We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness can seem more el, When we want something very badly, it can be hard to see warning signs that might be obvious to other people. And if the word bridge is masculine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are strong and long and towering - these kind of more stereotypically masculine words. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, What Do You Do When Things Go Right? In this week's My Unsung Hero, Sarah Feldman thanks someone for their gift more than 20 years ago. How to Really Know Another Person - Transcripts MCWHORTER: No, because LOL was an expression; it was a piece of language, and so you knew that its meaning was going to change. That's how much cultural heritage is lost. 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. There was no such thing as looking up what it originally meant. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. podcast pages. This is a database with millions of art images. John, you've noted that humans have been using language for a very long time, but for most of that time language has been about talking. Long before she began researching languages as a professor, foreign languages loomed large in her life. Young people have always used language in new and different ways, and it's pretty much always driven older people crazy. You have to do it in order to fit into the culture and to speak the language. Please note that your continued use of the RadioPublic services following the posting of such changes will be deemed an acceptance of this update. But if he just bumped into the table, and it happened to fall off the table and break, and it was an accident, then you might be more likely to say, the flute broke, or the flute broke itself, or it so happened to Sam that the flute broke. And all of a sudden, I noticed that there was a new window that had popped up in my mind, and it was like a little bird's-eye view of the landscape that I was walking through, and I was a little red dot that was moving across the landscape. As you're going about your day, you likely interact with family, friends and coworkers. Writing has come along relatively recently. So you might say, there's an ant on your northwest leg. We'll begin with police shootings of unarmed Black men. You're also not going to do algebra. Whats going on here? BORODITSKY: Yeah, that's true. How else would you do it? You may also use the Hidden Brain name in invitations sent to a small group of personal contacts for such purposes as a listening club or discussion forum. And he started by asking Russian-speaking students to personify days of the week. Lera is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. BORODITSKY: And Russian is a language that has grammatical gender, and different days of the week have different genders for some reason. This week, in the second installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Todd Kashdan looks at the relationship between distress and happiness, and how to keep difficult emotions from sabotaging our wellbeing. So it's, VEDANTAM: The moment she heard it, Jennifer realized mendokusai was incredibly. Whats going on here? They're more likely to see through this little game that language has played on them. (Speaking Japanese). Later things are on the right. We use a lot of music on the show! Hidden Brain (podcast) - Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam - Listen Notes Perspectives on the Situation by Harry T. Reis, and John G. Holmes, in The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012. In the final episode of our Relationships 2.0 series, psychologistHarry Reis says theres another ingredient to successful relationships thats every bit as important as love. It's part of a general running indication that everything's OK between you and the other person, just like one's expected to smile a little bit in most interactions. How To Breathe Correctly For Optimal Health, Mood, Learning VEDANTAM: There are phrases in every language that are deeply evocative and often untranslatable. Shankar Vedantam, host of the popular podcast "Hidden Brain" has been reporting on human behavior for decades. If a transcript is available, youll see a Transcript button which expands to reveal the full transcript. You-uh (ph). This week on Hidden Brain, psychologist Adam Grant describes the magic th Interpersonal Chemistry: What Is It, How Does It Emerge, and How Does it Operate? You know, endings are going to tend to drop off. I had this cool experience when I was there. Just saying hello was difficult. And you can just - it rolls off the tongue, and you can just throw it out. al (Eds. We also look at how. In this favorite 2021 episode, psychologist Adam Grant pushes back against the benefits of certainty, and describes the magic that unfolds when we challenge our own deeply-held beliefs. We recommend movies or books to a friend. Just go to the magnifying glass in the top right corner, click on it, and use the search function at the top of the page. I just don't want to do it. And you can even teach people to have a little bit of fun with the artifice. HIDDEN BRAIN < Lost in Translation: January 29, 20189:00 PM ET VEDANTAM: Well, that's kind of you, Lera. If you missed it, 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. And so what that means is if someone was sitting facing south, they would lay out the story from left to right. 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. VEDANTAM: There are phrases in every language that are deeply evocative and often, untranslatable. And you suddenly get a craving for potato chips, and you, realize that you have none in the kitchen, and there's nothing else you really want to, eat. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Speaking foreign language). Many of us rush through our lives, chasing goals and just trying to get everything done. Not without written permission. But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? Welcome to HIDDEN BRAIN. And if you can enjoy it as a parade instead of wondering why people keep walking instead of just sitting on chairs and blowing on their tubas and not moving, then you have more fun. 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. 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. So for example, you might not imagine the color shirt that he's wearing or the kinds of shoes that he's wearing. VEDANTAM: One of the ultimate messages I took from your work is that, you know, we can choose to have languages that are alive or languages that are dead. So you can't see time. 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. out. Each generation hears things and interprets things slightly differently from the previous one. : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, Read the latest from the Hidden Brain Newsletter. And it's not just about how we think about time. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. I think that it's better to think of language as a parade that either you're watching, or frankly, that you're in, especially because the people are never going to stand still. I'm shankar Vedantam in the 2002 rom com. VEDANTAM: If languages are shaped by the way people see the world, but they also shape how people see the world, what does this mean for people who are bilingual? They're more likely to say, well, it's a formal property of the language. 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. If you can speak more than one language, does this mean that you're also simultaneously and constantly shifting in your mind between different worldviews? Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. 437 Episodes Produced by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Website. Perceived Partner Responsiveness as an Organizing Construct in the Study of Intimacy and Closeness, by Harry T. Reis, et. It's never going to. That was somehow a dad's fashion, and that I should start wearing flat-fronted pants. Hidden Brain explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world. The fun example I give my students is imagine playing the hokey pokey in a language like this. And they asked me all kinds of questions about them. The size of this effect really quite surprised me because I would have thought at the outset that, you know, artists are these iconoclasts. The Effects of Conflict Types, Dimensions, and Emergent States on Group Outcomes, by Karen Jehn et. Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. If you're like most people, you probably abandoned those resolutions within a few weeks. Transcript The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. But what if it's not even about lust? It might irritate you slightly to hear somebody say something like, I need less books instead of fewer books. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. You can't touch time. This is Hidden Brain. This takes kids a little while to figure out, and he had all kinds of clever ways to ask these questions. He's a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of the book "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).". And I did that. Imagine this. by Harry T. Reis, Annie Regan, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2021. 00:55:27 Hidden Brain Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button You know, lots of people blow off steam about something they think is wrong, but very few people are willing to get involved and do something about it. How does that sound now? VEDANTAM: The word chair is feminine in Italian. But somehow they've managed, not just by randomly bumping into each other. I'm Shankar Vedantam. "Most of the laughter we produce is purely . And why do some social movements take off and spread, while others fizzle? Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. Listen on the Reuters app. FAQ | Hidden Brain Media VEDANTAM: As someone who spends a lot of his time listening to language evolve, John hears a lot of slang. They are ways of seeing the world. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. something, even though it shouldn't be so much of an effort. 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. Hidden Brain : NPR Hidden Brain. VEDANTAM: Time is another concept that is also central to the way we see and describe the world. Which pile do you go in, right? Today, we explore the many facets of this idea. It should just be, here is the natural way, then there's some things that you're supposed to do in public because that's the way it is, whether it's fair or not. These relationships can help you feel cared for and connected. Our team includes Laura Kwerel, Adhiti Bandlamudi and our supervising producer Tara Boyle. I think it's a really fascinating question for future research. Newsletter: Go behind the scenes, see what Shankar is reading and find more useful resources and links. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: (Speaking Italian). She shows how our conversational styles can cause We all know casual sex isn't about love. And it irritates people, but there's a different way of seeing literally. You also see huge differences in other domains like number. When we come back, I'm going to ask you about why languages change and whether there are hidden rules that shape why some words are more likely to evolve than others. VEDANTAM: For more HIDDEN BRAIN, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter. And some people would say it's a lot more because it's, you know, irrecoverable and not reduplicated elsewhere. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. And so language changed just like the clouds in the sky. But if they were sitting facing north, they would lay out the story from right to left. So it's easy to think, oh, I could imagine someone without thinking explicitly about what they're wearing. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. Many of us rush through our days, weeks, and lives, chasing goals, and just trying to get everything done. BORODITSKY: I spoke really terrible Indonesian at the time, so I was trying to practice. This week, in the final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes what happens when we stop to savor the beauty in nature, art, or simply the moral courage of those around us. MCWHORTER: Yeah, I really do. It's inherent. Imagine how we would sound to them if they could hear us. Time now for "My Unsung Hero," our series from the team at Hidden Brain telling the stories of . SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST:This is HIDDEN BRAIN. Hidden Brain. And then if you are going to be that elliptical, why use the casual word get? You know, it's Lady Liberty and Lady Justice. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. You 2.0: How to Open Your Mind | Hidden Brain Media Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. So even if I'm speaking English, the distinctions that I've learned in speaking Russian, for example, are still active in my mind to some extent, but they're more active if I'm actually speaking Russian. So the way you say hi in Kuuk Thaayorre is to say, which way are you heading? And if it was feminine, then you're likely to paint death as a woman. In this month's Radio Replay, we ask whether the structure of the languages we speak can change the way we see the world. Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-being: The Self-Concordance Model, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Andrew J. Elliot, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999. If I give you a bunch of pictures to lay out and say this is telling you some kind of story and you - and they're disorganized, when an English speaker organizes those pictures, they'll organize them from left to right. I'm Shankar Vedantam, and you're listening to HIDDEN BRAIN. It is a great, free way to engage the podcast community and increase the visibility of your podcasts. this is hidden brain I'm Shankar Vedantam in the classic TV series Star Trek Mister Spock has a foolproof technique for accurately reading the thoughts and feelings of others the Vulcan mind I am Spock you James our minds are moving closer most most here are kind of hard we have new technology that gives us direct access to the minds of others so So when the perfect woman started writing him letters, it seemed too good to be true. GEACONE-CRUZ: It's a Sunday afternoon, and it's raining outside. So you may start with moving your southwest leg in, but then you have to move your northeast leg out. I think that the tone that many people use when they're complaining that somebody says Billy and me went to the store is a little bit incommensurate with the significance of the issue. UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I'm willing to get involved. You would give a different description to mark that it was not intentional. We couldnt survive without the many public radio stations that support our show and they cant survive without you. JENNIFER GEACONE-CRUZ: My name is Jennifer Geacone-Cruz. It takes, GEACONE-CRUZ: It's this phrase that describes something between I can't be, bothered or I don't want to do it or I recognize the incredible effort that goes into. Take the word bridge - if it's feminine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are beautiful and elegant. The phrase brings an entire world with it - its context, its flavor, its culture. Lera said there's still a lot of research to be done on this. In The Air We Breathe : NPR Learn more. So that's a measurement difference of 100 percent of performance. You can't smell or taste time. Personal Strivings: An Approach to Personality and Subjective Well-being, by Robert A. Emmons, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1986. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. Those are quirks of grammar literally in stone. BORODITSKY: Well, there may not be a word for left to refer to a left leg. But can you imagine someone without imagining their gender? All episodes of Hidden Brain - Chartable It's exactly how old English turned into modern English. This is HIDDEN BRAIN. So the word for the is different for women than for men, and it's also different for forks versus spoons and things like that. But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? L. Gable, et. Everyone wants to be loved and appreciated. And as odd as that sounds, I can guarantee you if you watch any TV show with women under a certain age or if you just go out on an American street and listen, you'll find that that's a new kind of exclamatory particle. I'm Shankar Vedantam. But actually, it's something that's not so hard to learn. Follow on Apple, Google or Spotify. Subscribe to the Hidden Brain Podcast on your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode. Parents and peers influence our major life choices. You're not going to do trigonometry. VEDANTAM: John McWhorter, thank you so much for joining me on HIDDEN BRAIN today. They're supposed to be painting something very personal. For example, when we started talking about navigation, that's an example where a 5-year-old in a culture that uses words like north, south, east and west can point southeast without hesitation. That kind of detail may not appear. Well, that's an incredibly large set of things, so that's a very broad effect of language. There's a lowlier part of our nature that grammar allows us to vent in the absence of other ways to do it that have not been available for some decades for a lot of us. - so one skull but two different minds, and you shift from one to the other. Transcript Speaker 1 00:00:00 this is hidden brain. It's just how I feel. We're speaking today with cognitive science professor Lera Boroditsky about language. And when I listen to people having their peeves, I don't think, stop it. This week on Hidden Brain, we explore how unconscious bias can infect a culture and how a police shooting may say as much about a community as it does about individuals. There's a way of speaking right. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. It's not something that you typically go out trying to do intentionally. How big are the differences that we're talking about, and how big do you think the implications are for the way we see the world? And so even though I insist that there is no scientific basis for rejecting some new word or some new meaning or some new construction, I certainly have my visceral biases. Subscribe: iOS | Android | Spotify | RSS | Amazon | Stitcher Latest Episodes: Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button BORODITSKY: It's certainly possible. And they have correlated this with gender features in the language, just like the ones you were talking about. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: (Speaking Russian). 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. Growing up, I understood this word to mean for a very short time, as in John McWhorter was momentarily surprised. Those sorts things tend to start with women. BORODITSKY: I had this wonderful opportunity to work with my colleague Alice Gaby in this community called Pormpuraaw in - on Cape York. You know, I was trying to stay oriented because people were treating me like I was pretty stupid for not being oriented, and that hurt. 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. It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. 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. 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. 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. But what we should teach is not that the good way is logical and the way that you're comfortable doing it is illogical. How come you aren't exactly the way you were 10 years ago? 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. VEDANTAM: I'm Shankar Vedantam. BORODITSKY: That's a wonderful question. And then question 21 was, is this person a man or a woman? You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. Many people have this intuition that, oh, I could never learn that; I could never survive in a community like this. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. And it really is an illusion that what language is, is something that sits still. That's because change is hard. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Lawrence S. Krieger, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2004. As someone who works in media, I often find that people who can write well are often people who know how to think well, so I often equate clarity of writing with clarity of thought. VEDANTAM: Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive science professor at the University of California, San Diego. Copyright 2018 NPR. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. I've always found that a very grating way to ask for something at a store. You can support Hidden Brain indirectly by giving to your local NPR station, or you can provide direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page. Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. So for example, for English speakers - people who read from left to right - time tends to flow from left to right. VEDANTAM: I love this analogy you have in the book where you mention how, you know, thinking that a word has only one meaning is like looking at a snapshot taken at one point in a person's life and saying this photograph represents the entirety of what this person looks like. Now, many people hear that and they think, well, that's no good because now literally can mean its opposite. In the United States, we often praise people with strong convictions, and look down on those who express doubt or hesitation. And it's sad that we're not going to be able to make use of them and learn them and celebrate them. In this favorite episode from 2021, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isnt something to be found its somethi, It's natural to want to run away from difficult emotions such as grief, anger and fear. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, Going the Distance on the Pacific Crest Trail: The Vital Role of Identified Motivation, Athletic Scholarships are Negatively Associated with Intrinsic Motivation for Sports, Even Decades Later: Evidence for Long-Term Undermining, Rightly Crossing the Rubicon: Evaluating Goal Self-Concordance Prior to Selection Helps People Choose More Intrinsic Goals, What Makes Lawyers Happy? One study that I love is a study that asked monolingual speakers of Italian and German and also bilingual speakers of Italian and German to give reasons for why things are the grammatical genders that they are. We love the idea of Hidden Brain helping to spark discussions in your community. As soon as you move the leg, it becomes a different leg. I just don't want to do it. It's how we think about anything that's abstract, that's beyond our physical senses. But as Bob Cialdini set out to discover the keys to influence and persuasion, he decided to follow the instincts of his childhood. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. VEDANTAM: Lera now tries to understand languages spoken all over the world. Hidden Brain - You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose Hidden Brain Aug 2, 2021 You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose Play 51 min playlist_add Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. Now, in a lot of languages, you can't say that because unless you were crazy, and you went out looking to break your arm, and you succeeded - right? If you're studying a new language, you might discover these phrases not in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. Of course, you also can't experience anything outside of time. We'll also look at how languages evolve, and why we're sometimes resistant to those changes. So I think that nobody would say that they don't think language should change. You can't know, but you can certainly know that if could listen to people 50 years from now, they'd sound odd. Whereas speakers of a language like Spanish might not be quite as good at remembering who did it when it's an accident, but they're better at remembering that it was an accident. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. So if the word for death was masculine in your language, you were likely to paint death as a man. And the way you speak right is not by speaking the way that people around you in your life speak, but by speaking the way the language is as it sits there all nice and pretty on that piece of paper where its reality exists. And I don't think any of us are thinking that it's a shame that we're not using the language of Beowulf. I think language can certainly be a contributor into the complex system of our thinking about gender. When we come back, we dig further into the way that gender works in different languages and the pervasive effects that words can play in our lives. Yes! 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.