Postby vinceschubert » Wed Jul 08, 2026 7:00 am
Hi K, You've been instrumental in me digging deep for more effective ways to commune-icate the triggers that will induce a novel (to you) way of interpreting experience.
Experiencing here is currently an avalanche of thought/feelings about one possibility.
i just saw the beginning of an interview with Lera Borodizzi that took it (the avalanche) in a certain direction.
As i don't seem to be able to attach a PDF to this post, here is the transcript.
After reading it we can discuss...
Lera Borodizzi, welcome to how the Light Gets In. Thank you so much for having me. Lera, your research within cognitive science and linguistic studies has transformed our understanding of thought. How does language affect culture? Well, language can shape thought in lots of ways. In my own work, I focused on how language shapes the fundamentals of thought. So basic things like how we organize space, time, how we process color, how we think about events, and what we find is, even at these very, very basic levels, the building blocks of cognition, language can have a really profound effect on how we put the world together in our minds. So within linguistic relativity has been dismissed before and revived in certain areas. What do you think? Earlier, researchers got wrong in their methods kind of compared to yours now? Yeah. So there was a strong idea coming out of Chomsky and linguistics that languages didn't substantially differ from one another at the core.
[01:04 - 02:20]
Now, no one had discovered what that core is. It was a hypothetical core, but it was just a claim. The claim was languages don't fundamentally differ. And so if your claim is that languages don't fundamentally differ, it doesn't actually even make sense to ask whether speakers of different languages would think differently. But the more linguists went out into the field and studied in detail different languages, the more really striking differences between languages they uncovered. And so then it no longer became the question of do languages differ? It was very clear that they do. And then you could start asking the question of how do those differences reflect in thinking? There is another part of skepticism, which is, is cognition something that's malleable? So it's one thing that languages differ, but if thinking can't be changed, then it doesn't matter if languages differ. Speakers of all languages would think the same. But then decades and decades of research in cognitive psychology showed how malleable cognition is and how flexible it actually is. So once you have those two puzzle pieces, languages really differ, and cognition is really malleable. You put those together, and that creates an environment where you can find these incredibly profound differences between speakers of different languages.
[02:21 - 03:44]
And within your own research and your own experiments, how did you kind of go about designing those experiments? You know, I'm trained as a cognitive psychologist, so I started by designing the most classic kinds of basic experiments that you would do just to study cognition. So test people's memory or test people's ability to make categories, Test how quickly people can solve a problem, really basic designs. And I think that was part of the success of the research program that I pursued, because in the past, a lot of claims had Come either from anthropologists or from linguists. And so they came back with data that looked like field reports. And psychologists, you know, every field has their own standards for what they count as evidence. And psychologists would look at those field reports and say, well, these are just stories. It's like your travel journal. It's not really data. And because I was doing things that seemed so traditional as cognitive psychology, But I wasn't just testing American undergraduates. I was also testing people who lived in all kinds of locations around the world, that became data that people could really believe and take seriously and say, oh, well, the methodology is very familiar. It's very sound. This is a controlled experiment. They've made proper measurements. But now we have to really take it seriously. So that really changed how the field treated the idea.
[03:45 - 05:31]
And within those experiments, you talk about memory and intention and how that differs between languages. Can you kind of walk me through those experiments and your findings in that? Sure. So language can guide our attention to some elements and not others in the world. The world is very complicated, and there's an infinite set of things we could potentially pay attention to, and our ability to process that information is quite limited. And so every language chooses certain things to attend to. So the way we divide up the color spectrum, for example, there's an infinite set of ways to do it. Languages make some choices. Some languages have many words for color. Some have only a few, where languages draw boundaries and the continuous color space differs from language to language. And so we can test if your language makes a distinction between this set of hues and this other set of hues, and another language calls it all by the same word. Does that make a difference for your ability to distinguish those colors? So Russian, for example, makes a distinction between light blues and dark blues. So light blues are goluboy and dark blues are sini. And so you test Russian speakers and English speakers and speakers of other languages, and what you can see is that Russian speakers are faster to make a distinction, visual distinction, between colors that are called by different names compared to English speakers. And in the brain, if you show people a bunch of colors, hues that are changing slowly from light blue to dark blue, in the brains of people who call those colors by categorically different names, there's this surprise marker that goes off as you switch from categorically light blue to categorically dark blue.
[05:31 - 06:45]
Whereas for English speakers, that surprisal marker narrow goes off because they're all just. And so even very early on, the brain treats those colors as being categorically different. It goes, oh, wait, something has importantly shifted, but only if you speak that kind of language that distinguishes those two by different words. So with this idea of intention and memory and the fact that different languages can be swayed almost in different directions, do you think there is a correct way of speaking about things? No, of course not. Every language is just a perspective on the world. And within any language, we also have many options for how to describe any given scenario. I think the best possible case is that you have a lot of flexibility for describing anything, so that you can have more precise vocabulary when precision is required. But you're also allowed to have a more generic or more vague vocabulary where you might not want to commit to a level of specificity that you don't actually know. So the more flexibility a language allows you, the more richness, the kind of more faithful you can be to the thoughts you actually wish to express.
[06:45 - 07:55]
So do you think that in some cases people can be trapped by their language because of these restrictions and limitations on how we express things and then therefore, how we think? I think people believe the structures of their languages way too much. People think that the language they speak reflects reality or is a true window onto reality, when in fact, each language is just a human made artifact that was constructed over thousands of years under circumstances that may no longer apply to our lives anymore. And so once you actually learn a second language or a third language, you start to see how different languages treat the world differently, and you start believing the structures of your language less and questioning things more. And so all of us actually have the capacity to see things in lots of different ways. But if you speak only one language, you're hardly ever invited to consider what the structures of your language are guiding you to think that you could think about differently. So we also have spoken a little bit about kind of this diversity of language.
[07:55 - 09:02]
What do you think would be the impact of a loss of that? Well, we're losing languages at an alarming rate. So There are about 7,000 languages in the world right now. And some estimates are that we're losing about a language a week. And so in 100 years, we may have lost half of the world's languages. I think that might be accelerating at the moment. A loss of a language is a loss of an incredible amount of human intellectual labor. Right. So all of the people that had come before in that culture worked together to construct a representation of reality, to construct a cosmology, to construct all of these ideas. And when the last fluent speakers of the language pass away, all of that intellectual labor is gone. The linguist Ken Hale said, you know, imagine a bomb being dropped on the Louvre and all of that cultural heritage being lost. That's what it's like to lose a language. But I actually think it's a lot worse because with a lot of languages that we're losing, they're not well documented, so we don't have a way to reconstruct that information in any way.
[09:03 - 10:07]
And then the loss that the descendants of those people feel is extremely strong because they lose the connection to their past, to their ancestors, to the ways of life that brought them up. So it's an incredible loss when we lose languages. So obviously there's therefore an incentive to learn lots more languages and kind of keep that culture alive. But do you think there is something that could be said about possibly blurring the lines between languages if you speak different languages, or do you think that you can kind of compartmentalize when you switch over between languages? Well, languages always have always mixed and always borrowed from one another. And also languages always change. So languages are living things. They evolve. We are the ones who create them, and we're the ones who change them to suit our needs. So for me, there's no problem whatsoever in speaking more than one language, in inventing new ways of talking, in blending things between languages. These are things that have naturally happened for as long as there have been languages.
[10:09 - 11:15]
There aren't trade offs between these things. It's just a natural process. Obviously, you have transitioned from very different linguistic worlds where you spoke, your first language was Russian, and then you moved to the U.S. do you think that that personal experience planted the seed for your research, or do you think it was something else? It was definitely informative. So I grew up in the former Soviet Union, where there was a very particular approach to what was true and what was not true. And the information circle was very closed off. And then I moved to the US when I was 12, and suddenly all the things that had been true in the place where I GRE up were the opposite in the new place that I lived. So just seeing how much people's perspectives could be different about the very basics of life, of course, encouraged me to think about it. And then also because I had a different perspective than my other classmates in America, I would end up in a lot of discussions and arguments.
[11:16 - 12:31]
And I noticed that in a lot of arguments about, you know, big ideas like freedom and justice and things like that, the crux of the disagreement was we were using the same words, but we're using them in different ways. So you and I might be talking about freedom, or we think we're talking about the same thing and we're disagreeing, but we're in fact using the word freedom in different ways. So it's not even that we're able to have a reasonable discussion because we've believed that the word freedom refers to one thing, but it actually can refer to lots of different things. And so that really cemented my desire to understand how language and thought relate to one another, because so many of our important discussions in society are done in language, hinge on language, and I think sometimes are confused by language. And what do you want to see next in the sphere of linguistics? I think accepting that linguistic diversity is the normal human condition, the fact that the human mind has created not one way of perceiving reality, but thousands of them, is a real testament to the ingenuity and flexibility of the human mind.
[12:32 - 13:43]
And so if we start from that baseline assumption of diversity as the norm, that gives us a very different lens on what it means to be human and allows us to explore the human mind and all of its richness. So rather than starting with always American undergraduates of the same standard as human and then treating everyone else as some kind of aberration, right, Instead saying, okay, the human mind is much richer. There's so many more ways that humans can use their minds. And that also allows us to go and look for ways to expand our own thinking. So not just looking at other people and saying, oh, look how weird they think, how different they are. Turn the mirror on ourselves, too, and say, why do I think the things that I think? How did I come to believe these things? And that that allows you the expansion to think differently, but it also allows you the expansion to invent new ways of thinking or new ways of talking that suit the world that you actually want to live in, not just the world that you have inherited. Amazing. And finally, if you could speak any language in the world fluently, past or present, which would it be? Oh, my gosh. Well, all of them.
[13:46 - 14:32]
The language that I think would be most meaningful for me to learn, given where I live, is the Kumeyaay language. It is the traditional owners of the land in San Diego where I'm based, and there are still speakers of that language around. And I think it would be meaningful to connect to that land where I've now lived there for a decade, and I haven't learned any Kumeyaay, So I think that would be a very meaningful thing for me to learn. I don't know if that's going to happen. But obviously there are other languages that have a lot of use around the world, but sometimes it's good to do something that's just good for the soul. So I think that would be the one that would be best for the soul. Perfect. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
