowly fading in, they end by talking about languages disappearing, which Boroditsky finds very saddening.  Languages are a “testament to credible ingenuity and complexity of the human mind,” Boroditsky says. When a language dies, a lot of cultural history and heritage is lost.  

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510308/hidden-brain