Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/how-language-shapes-thought/4329212#transcript
Lera Boroditsky: In the 70s Noam Chomsky, a very important linguist, pioneered a theory, an idea that all human languages might actually underneath be essentially the same, that there might be a universal grammar that underlies all the 7,000 some languages that people speak around the world. Now this was proposed as a possibility, as a hypothetical idea, that there could be a formalism that describes all the languages and makes them underneath the same.
If you believe that idea, if you believe that hypothesis then asking how different languages shape the way we think is not a question that even makes sense because if all languages are really the same underneath then why would you even bother asking how a speaker of French as opposed to a speaker of Mandarin might think differently. The languages should all give people the same thoughts. But if it turns out that languages aren’t really psychologically the same underneath then that reopens the question and allows us to ask if you speak Spanish or if you speak Mandarin or if you speak Kuuk Thaayorre or Wik-Mungkan, do the structures of those languages, the habits in those languages actually shape the way you see the world?
Lynne Malcolm: One of the ways Lera Boroditsky has set out to test how language may shape our thoughts is by looking at how different language speakers think about the abstract concepts of time and space.
Lera Boroditsky: And it turns out that people around the world think about time in all kinds of cool and different ways depending on the patterns in their language and culture. So the first things we looked at are differences in metaphors people have for time. So for example in English we often use spatial terms like ahead, forward, behind, back to talk about time. So we’ll say the best is ahead of us, the worst is behind us. We’re treating time as if it were a horizontal path that we travel. But in other languages in addition to horizontal terms there are also vertical terms. So in Mandarin for example the words up and down are used to talk about time, the past is said to be up and the future is down. And we wondered, does this matter for how people lay out time in the privacy of their minds when they’re imagining the time line, when they’re thinking about arranging their schedule. Are Mandarin speakers more likely to imagine a vertical time line than are English speakers? And that turns out to be the case.
And there are other differences that I think are even more cool so Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser did some work with the Ymara. this is an Indian language. And the Ymara, instead of putting the future ahead and the past behind, the way we do in English, they do it in exactly the reverse direction. So for them the past is in front of them and the future is behind them. When they are talking about the past they will point ahead and when they’re talking about the future they’ll point behind them. And that seems incredibly counterintuitive to English speakers.
Lera Boroditsky: That’s an excellent question. There are different ways that languages influence us. Let me give you an example that I think has immediate real world consequences. Languages differ in how they describe causal events and let’s talk about accidents in particular. In English we don’t make a very strong distinction between an accidental event and an intentional event. So if I break a cup accidentally, or if I grab it in anger and smash in on the ground in both cases it’s fine to say 'she broke the cup'. But in some languages if it’s an accident you would use a different grammatical form, you would say 'the cup broke', or 'the cup broke itself', or 'to her it happened that the cup broke,' or something like that. So you would distinguish that event as being an accident in the grammatical form.
So one thing that we wondered was whether speakers who speak such languages that really more strongly distinguish accidents from intentional actions pay attention to events differently. So we compared the speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. Spanish and Japanese of course are very different from one another but they both differ from English in that they differentiate accidents from intentional actions more strongly than English does. And what we did is we showed everyone videos of accidents and videos of intentional actions and they are simple actions like someone popped the balloon and it was either intentional or accidental.
We asked one group of people to describe the videos to make sure that the differences between languages were real, and they were. And we asked another group of people just to watch the videos and try to remember them and later we tested their memory. What we found in the descriptions was English speakers were much more likely to mention the agent when describing an accident than were speakers of Japanese of Spanish. So if someone accidently popped the balloon English speakers would still say he popped the balloon whereas speakers of Spanish or Japanese might not mention the agent.
When we looked at the memory results we saw a pattern that mirrored the language data. So what we saw is the English speakers remembered really well when someone intentionally popped the balloon, and they also remembered really well, equally well when someone accidently popped the balloon, it didn’t matter to them whether the action was intentional or accidental, they remembered who did it. For Spanish and Japanese speakers they remembered who did it really well when it was an intentional action but less well when it was an accident. So when it was an accident if they were describing it they weren't likely to mention the agent and they also weren’t paying attention to who the person was as much, they were distributing their attention elsewhere..
So that to me is an example of a cross-linguistic difference with important real world consequences. Of course we want to think about how we blame people, how we distribute punishment, how we participate in eye witness testimony and what kinds of elements of our culture or our language are contributing to our judgments. To what extent do we maybe judge people too harshly because of the structure of our language or to what extent do other people maybe avoid responsibility because of the structure of their language and so on. There are no right answers to these questions but they lead us to think about how we come to make these important judgments about other people.
Lynne Malcolm: And it even seems that the extent to which we blame others for their actions can come down to the language used. Do you remember the scandalous incident between Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson?
Lera Boroditsky: So we used the original wardrobe malfunction, this is when Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson performed at the Superbowl half-time show and there was an incident where Janet Jackson’s breast became exposed. Now everyone in the United States has seen this video and there was a lot of outrage about it at the time. And so what we wanted to see is whether describing this situation in slightly different ways would lead people to blame Justin Timberlake more or less for the event and want to fine him more or less money. So we made everyone watch the video again and we gave them either a agentive description or we said in the final dance move he reached across her body and he ripped the costume, or in the final dance move he reached across her body and the costume ripped. And of course everyone saw exactly what happened, so they saw the actual visual reality but what we found was that the people who got the agentive description not only blamed Justin Timberlake more they also wanted to charge him 53% more in fines, and that was something in the order of $36,000 more in terms of what people wanted from him as a punitive fine. And we thought that was a really expensive agentive expression.
Lynne Malcolm: Absolutely.
Lera Boroditsky: Just one transitive verb costs you thousands of dollars. That’s one of my favourite recent examples where a small change in phrasing can lead to a big difference in people’s judgments.
Lynne Malcolm: The other structure that you talk about is the use of metaphor. How powerful are metaphors and how do they figure in the way we reason?
Lera Boroditsky: Metaphors are a wonderful tool and a dangerous tool for thinking. So I think about metaphor a lot in the context of reasoning about social issues or political issues. How does a regular person think about how to deal with a societal problem like diminishing crime, or bettering the economy, or decreasing unemployment? How do we think about these really complex systems? One way we do it is by employing metaphors. Metaphors invite us to think about these complex or abstract things in terms of things that we already know something about. So you might say crime is a beast attacking our cities. Well we know something about beasts and we know something about what it means for a beast to attack, and all of a sudden you have all of this conceptual structure, all of this knowledge that you already have in your mind that you can apply to think about crime. And this can lead you then to make decisions and reason along the lines of that metaphor and come to a conclusion about how crime should be dealt with. But of course we have not one metaphor but many metaphors for any given abstract idea, so we talk about crime as a beast attacking but also as a virus infecting, or plaguing our cities. And it turns out that depending on which metaphor you choose you end up thinking that very different kinds of solutions would be effective in addressing the problem of crime.
So if we give people an example where we say crime is a virus ravaging the city, they propose that what should be done is we should investigate the root of the problems and we should essentially do things to inoculate the city against further infection, so they say you should improve the education system, or you should work on unemployment. These are very systemic, reform oriented solutions. But if we tell people crime is a beast ravaging the city and give them all the same statistics and numbers as before they now instead say what you need to do is you need to make more jails and you need to put out more police officers and give harsher sentences and more punishment. So they give enforcement and punishment solutions that are more in line with how you would deal with a beast.
And in our studies we found that these metaphors can be surprisingly powerful. So a single word difference in a description of a city's crime problem can lead to a difference in opinion between people that’s at least as big as the difference in opinion between Democrats and Republicans for example in US politics, which is a very big, ecologically big difference.
Donnerstag, 21. März 2013
A history of memory
Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/a-history-of-memory/4373748#transcript
metaphors for memory
Alison Winter: There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the early 20th century.
Lynne Malcolm: In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.
Alison Winter: The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.
rebirth
the story of Virgina Tighe and Bridey Murphy
Alison Winter: One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20th century.
During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.
Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.
Is memory really seared into our brain - like a photo?
The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five. But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.
So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.
metaphors for memory
Alison Winter: There have always been models, metaphors for memory because it’s such an elusive thing and usually there are metaphors that have to do with writing or recording some kind of information storage to think about how the mind stores information. And at the turn of the century the dominant metaphor was the filing cabinet. There are also ancient metaphors that continue to be used like the wax tablet that you scratch, you scratch an impression into a wax tablet and over time that scratch gets scratched over by other things so your memory softens or becomes eroded. But the filing cabinet was a model that was quite common in this early time, the early 20th century.
Lynne Malcolm: In the early 1900s science began devising techniques to retrieve the truth and the idea of the truth serum came into play.
Alison Winter: The irony about its history is that we now I think associate it with a kind of coercive interrogations of forcing someone to tell you something they don’t want to tell. But in the 1920s it was used in the hopes of correcting corrupt police practices and this truth serum, which was actually an obstetric drug, was thought to guarantee the testimony of people whose freedom was at risk. It was almost like it was a truth serum for society in the 20s, and the claim was that you would just be able to pull the drawer of the filing cabinet and rifle through anything that was inside.
rebirth
the story of Virgina Tighe and Bridey Murphy
Alison Winter: One of the things that most interested me in my research is the relationship between recording technologies on the one hand and how they’ve been understood; and what you might call internal memory, memory within our minds. Because researchers on memory have tended to compare memory to whatever recording device was most exciting, or cutting edge at the time. So the story about the flashbulb has to do with the way that people took pictures with cameras in the 20th century.
During my childhood there were many ads for cameras and film that talked about the Kodak moment you could take a picture of a moment in your family’s life that was on the one hand perfectly ordinary but on the other hand it would be absolutely unique and there would be this one special moment like the moment when a child takes a dive in a pool for the first time. Something both mundane and superb and then if you don’t have the camera with you you can’t capture that moment and it’s a split second.
Well the national event that was related to this idea of a frozen moment was the moment when people in America heard about the assassination of President Kennedy and for years after that people would talk about where they were and what they were doing at the moment when they heard about the assassination. This is the early days of television so it was one of the first times when something of this scale of shock was communicated so quickly to so many people. And psychologists at Harvard Roger Brown and James Kulik were intrigued by how vivid these descriptions were of the moment. It was almost they thought like a photograph and they weren’t the first people to make this comparison.
Is memory really seared into our brain - like a photo?
The trend in the psychological sciences is to think of memory as being very reconstructive, that is we think we have a continuous access to our original experiences like I think I can remember a birthday party that I had with my dad when I was five. But actually what I probably remember is a picture of myself with the cake and I turned that into a place holder for an original memory that is long gone and may have had nothing to do with the photograph beside the fact that that photograph exists.
So the most widely accepted understanding of memory now is that we continually remake what our memories actually are but we think of them as being reliable and authentic.
Memory
Source:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/memory---the-thread-of-life/4409988#transcript
Memory - The Thread of life
Learning
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: If we want to create more enduring memory for what we have learned, a number of researchers have shown that studying a few times but testing yourself over and over again can really create this kind of long-lasting knowledge. So we wanted to understand why, why is that repeatedly studying something doesn’t endure? It seems so intuitive and it seems effective because we do well in exams after we cram, but the question is six months later can we still have that knowledge at our disposal; and we wanted to understand why is it that this knowledge just dissipates over time.
So in a very detailed set of experiments that we did what we were able to uncover is fascinating. Repeated study does improve retention in the short term. There’s a lot of information that’s retained but it’s not organised very tightly or very efficiently or in ways that its meaning can emerge and become really centralised. But repeated retrieval allows that process to take place where we are able to align what we have just learned to our pre-existing knowledge in a much more efficient way. And those structures are larger in size, they are tighter in size and they don’t splinter over time the way knowledge structures splinter if only repeated study practice was used.
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: I think taking tests is a very good idea, I imagine it would not be a very popular recommendation, when people take repeated tests it seems like a very averse-like thing to do, but having done it once or twice it gets easier, you become a smart test-taker. You also in the process get to retain what you’re learning. So it is important to remember that repeated study in the short run affords a larger amount of retention, and that can fool us into thinking that a larger amount has been retained and so that must be the more effective method. And repeated tests might just home in on a lesser amount, but it helps us get down to the important pieces that we can then hold on to.
So frequent testing is a good idea, and I will go on to say that because every exposure to information creates memories. It’s very important that if students are taking repeated tests, and when they give incorrect answers it’s very important to correct those answers. Because over time students might lose the information on which answer was correct and which was incorrect, they might just remember an answer and that could be a problem. So that is another caveat to how we might go about setting up our educational practice based on this research.
Keeping your memory in old age
Suparna Rajaram: You actually pose a very good question about how this might interact with ageing, even a normal healthy ageing mind and brain starts to exhibit some deficits in memory and the deficits are largely isolated to the episodic memory deficit — being able to remember day to day things. So could repeatedly rehearsing information help? Here’s the interesting part about repeatedly going over something in your mind that has happened. It’s much more similar to what I call repeated testing, because we go over information by self generating, we think about what had happened all over again by ourselves. So if somebody else tells us what happened it is going to be less effective in terms of holding on to it than if we thought about it ourselves and we were the ones who narrated it over and over again to others.
So could it help with ageing? And I would say it should help because even though there are episodic memory deficits as people get older, one of the less obvious strengths that remain fully intact with ageing is that people organise information just as well as young adults do. So when the ability to organise information is present then rehearsing information is definitely going to pick up on that ability and the two would interact to help.
Our memory
Elaine Reese: I think that it’s formative in our sense of self. So if you think about autobiographical memories, no one else has exactly the same set of memories that you have or that I have. It’s what makes us unique as a person.
The effect of speaking with children
Elaine Reese: Yes, we’ve been working on that with a new group of teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 20. And what we’re finding is that those adolescents whose mothers talked with them in this elaborative way about the past, that they have what we call more coherent memories as adolescents. By coherence I mean that when they’re talking about sometimes difficult events that have happened in their lives, or life changing events, that they are able to talk about them in a more structured way to get some meaning out of that event for who they are. And we know that those young adults who have a more coherent life story, they also have better wellbeing so they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher life satisfaction. So it somehow all seems to come together in the late adolescent period as what we’re finding.
family stories
Elaine Reese: Yes, and you can add to it and provide more details over time and they will be interested in different aspects of it. And some family stories are just fun and funny, such as we hear about a lot of family misadventures on holiday, so we’ve got some great stories about rushing to catch the plane to Singapore, and the nappies all came out of the bag...and families retell those stories just for fun but I think they also have a bonding function for the family and they can really pull families together that yes, we got through that hard time and we made it through as a family.
Elaine Reese: One puzzling finding that I’d like to explore more is with younger adolescents we are finding that the adolescents who tell the more coherent stories actually have higher rates of depression and this is with, say, 12- to 14-year-olds. We think what’s happening is that when young adolescents are first starting to make meaning out of life events and trying to connect all these things that have happened to them and trying to figure out what it means for themselves, they’re not really completely ready to do that, I think they still need parents' help in structuring the things that are happening to them. So one thing I’m really interested in doing is trying to find some way to help parents talk with their young adolescents, especially about the negative things that have happened to them and to help them find some way of coping, because we know that’s when a lot of young adolescents start to experience depression symptoms for the first time. So it’s something that I feel quite strongly about, having two adolescents myself — 12 and 16 — and I’d really like to know if there’s some way that family storytelling can help.
Lynne Malcolm: So perhaps there is an argument for family storytelling to be important consistently right through?
Elaine Reese: Yes, probably it’s going to be important in different ways for children at different ages. So with the really young children we know it’s important for their language development, their storytelling and for their memory, and I think as children get older and as we find out more, we’ll find that it’s very important for their self-esteem and self-concept and their wellbeing.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/memory---the-thread-of-life/4409988#transcript
Memory - The Thread of life
Learning
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: If we want to create more enduring memory for what we have learned, a number of researchers have shown that studying a few times but testing yourself over and over again can really create this kind of long-lasting knowledge. So we wanted to understand why, why is that repeatedly studying something doesn’t endure? It seems so intuitive and it seems effective because we do well in exams after we cram, but the question is six months later can we still have that knowledge at our disposal; and we wanted to understand why is it that this knowledge just dissipates over time.
So in a very detailed set of experiments that we did what we were able to uncover is fascinating. Repeated study does improve retention in the short term. There’s a lot of information that’s retained but it’s not organised very tightly or very efficiently or in ways that its meaning can emerge and become really centralised. But repeated retrieval allows that process to take place where we are able to align what we have just learned to our pre-existing knowledge in a much more efficient way. And those structures are larger in size, they are tighter in size and they don’t splinter over time the way knowledge structures splinter if only repeated study practice was used.
(...)
Suparna Rajaram: I think taking tests is a very good idea, I imagine it would not be a very popular recommendation, when people take repeated tests it seems like a very averse-like thing to do, but having done it once or twice it gets easier, you become a smart test-taker. You also in the process get to retain what you’re learning. So it is important to remember that repeated study in the short run affords a larger amount of retention, and that can fool us into thinking that a larger amount has been retained and so that must be the more effective method. And repeated tests might just home in on a lesser amount, but it helps us get down to the important pieces that we can then hold on to.
So frequent testing is a good idea, and I will go on to say that because every exposure to information creates memories. It’s very important that if students are taking repeated tests, and when they give incorrect answers it’s very important to correct those answers. Because over time students might lose the information on which answer was correct and which was incorrect, they might just remember an answer and that could be a problem. So that is another caveat to how we might go about setting up our educational practice based on this research.
Keeping your memory in old age
Suparna Rajaram: You actually pose a very good question about how this might interact with ageing, even a normal healthy ageing mind and brain starts to exhibit some deficits in memory and the deficits are largely isolated to the episodic memory deficit — being able to remember day to day things. So could repeatedly rehearsing information help? Here’s the interesting part about repeatedly going over something in your mind that has happened. It’s much more similar to what I call repeated testing, because we go over information by self generating, we think about what had happened all over again by ourselves. So if somebody else tells us what happened it is going to be less effective in terms of holding on to it than if we thought about it ourselves and we were the ones who narrated it over and over again to others.
So could it help with ageing? And I would say it should help because even though there are episodic memory deficits as people get older, one of the less obvious strengths that remain fully intact with ageing is that people organise information just as well as young adults do. So when the ability to organise information is present then rehearsing information is definitely going to pick up on that ability and the two would interact to help.
Our memory
Elaine Reese: I think that it’s formative in our sense of self. So if you think about autobiographical memories, no one else has exactly the same set of memories that you have or that I have. It’s what makes us unique as a person.
The effect of speaking with children
Elaine Reese: Yes, we’ve been working on that with a new group of teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 20. And what we’re finding is that those adolescents whose mothers talked with them in this elaborative way about the past, that they have what we call more coherent memories as adolescents. By coherence I mean that when they’re talking about sometimes difficult events that have happened in their lives, or life changing events, that they are able to talk about them in a more structured way to get some meaning out of that event for who they are. And we know that those young adults who have a more coherent life story, they also have better wellbeing so they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher life satisfaction. So it somehow all seems to come together in the late adolescent period as what we’re finding.
family stories
Elaine Reese: Yes, and you can add to it and provide more details over time and they will be interested in different aspects of it. And some family stories are just fun and funny, such as we hear about a lot of family misadventures on holiday, so we’ve got some great stories about rushing to catch the plane to Singapore, and the nappies all came out of the bag...and families retell those stories just for fun but I think they also have a bonding function for the family and they can really pull families together that yes, we got through that hard time and we made it through as a family.
Elaine Reese: One puzzling finding that I’d like to explore more is with younger adolescents we are finding that the adolescents who tell the more coherent stories actually have higher rates of depression and this is with, say, 12- to 14-year-olds. We think what’s happening is that when young adolescents are first starting to make meaning out of life events and trying to connect all these things that have happened to them and trying to figure out what it means for themselves, they’re not really completely ready to do that, I think they still need parents' help in structuring the things that are happening to them. So one thing I’m really interested in doing is trying to find some way to help parents talk with their young adolescents, especially about the negative things that have happened to them and to help them find some way of coping, because we know that’s when a lot of young adolescents start to experience depression symptoms for the first time. So it’s something that I feel quite strongly about, having two adolescents myself — 12 and 16 — and I’d really like to know if there’s some way that family storytelling can help.
Lynne Malcolm: So perhaps there is an argument for family storytelling to be important consistently right through?
Elaine Reese: Yes, probably it’s going to be important in different ways for children at different ages. So with the really young children we know it’s important for their language development, their storytelling and for their memory, and I think as children get older and as we find out more, we’ll find that it’s very important for their self-esteem and self-concept and their wellbeing.
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