词语控制你思维的5种疯狂方式.docx

1、词语控制你思维的5种疯狂方式5 Insane Ways Words Can Control Your Mind 发布时间：2012-04-03文章出自：原文链接：点击查看On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. Were automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if weve never seen either of them befo

2、re. Its totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and dont notice it. While we tend to think words are just sounds we make to express ideas, science is finding that language is more like a fun house mirror, warping what we see in mind-blowing ways. For instance . Kee

3、p in mind, Steve pulls this shit all the time. The answer largely depends on what language you speak. And the language wont just determine how you phrase it, but who you actually blame for the accident. An English speaker is more likely to name Steve as the responsible party - even if he wasnt jumpi

4、ng on the bed like a jackass but just sat on it. A speaker in Japan or Spain would be more likely to just say, It broke. Stanford scientists did experiments on this, by having speakers of various languages watch videos featuring, in various situations, people breaking eggs or popping balloons, somet

5、imes on purpose, sometimes on accident. The subjects didnt know why they were watching. Maybe its a kid-friendly version of Jackass? Later, the scientists quizzed the subjects on the people in the videos. In videos where the guy intentionally broke the egg, all of the subjects, regardless of languag

6、e, were equally good at remembering details of the guy. After all, hes the one who broke the egg. The video was about him, the egg breaker. Will nothing stop his madness? But when asked about the people who accidentally broke something, the Spanish and Japanese subjects - the groups more likely to u

7、se the bed broke earlier - couldnt remember them. Since it was an accident, the guy wasnt important. The egg broke. But us English speakers? We could remember him just fine. To us, the distinction between intentional and accidental was much less important. Somebody had to be blamed. Youd think that

8、this has less to do with the language and more to do with the culture - that maybe theyre just less prone to throw around blame in Japan. So they did another experiment, this time with just the English speakers. They had them watch the infamous Janet Jackson boob flash during the Super Bowl a few ye

9、ars ago. Seriously? This pissed off millions of people? The group was then handed a report on the incident and told to come up with a punishment. Half of the group got a report with a very subtle difference in wording: at the end instead of reading the costume ripped, it read Justin Timberlake rippe

10、d the costume. The people who got the second report levied fines 50 percent higher than the others. Even though they had all watched the same video about the same incident. Just changing the phrasing to imply blame changed the way they thought about it. Science is just beginning to grasp how this ch

11、anges a culture, but you can have fun thinking about it. For instance, during this election season, think about how much of the debate centered around figuring out who is to blame for each problem. Whose fault is it that the health care system is screwed up? Washington? The insurance companies? The

12、lawyers? We must know! It has to be somebody, dammit. It cant just be, you know, some kind of complex, chaotic system subject to a billion variables no one understands. To phrase something that way, even if its an accident or a natural disaster, feels weird to us. The story needs a villain. Say we w

13、ant to come to your house, to crash on your sofa for a couple of months because, you know, Steve broke our bed. When you give us directions youll say something like, Turn left at the adult book store and go down two blocks . Thats the way you think through the directions in your head, after all - tu

14、rn left here, turn right there. U-turn at the hobo. But lets say that somehow you never had the word left in your language. Well, youd still have the idea of turning left, right? Youd just have a different term for it. Its not like youd actually have a tougher time finding your house just because yo

15、u lacked a certain word. Actually . yes you would. Figuring this out required a unique set of test subjects, but researchers found them in a bunch of deaf kids in Nicaragua who invented their own sign language. This language, in its early stages, had no terms for left or right. But the people who us

16、ed the language were otherwise normal - their other senses worked exactly the same as yours. Youd think that while they had a tougher time explaining where things were in a room, theyd be the same as you or me at finding things. Theyre not. They took the sign language speakers, blindfolded them, spu

17、n them around and had them try to relocate an object they had just watched being hidden in the room. For you and most people you know, its a super easy test - the object is on the floor to the left of the window. For other sign language speakers, its not much harder. But these guys sucked at it. Har

18、d. Lacking the terms for directions like, to the left of the window didnt just make it harder for them to tell you where the object was - it made it harder for them to tell themselves where it was, when trying to remind themselves inside their head. Their ability to figure out where things were was

19、dictated by their language. Theyd eventually find it, but it was a much slower and more difficult process for them. They lacked the internal language to orient themselves properly. Whats the sign for, cant-read-a-damn-map? It gets weirder. If we were to ask you to come pick us up so we could crash a

20、t your place, because our El Camino was in the shop, and we gave you the directions as, turn north at the Citgo station, go six blocks, then turn west at the Hooters, then south down the alley . would you tell us to go fuck ourselves? Hell, without a compass some of you cant even point which way is

21、north from your own living room, let alone in a strange city. What the fuck did that airport security guard mean by east? But you could go kidnap an Aboriginal tribesman from Australia and hed immediately know which way is which. Hed know at any given second which direction hes facing. He has to kno

22、w, because in the Aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr they also dont have words that mean left or right or in front of or behind. They give all directions in terms of north/south/east/west. Seriously. If youre trying to hang a flat-screen TV on their wall they wont say, Move it two inches to the left. Theyll

23、 say, Move it two inches east. Now youd think that, in practical terms, this would be pretty freaking annoying. But it turns out sticking to the compass gives them an almost supernatural sense of direction, and its because they have to - their language doesnt work otherwise. Because they speak in te

24、rms of geocentric directions, they also think in those terms. They could probably get around most cities better than you, even if theyve never been inside of a car. Everyones perception of colors should be the same. We have the same retinal structure due to evolution and the same wavelengths of ligh

25、t shooting at us. Illustrated here, probably. And whats all this taupe bullshit? Shes not. Experiments have found that whether or not you can register a color depends on whether or not you have a name for it in your language. You can see the color, it just doesnt register in your mind. One study com

26、pared some young children from England with kids from a tribe in Nambia. In the English language, young kids usually learn 11 basic colors (black, white, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple and brown) but in Himba its only five. For instance, they lump red, orange and pink together

27、and call it serandu. We dont know what they call that hairstyle, but we call it awesome. If you showed the Himba toddler a pink card and then later showed him a red one and ask if theyre the same card, the kid would often mistakenly say yes - because theyre both serandu. Same as if you showed you Eg

28、gshell and an hour later showed you Bone and asked if it was the same card from before. Now, again, they can see the colors; if you hold up a pink card and a red card next to each other, the English kid and Himba kid both would say theyre different. But not when they see them one at a time. But if y

29、ou teach him the new names for the colors, that one is pink and the other is red, from then on he can identify them when seen by themselves, without the other one for comparison. Same as the girl or interior decorator who can immediately identify eggshell as distinct from ivory the moment she sees i

30、t on a wall, while her boyfriend couldnt do it with a gun to his head. The ability to recognize the color comes with having a name for it. Also, with giving a shit. Likewise, Turkish and Russian both split what we call blue into two different colors, for the darker and lighter shades. Therefore they

31、 consistently do a better job than English speakers when given the same is this blue card the same as the last blue card test. Even weirder, when testing the Russians they found that by giving them a verbal distraction (making them try to memorize a string of numbers while doing the color test) the

32、advantage disappeared. It was the language part of their brain that was helping them see the color. Prev Page 1 of 2 Next Recommended For Your Pleasure Add New Comment 1110 Comments i looked at a ladder before and it took a full 5 seconds or so for the word ladder to come to mind. for a few seconds i had no idea what i was looking at it was colours and shapes. trippy article Reply So how does #3 apply to San Francisco gays? Reply