Showing posts with label BBC Future. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC Future. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
"The myth that women are more naturally empathetic than men" from BBC Future
I found this article fascinating--and hopeful, showing that empathy is innate and available to all.
"The myth that women are more naturally empathetic than men"
by Melissa Hogenboom* | BBC Future
February 15, 2026
Scientific research is up-ending age-old gender stereotypes about empathy – and revealing new ways of thinking about masculinity.
When women achieve great things, it was erroneously supposed that "they were not Women who did those Great Actions, but that they were Men in Petticoats!", the philosopher Mary Astell wrote in 1705. Even Queen Elizabeth I once famously said that she'd rule the country like a king, despite having the body of a "feeble woman" – as if ruling had to be a masculine path.
While these anecdotes are from the past, subtle gendered biases of what it means to be a successful, powerful individual still permeate.
Notably, we still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.
One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.
But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?
Gender stereotypes like these have clear consequences on how we raise our children, workplace culture and leadership. But what's less visible is how early these biases start, and the fact that stereotypes reinforce our expectations – imposing significant constraints on how we expect others to behave.
The hormones behind empathy
Empathy involves both the ability to understand others' thoughts and feelings, allowing us to respond appropriately. It can also be thought of in terms of cognitive empathy – our ability to recognise emotions and take other perspectives – and affective or emotional empathy, where we have an emotional response to someone's thoughts and feelings.
Scientists use a variety of methods to empirically measure empathy, including questionnaires and experiential tasks.
And it's long been found that, on average, women tend to consistently score higher than men.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a clinical psychologist at Cambridge University, argues that it is because the female brain is "predominantly hard-wired for empathy", which makes women especially suited for caring roles, while the male brain is "predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems".
While social factors clearly influence empathy, says Baron-Cohen, his work suggests that hormone exposure in the womb plays a role in social development.
His 2006 study of over 200 children aged 6-9 found that testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid during pregnancy – which are higher in males than in females – are directly correlated with how the children performed on cognitive tests on systemising, defined as the ability to analyse rules or patterns. Indeed, testosterone exposure in the womb was a stronger predictor of a child's test scores than their sex alone.
A similar 2007 study also showed that foetal exposure to testosterone was inversely correlated with empathy test scores.
"What's clear is that something like empathy or systemising are a complex mix of biology and social factors," says Baron-Cohen.
Is empathy in the genes?
Many other researchers, such as neuroscientist Gina Rippon, find this hormonal theory problematic. "The idea that all women are naturally more empathic is part of the persistence of the so-called 'female brain myth'," she says. We also must remember, says Rippon, that young children's brains are "hugely responsive to outside influences".
In one seminal study that found gender differences in empathy tasks, the differences were not large: women were more empathetic in 36 of the 57 countries studied, but in 21 countries the scores were very similar, and the authors stated that they "cannot determine causation".
And though women do score slightly higher than average on empathy studies, the range of variation within genders is much greater than between them. "If you look at the spread of the empathy scores within the male and female populations, it's huge," says Rippon.
Girls and women are often said to be more attuned to the faces of others, an important skillset needed for empathy, but results are mixed, and recent research suggests this preference is not something they are born with. A meta-analysis published in 2025 examined 31 studies featuring 40 separate experiments on how one-month-old girls and boys observed others' faces, if they cried when others cried and how alert they were to those surrounding them. In all these measures, no matter the sex, the infants did not differ in their social awareness and keenness in understanding others' emotions.
Indeed, a 2018 large-scale genetic study of empathy involving over 46,000 participants who completed a questionnaire and submitted DNA samples, suggested that genes do play a role in how empathetic a person is. But none of these genes are associated with a person's sex.
Varun Warrier, an assistant professor of neurodevelopmental research at Cambridge University and author of the study, explained at the time that "since only a tenth of the variation in the degree of empathy between individuals is down to genetics, it is equally important to understand the non-genetic factors". This means that the environment in which someone grows up and lives must be playing a role.
The socialisation of empathy
Women tend to display empathetic traits more, not because they are innate, many scientists argue, but because girls and women are socialised to act on their emotions and to prioritise the needs of others from an extremely young age. Girls are also often presented with toys that emphasise softer, more nurturing skills, while boys are encouraged to play with toy tools and cars.
"Little girls are told to be nice and not to be unkind and rough, so it gradually becomes part of who they are," says Rippon.
Many studies have similarly shown that power distorts our empathy and inhibits people from feeling it. In my book Breadwinners, I outline the argument that, as men have historically had more power than women – and continue to do so in business and politics – they are therefore more likely to experience less empathy.
One study found that individuals who perceived themselves as having "lower subjective rank, lower income and belonging to cultural groups associated with the lower class" were better at reading the emotions of others, for instance. That women score higher on empathy could therefore stem from a need to be highly perceptive to those in power, coupled with their own relative lack of power.
Empathy is a malleable trait
Crucially, empathy can be learned, according to Nathan Spreng, a neurologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. "Once we understand this idea of a range of emotional experience, we can focus on it and learn what other people's emotions are, and improve our empathy," Spreng said on the BBC's The Documentary Podcast. "It's not static, it's a dynamic thing across the lifespan."
A 2023 neurological study clearly shows that both women's and men's brain waves respond in much the same way when shown images of painful or neutral facial expressions. But in the part of the experiment where participants completed empathy questionnaires rating how empathetic they felt, men scored lower than women did on average. That is, unless they were told beforehand that they'd score well.
In the group of men who were primed with information suggesting that men are also naturally "good at sharing and caring for the feelings of others", the gender differences in how empathetic they felt disappeared.
Not only do these findings suggest that self-reported empathy experiments are hard to untangle from a slew of personal and social biases, but they also further support the hypothesis that a person's expectations and motivations play a major role in their empathy.
Women "tend to come out as more empathic when they know their empathy levels are being assessed", says Rippon, of experiments like these. "It's a socially acceptable trait, so they want to score highly."
One study found that women only outperformed men on a task asking them to accurately infer someone else's feelings when they were first asked to reflect on how they felt. If they weren't nudged in this way, there was no observed gender gap. And when researchers offered participants money to infer others' feelings accurately, empathic accuracy improved for both genders. Participants easily learned to be empathetic because there was a reward for doing so.
Sara Hodges, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and co-author of this study, proposes that women may show improved empathic accuracy not due to an innate ability, but because they are more motivated to do so by societal expectations.
Rather than viewing empathy as a fixed trait we should see it as a process that draws upon multiple sources of information, including body language, speech, stereotypes, personal experiences and past interactions, according to Hodges. "When people are more motivated to know what someone is thinking or feeling, they recruit more sources for constructing that," says Hodges.
The dire consequences of the empathy bias
What is less talked about, says Hodges, is that empathy isn't just a soft skill used for good – it can also be used to manipulate others or exploit people. "For example, in negotiation, if you know the other person's bottom line, you're a better negotiator," says Hodges.
But ultimately, the consequences of expectations surrounding empathy and the like can contribute to inequality in society and have dire consequences for both women and men.
Women are judged as less likely to have leadership potential than men because we tend to see leaders as needing to be dominant and assertive, traits typically associated with masculinity.
But when it comes to loneliness, women are more likely to seek support from their social network than men. Social isolation, instead, is a known risk factor for attempting suicide, the rate of which is much higher among men.
Fortunately, the narrative about the importance of emotional skills among men and women is slowly changing, including the importance of empathy towards others and caring responsibilities, according to Niall Hanlon, a sociologist from Technological University Dublin, in Ireland.
"Broadly speaking, men and boys are socialised to not see care in the way that women and girls do, that it's not part of the trajectory of being a man," says Hanlon. "They do imagine themselves to be fathers, but they don't expect that they will be in a primary caring position."
But society is already shifting to pave the way for more men to embrace caring responsibilities and be more outwardly empathetic. Men are spending more time with children than in the past, and they state they want to spend more time with their family (though women still do the bulk of flexible working and childcare).
The work being done to reframe men as more caring and empathetic will open the door to a new type of masculinity that could help prevent loneliness, says Hanlon – one that emphasises interdependence and empathy rather than autonomous, power-focused individuals.
"There's a lot of research that shows this is much better," says Hanlon. "For men, women and children."
* Melissa Hogenboom is a BBC health correspondent and author of the Breadwinners (2025) and The Motherhood Complex.
Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260213-are-women-naturally-more-empathetic-than-men
Monday, November 13, 2023
"11 mind-boggling facts about time" from BBC Future
11 mind-boggling facts about time
By BBC Future Staff
11th November 2023
This week, we're launching a special series called "Time: The Ultimate Guide". To kick things off, here are some of the most fascinating facts we've learnt to date…
To mark the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we'll be spending the next week tackling the big questions about time, including the science of time travel, how clocks have shaped humanity, and even the mind-bending temporal consequences of flying into a black hole.
We're starting our ultimate guide with 11 mind-bending facts about the physics, psychology and history of time, plucked from the BBC Future archive. Read on to learn why there's more to time than meets the eye.
1. YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECTS YOUR PERCEPTION OF TIME
Think of time as a line. Which direction does it flow? Is it horizontal or vertical? Or perhaps it is not a line at all for you. The answers to these questions may very well depend on what language you speak.
Much of the way we perceive the time is influenced by the language we use. For example, English speakers describe time as being in front or behind them, or as a horizontal line moving left to right. Mandarin speakers envision time as a vertical line where down represents the future, while Greek people tend to view time as a three dimensional entity that is "big" or "much" rather than "long". In Pormpuraww, a remote Indigenous Australian community, time is arranged according to east and west.
2. WHEN THE UNIVERSE EVENTUALLY DIES THERE WILL BE NO MORE FUTURE AND NO PAST
Much like us, the way time passes changes will change as the Universe ages. The "arrow of time", which points from the past towards the future, is thought to have its origins in the Big Bang. The infant Universe is thought to have had very low entropy – a measure of disorder or randomness. Since then, entropy has been increasing – this change is what gives the arrow of time its directionality. It's the same reason it's easy to crack a fresh egg, but extremely hard to take a mess of shards and yolk and create a whole fresh egg.
No one knows what will happen at the end of the Universe, but a strong contender is "heat death", where entropy will have reached a maximum and the arrow of time will lose its direction. Think of it as all the eggs in the Universe being already smashed, and after that nothing interesting ever happens again.
3. IT MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE TO HAVE CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE WITHOUT TIME
We count, therefore we are. The ticking of time is the invisible heartbeat of our lives, and affects every moment of our consciousness. Time and self are in perpetual handshake – even a human trapped in a completely dark cave would still be governed by the circadian rhythms of our internal clocks.
Holly Andersen, who studies the philosophy of science and metaphysics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, warns about what losing our sense of time could do to our sense of self. She believes it's not possible to have conscious experience without time and the passage of time. Think about how your personal identity is built over time, filed away as memories.
"These memories constitute you over time," says Andersen. "If you lose a bunch of time you are now a different person."
4. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A CLOCK WITH 100% ACCURACY
Metrologists work very hard to keep time, using ever-finer technology to measure the passing of minutes, seconds and hours. However, while their atomic clocks are incredibly accurate, they're not perfect. In fact, there is no clock on Earth that is entirely "correct".
The actual process of defining what time it is – right now – is based on lots of clocks, all keeping time around the world. National laboratories all send their time-keeping to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, which then creates a weighted average. The time, therefore, is a human construct.
5. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME IS ACTIVELY CREATED BY OUR MINDS
Various factors are crucial to our construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow located in space. Our time perception roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.
The upside is that this gives us some measure of control over how we experience it. For example, if you want to feel like your life is not rushing past you, the key is novelty: research shows that a life of repetitive and routine activities will feel, as you reflect on it, that time is moving faster.
6. THERE ARE CITIZENS OF THE 22ND CENTURY ALREADY AMONG US – BUT THEY'RE NOT TIME TRAVELLERS
The next century can often feel very far away: a distant land, where hypothetical unborn generations live. However, there are millions of people on Earth right now who will be there when the fireworks go off on New Year's Eve 2099. A child born in 2023 will be their 70s. We're far more connected across long spans of time than we might realise. Through our family ties, we're all just a hop, skip and a jump away from past and future centuries.
7. WE CAN ALL EXPERIENCE A TIME WARP
Time does not always flow at the same rate for everyone. Is time all in the mind?
A car skids for what feels like an age, spraying gravel into the air where it hangs motionless. Time slows almost to a standstill and, in that moment, you react and dive for safety. In situations like this, stress can prompt the brain to speed up its internal processing – to help you handle a life-or-death situation.
Brain disorders such as epilepsy or stroke, too, can cause temporal tricks of the mind – speeding time up or stopping it dead. Some people, like athletes, can even train their brain to create a time warp on demand; a surfer catching a wave at the perfect moment, an unstoppable footballer.
Time, it seems, is a fragile illusion. In a moment we could find ourselves in an altered reality.
8. WHEN THE CLOCKS CHANGE FOR DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, WE HAVE ONE BUILDER TO THANK (OR BLAME)
Changing the clocks for summer – to make the most of long daylight hours at higher latitudes – is not universally embraced by everyone. But love it or hate it, there's a stubborn British campaigner you can thank. Without a builder called William Willett, a quarter of the world – including the US – might never have adopted daylight saving time.
After Willett managed to persuade political leaders, Britain made the change during World War One. The move came about because of a coal shortage – and longer daylight hours meant less need for coal-powered electricity to keep the lights on. It was such an effective idea that in World War Two, Britain took it a step further and temporarily ran on Double Summer Time, a full two hours ahead of GMT, to save on industrial costs.
9. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT
As you read these words, it's easy to assume that it's "now". However, it's not.
Take the simple act of looking at a person speaking to you across a table. The confirmation of them moving their lips reaches our eyes before the sound of their voice (because light travels faster than sound) but our brain syncs them up to make them match.
10. OUR DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER DUE TO THE MOON'S GRAVITY
It might surprise you to know that the Moon – our planet's constant orbital companion in the astro-ballet we perform around the Sun – is inching away from us. Every year the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases by 1.5in (3.8cm). And as it does so, it is making our days ever so slightly longer in the process.
This is down to the tug of the Moon's gravity on our planet. The gravitational pull of the Moon creates tides, which are a "bulge" of water that extends in an elliptical shape both towards and away from the gravity of the Moon. But the Earth spins on its axis much faster than the Moon orbits above, meaning friction from the ocean basins drag the water along with them. This causes the bulge to move slightly ahead of the Moon in its orbit, which in turn attempts to pull it backwards. This gradually saps our planet's rotational energy, slowing its spin while the Moon gains energy, causing it to move into a higher orbit and away from the Earth.
The incremental braking of our planet's spin has caused the length of an average Earth day to increase by about 1.09 milliseconds per century since the late 1600s. Other estimates put the figure a little higher, at 1.78ms per century by drawing on more ancient observations of eclipses. While none of this sounds like much, over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, it adds up.
11. MANY PEOPLE LIVE OUTSIDE CONVENTIONAL TIME – FOR THEM, IT'S NOT 2023
For many Nepalis, this article was not published in 2023. In the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar, it's actually the year 2080. At least four calendars are used among different ethnic groups there, and Nepal is even 15 minutes out of sync with standard time zones.
It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years simultaneously. In Myanmar, it's also 1384, in Thailand it's 2566, and in Ethiopia it's 2016, where the year lasts 13 months. The Islamic calendar, meanwhile, marked the arrival of the year 1445 in July.
Link to original article with additional information and video about each item:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231110-11-mind-boggling-facts-about-time
By BBC Future Staff
11th November 2023
This week, we're launching a special series called "Time: The Ultimate Guide". To kick things off, here are some of the most fascinating facts we've learnt to date…
To mark the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we'll be spending the next week tackling the big questions about time, including the science of time travel, how clocks have shaped humanity, and even the mind-bending temporal consequences of flying into a black hole.
We're starting our ultimate guide with 11 mind-bending facts about the physics, psychology and history of time, plucked from the BBC Future archive. Read on to learn why there's more to time than meets the eye.
1. YOUR LANGUAGE AFFECTS YOUR PERCEPTION OF TIME
Think of time as a line. Which direction does it flow? Is it horizontal or vertical? Or perhaps it is not a line at all for you. The answers to these questions may very well depend on what language you speak.
Much of the way we perceive the time is influenced by the language we use. For example, English speakers describe time as being in front or behind them, or as a horizontal line moving left to right. Mandarin speakers envision time as a vertical line where down represents the future, while Greek people tend to view time as a three dimensional entity that is "big" or "much" rather than "long". In Pormpuraww, a remote Indigenous Australian community, time is arranged according to east and west.
2. WHEN THE UNIVERSE EVENTUALLY DIES THERE WILL BE NO MORE FUTURE AND NO PAST
Much like us, the way time passes changes will change as the Universe ages. The "arrow of time", which points from the past towards the future, is thought to have its origins in the Big Bang. The infant Universe is thought to have had very low entropy – a measure of disorder or randomness. Since then, entropy has been increasing – this change is what gives the arrow of time its directionality. It's the same reason it's easy to crack a fresh egg, but extremely hard to take a mess of shards and yolk and create a whole fresh egg.
No one knows what will happen at the end of the Universe, but a strong contender is "heat death", where entropy will have reached a maximum and the arrow of time will lose its direction. Think of it as all the eggs in the Universe being already smashed, and after that nothing interesting ever happens again.
3. IT MAY NOT BE POSSIBLE TO HAVE CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE WITHOUT TIME
We count, therefore we are. The ticking of time is the invisible heartbeat of our lives, and affects every moment of our consciousness. Time and self are in perpetual handshake – even a human trapped in a completely dark cave would still be governed by the circadian rhythms of our internal clocks.
Holly Andersen, who studies the philosophy of science and metaphysics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, warns about what losing our sense of time could do to our sense of self. She believes it's not possible to have conscious experience without time and the passage of time. Think about how your personal identity is built over time, filed away as memories.
"These memories constitute you over time," says Andersen. "If you lose a bunch of time you are now a different person."
4. THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A CLOCK WITH 100% ACCURACY
Metrologists work very hard to keep time, using ever-finer technology to measure the passing of minutes, seconds and hours. However, while their atomic clocks are incredibly accurate, they're not perfect. In fact, there is no clock on Earth that is entirely "correct".
The actual process of defining what time it is – right now – is based on lots of clocks, all keeping time around the world. National laboratories all send their time-keeping to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, which then creates a weighted average. The time, therefore, is a human construct.
5. THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME IS ACTIVELY CREATED BY OUR MINDS
Various factors are crucial to our construction of the perception of time – memory, concentration, emotion and the sense we have that time is somehow located in space. Our time perception roots us in our mental reality. Time is not only at the heart of the way we organise life, but the way we experience it.
The upside is that this gives us some measure of control over how we experience it. For example, if you want to feel like your life is not rushing past you, the key is novelty: research shows that a life of repetitive and routine activities will feel, as you reflect on it, that time is moving faster.
6. THERE ARE CITIZENS OF THE 22ND CENTURY ALREADY AMONG US – BUT THEY'RE NOT TIME TRAVELLERS
The next century can often feel very far away: a distant land, where hypothetical unborn generations live. However, there are millions of people on Earth right now who will be there when the fireworks go off on New Year's Eve 2099. A child born in 2023 will be their 70s. We're far more connected across long spans of time than we might realise. Through our family ties, we're all just a hop, skip and a jump away from past and future centuries.
7. WE CAN ALL EXPERIENCE A TIME WARP
Time does not always flow at the same rate for everyone. Is time all in the mind?
A car skids for what feels like an age, spraying gravel into the air where it hangs motionless. Time slows almost to a standstill and, in that moment, you react and dive for safety. In situations like this, stress can prompt the brain to speed up its internal processing – to help you handle a life-or-death situation.
Brain disorders such as epilepsy or stroke, too, can cause temporal tricks of the mind – speeding time up or stopping it dead. Some people, like athletes, can even train their brain to create a time warp on demand; a surfer catching a wave at the perfect moment, an unstoppable footballer.
Time, it seems, is a fragile illusion. In a moment we could find ourselves in an altered reality.
8. WHEN THE CLOCKS CHANGE FOR DAYLIGHT SAVINGS, WE HAVE ONE BUILDER TO THANK (OR BLAME)
Changing the clocks for summer – to make the most of long daylight hours at higher latitudes – is not universally embraced by everyone. But love it or hate it, there's a stubborn British campaigner you can thank. Without a builder called William Willett, a quarter of the world – including the US – might never have adopted daylight saving time.
After Willett managed to persuade political leaders, Britain made the change during World War One. The move came about because of a coal shortage – and longer daylight hours meant less need for coal-powered electricity to keep the lights on. It was such an effective idea that in World War Two, Britain took it a step further and temporarily ran on Double Summer Time, a full two hours ahead of GMT, to save on industrial costs.
9. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT
As you read these words, it's easy to assume that it's "now". However, it's not.
Take the simple act of looking at a person speaking to you across a table. The confirmation of them moving their lips reaches our eyes before the sound of their voice (because light travels faster than sound) but our brain syncs them up to make them match.
10. OUR DAYS ARE GETTING LONGER DUE TO THE MOON'S GRAVITY
It might surprise you to know that the Moon – our planet's constant orbital companion in the astro-ballet we perform around the Sun – is inching away from us. Every year the distance between the Earth and the Moon increases by 1.5in (3.8cm). And as it does so, it is making our days ever so slightly longer in the process.
This is down to the tug of the Moon's gravity on our planet. The gravitational pull of the Moon creates tides, which are a "bulge" of water that extends in an elliptical shape both towards and away from the gravity of the Moon. But the Earth spins on its axis much faster than the Moon orbits above, meaning friction from the ocean basins drag the water along with them. This causes the bulge to move slightly ahead of the Moon in its orbit, which in turn attempts to pull it backwards. This gradually saps our planet's rotational energy, slowing its spin while the Moon gains energy, causing it to move into a higher orbit and away from the Earth.
The incremental braking of our planet's spin has caused the length of an average Earth day to increase by about 1.09 milliseconds per century since the late 1600s. Other estimates put the figure a little higher, at 1.78ms per century by drawing on more ancient observations of eclipses. While none of this sounds like much, over the course of the Earth's 4.5-billion-year history, it adds up.
11. MANY PEOPLE LIVE OUTSIDE CONVENTIONAL TIME – FOR THEM, IT'S NOT 2023
For many Nepalis, this article was not published in 2023. In the Nepali Bikram Sambat calendar, it's actually the year 2080. At least four calendars are used among different ethnic groups there, and Nepal is even 15 minutes out of sync with standard time zones.
It turns out many cultures are fine with experiencing multiple years simultaneously. In Myanmar, it's also 1384, in Thailand it's 2566, and in Ethiopia it's 2016, where the year lasts 13 months. The Islamic calendar, meanwhile, marked the arrival of the year 1445 in July.
Link to original article with additional information and video about each item:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231110-11-mind-boggling-facts-about-time
Sunday, January 8, 2023
"The weird way language affects our sense of time and space"
I've been meaning to post this amazing article from BBC Future for many weeks now, and finally, here it is, full of incredible, mind boggling insights about language and communication and psychology and how differently we perceive our movement through time, and thus the structure of the universe altogether.
The weird way language affects our sense of time and space
By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren*
3rd November 2022
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?
These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.
In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.
The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.
It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.
Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.
There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.
This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.
Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.
This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.
Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."
Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.
We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.
But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.
In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.
Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".
And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".
The same is also true in Spanish.
"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."
Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.
Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.
These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.
Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)
"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.
Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".
But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.
He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.
This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.
It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.
They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.
But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.
But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).
And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."
In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".
Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.
In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."
Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.
Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".
Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.
As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".
But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.
* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?
Link to original article on BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space
The weird way language affects our sense of time and space
By Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren*
3rd November 2022
The languages we speak can have a surprising impact on the way we think about the world and even how we move through it.
If you were asked to walk diagonally across a field, would you know what to do? Or what if you were offered £20 ($23) today or double that amount in a month, would you be willing to wait? And how would you line up 10 photos of your parents if you were instructed to sort them in chronological order? Would you place them horizontally or vertically? In which direction would the timeline move?
These might seem like simple questions, but remarkably, your answers to these questions are likely to be influenced by the language, or languages, you speak.
In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.
The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.
It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour. "This is a principle of cognition that I don't think anyone would dispute," says Casasanto.
Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation. But getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely. The central role that language plays in expressing ourselves also makes it hard to unpick it from these other influences.
There are ways around this conundrum, however. Casasanto, for example, often teaches people in his lab to use metaphors from other languages (in their own tongue) and investigates what impact this has on their thinking. We know that people often use metaphors to think about abstract concepts – for example, a "high price", "long time" or "deep mystery". This way, you are not comparing people from different cultures, which may influence the results. Instead you are focusing on how thinking changes in the same people from the same culture while speaking in two different ways. Any cultural differences are therefore removed from the equation.
Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. They might move meetings forward or push deadlines back. They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.
This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text. If you asked a Hebrew speaker to place photos on a timeline, they would most likely start from the right with the oldest images and then locate more recent ones to the left.
Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future. For example, they use the word xia ("down") when talking about future events, so that "next week" literally becomes "down week". As with English and Hebrew, this is also in line with how Mandarin traditionally was written and read – with lines running vertically, from the top of the page to the bottom.
This association between the way we read language and organise time in our thoughts also impacts our cognition when dealing with time. Speakers of different languages process temporal information faster if it's organised in a way that matches their language. One experiment, for example, showed that monolingual English people were quicker to determine whether a picture was from the past or the future (represented by science fiction-style images) if the button they had to press for the past was to the left of the button for future than if they were positioned the other way around. If the buttons were placed above or below each other, however, it made no difference.
Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."
Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But amazingly, this group was also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age.
We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to. They then react faster to statements that are consistent with time going the opposite way to what they are used to.
But things get even more interesting. In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.
In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other.
Casasanto noted that people tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about duration. For example, in English, French, German or the Scandinavian languages, a meeting can be "long" and a holiday "short". Casasanto showed that these metaphors are more than ways of talking – people conceptualise "lengths" of time as if they were lines in space. He initially believed this was universally true for all people, regardless of the languages they speak. But when presenting his findings at a conference in Greece, he was interrupted by a local researcher who insisted this wasn't correct for her language. "My first response was a bit dismissive," admits Casasanto, who had doubled down on his view. Eventually, though, he says that he "stopped talking and started listening".
And the result changed the course of his research to focus on language-related differences rather than universals in thinking. What he discovered was that Greek people tend to view time as a three-dimensional entity, like a bottle, which can fill up or empty out. A meeting, therefore, isn't "long" but "big" or "much", while a break isn't "short" but "small".
The same is also true in Spanish.
"I can talk about 'long time' [in English], but if I use this expression in Greek, people will look at me funny," explains Athanasopoulos, who is a native Greek speaker. "They will think I'm using it in a poetic way or in a way to emphasise it."
Athanasopoulos, who found Casasanto's results fascinating, set out to investigate this issue. He sat Swedish and Spanish speakers in front of a computer screen and asked them to estimate how much time had passed when either watching a line grow or a container fill up. The trick was that these events occurred at different rates. Monolingual Swedish speakers were easily misled when the line was shown – they believed a longer line meant more time had passed, even if that wasn't the case. Their time estimates weren't, however, influenced by a filling container. For Spanish speakers, it was the other way around.
Athanasopoulos then went further, looking at bilingual Spanish and Swedish speakers – and what he found was remarkable. When the Swedish word for duration (tid) appeared in the top corner of the computer screen, the participants estimated time using line length and weren't affected by container volume. But when this changed to the Spanish word for duration (duración), the results completely reversed. The extent to which the bilinguals were affected by the time metaphors of their second language was related to how proficient they were in that language.
These language quirks are fascinating, but how much impact do they really have on our thinking? Casasanto raises a curious point. When you imagine time on a line, each point is fixed so that two points of time cannot swap places – there's a strict arrow. But in a container, points of time are floating around – and potentially capable of swapping places. "I've long wondered whether our physics of time might be shaped by the fact that English, German and French speakers were instrumental in creating it," he says.
Interestingly, time is an increasingly tricky problem in physics, standing in the way of uniting its different branches. Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously – as if they were points swimming around in a bottle. So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics. (Read more about whether time goes in just one direction.)
"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.
Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regnet, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar. The same is true for many other languages, including Mandarin, where external circumstances often denote that something is taking place in the future, such as "I go on holiday next month".
But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.
He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.
This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen.
It is also backed by a 2018 experiment in the bilingual city Meran/Merano, in northern Italy, where about half the inhabitants speak German, a futureless language, and the other half Italian, a futured language. The researchers tested 1,154 primary school children's ability to resist temptation by asking them whether they would like two tokens (which could be exchanged for presents) at the end of the experiment or a bigger reward (three, four or five tokens) in four weeks.
They discovered that German-speaking children were on average 16 percentage points more likely to be able to wait for a larger number of tokens than Italian-speaking children – in line with Chen's hypothesis. The results still held when controlling for risk attitudes, IQ, family background and residential area.
But the effects of language can extend even further into our physical world – influencing how we orient ourselves in space. Different languages can force us to think in terms of specific "reference frames". As Boroditsky and her colleague Alice Gaby have shown, Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre people in Australia, for example, use cardinal directions – north, south, east, west – to talk about even mundane things, such as "the cup is on your south-west". This is called an "absolute" reference frame – the coordinates provided are independent of the observer's viewpoint or the location of reference objects.
But many languages, including English, use rather clumsy terms for spatial orientation – such as "next to", "left of", "behind" or "above". As if that wasn't enough, we also have to calculate which frame of reference they apply in. If someone tells you to pick up the keys on the right of a computer, do they mean on the computer's right-hand side or to the right of the computer from your perspective when facing it? The former is called an "intrinsic" reference frame (having two reference points: computer and keys) and the latter a "relative" reference frame (there are three reference points: computer, keys and observer).
And this can shape how we think – and navigate. Tenbrink's and her colleagues have compared the use of reference frames in English and Spanish. In one experiment, she asked people to decide whether an object, say a ball, was left or right of a central figure: an animal, human or object, based on two descriptions given in English or Spanish. For example: "I see a dog. The ball is on the left of the dog." Or: "I see a dog, the ball is on the dog's left."
In English, those two descriptions can denote two different sides of the dog, whereas in Spanish they both refer to what English speakers would think of as the "dog's left".
Spanish monolinguals located the ball using the intrinsic reference frame 78% of the time and English monolinguals 52% of the time. English speakers only chose the intrinsic frame if the possessive sentence, "the ball is on the dog's left", was used. The phrasing didn't matter to Spanish speakers. They simply preferred the intrinsic frame, unless the object was inanimate – it was a vase or a car rather than a dog, statue or human.
In a follow-up study, Tenbrink showed that bilingual Spanish and English speakers were somewhere in the middle between monolingual Spanish and English speakers, and were more influenced by the reference frame used most commonly in the country they lived in. "Spanish and English speakers interpret spatial relationships in a slightly different way," says Tenbrink. "And once the speaker speaks both languages, their preferences shift in different ways. I thought that was quite fascinating because people won't normally realise that their preferences shift because they have learned a second language."
Either way, it's something to keep in mind if you're picking a meeting place with someone who speaks a different language to you.
Speakers of some languages also focus more on actions than the wider context. When watching videos involving motion, English, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian speakers tended to describe what happened in terms of action, such as "a man walking". Speakers of German, Afrikaans and Swedish, on the other hand, focused on the holistic picture, including the end point, describing it as "a man walks towards a car".
Athanasopoulos recalls an incident which laid bare how this can interfere with navigation. While working on a linguistic project, he went for a hike with a group of international researchers in the English countryside. Aiming to get from a town to a small village, they had to get through a private estate by walking across a field, as instructed by a sign with the message: "Walk across the field diagonally." To the English and Spanish speakers, this was intuitive. But a German speaker hesitated, looking slightly confused. When shown the path across the field, at the end of which there was a church, she finally concluded: "Ah, so you mean we should walk towards the church?" She needed a start and end point to picture the diagonal the sign was referring to.
As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it. Which is not to say that any one language is "better" than another. As Tenbrink argues, "a language will develop what its users need".
But being aware of how languages differ can help you think, navigate and communicate better. And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.
* Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren are science journalists and authors of Are You Thinking Clearly?
Link to original article on BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221103-how-language-warps-the-way-you-perceive-time-and-space
Tuesday, November 15, 2022
"Why does time go forwards, not backwards?" by Martha Henriques for BBC Future
I've been meaning to share this fascinating article from BBC Future for a little while now. I am a bit of armchair physicist so this is really interesting to me. And as we have seen, modern physics also incorporates philosophy and spirituality to varying degrees, areas that I am also interested in.
Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022
The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?
When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.
The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."
How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"
Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.
But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.
GATHERING STEAM
In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.
In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."
As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.
To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."
So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.
Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.
This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.
"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.
"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.
While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.
"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?
"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."
The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."
Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."
Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."
Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."
Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.
There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.
"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."
This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.
It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."
The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.
HUMAN TIME
The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".
"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."
This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."
There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".
The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.
"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."
These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.
"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."
That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.
To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.
"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.
"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.
"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"
Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards
Why does time go forwards, not backwards?
By Martha Henriques
3rd October 2022
The arrow of time began its journey at the Big Bang, and when the Universe eventually dies there will be no more future and no past. In the meantime, what is it that drives time ever onward?
When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. Without them, we couldn't have landed people on the Moon 282 years later. But these laws brought to physics a new problem, which wasn't fully appreciated until centuries after Newton and still nags at cosmologists today.
The issue is that Newton's laws work about twice as well as we might expect them to. They describe the world we move through every day – the world of people, the hands that move around a clock and even the apocryphal fall of certain apples – but they also account perfectly well for a world in which people walk backwards, clocks tick back afternoon to morning, and fruit soars up from the ground to its tree-branch.
"The interesting feature of Newton's laws, which wasn't appreciated till much later, is that they don't distinguish between the past and the future," says the theoretical physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll, who discusses the nature of time in his latest book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. "But the directionality to time is its most obvious feature, right? I have photographs of the past, I don't have any photographs of the future."
The problem is not confined to the centuries-old theories of Newton. Virtually all of the cornerstone theories of physics since then have worked just as well going forward in time as they do backwards, says physicist Carlo Rovelli of the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, and the author of books including The Order of Time.
"Starting from Newton, and then Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, then Einstein's work, and then quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, general relativity, and even quantum gravity – there is no distinction between past and future," Rovelli says. "Which came as a surprise, because the distinction is so evident to all of us. If you make a movie, it's obvious which way is the future and which one is the past."
How does a clear direction of time emerge from these descriptions of the Universe, which all lack their own arrow of time? As Marina Cortês, an astrophysicist at the University of Lisbon, puts it: "There's a lot of implications that start with taking seriously the question, 'Why does time pass?'"
Part of the answer lies at the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. Another insight comes from the opposite extreme, in the Universe's eventual death.
But before embarking on this epic journey back and forth along the timeline of the Universe, it's worth stopping off in 1865, just as the first truly time-directional law of physics came hurtling down the tracks of the Industrial Revolution.
GATHERING STEAM
In the 19th Century, when coal was shovelled into furnaces to generate steam power, scientists and engineers hoping to develop better engines embraced a set of principles that described the relationship between heat, energy and motion. They became known as the laws of thermodynamics.
In Germany, 1865, the physicist Rudolf Clausius stated that heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one, if nothing else around them changes. Clausius came up with the concept he called "entropy" to measure this behaviour of heat – another way of saying heat never flows from a cold body to a hot one is to say "entropy only ever increases, never decreases."
As Rovelli stresses in The Order of Time, this is the only basic law of physics that can tell apart the past from the future. A ball can roll down a hill or be kicked back to its summit, but heat can't flow from cold to hot.
To illustrate, Rovelli picks up his pen and drops it from one hand to the other. "The reason this stops in my hand is that it has some energy, and then the energy is turned into heat and it warms up my hand. And the friction stops the bouncing. Otherwise, if there was no heat, this would bounce forever, and I would not distinguish the past from the future."
So far, so straightforward. That is, until you start to consider what heat is on a molecular level. The difference between hot things and cold things is how agitated their molecules are – in a hot steam engine, water molecules are very excited, careening around and colliding into each other rapidly. The very same water molecules are less agitated when they coalesce as condensation on a windowpane.
Here's the problem: when you zoom in to the level of, say, one water molecule colliding and bouncing off another, the arrow of time disappears. If you watched a microscopic video of that collision and then you rewound it, it wouldn’t be obvious which way was forwards and which backwards. At the very smallest scale, the phenomenon that produces heat – collisions of molecules – is time-symmetric.
This means that the arrow of time from past to future only emerges when you take a step back from the microscopic world to the macroscopic – something first appreciated by the Austrian physicist-philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann.
"So the direction of time comes from the fact that we look at big things, we don't look at the details," says Rovelli. "From this step, from the fundamental microscopic vision of the world to the coarse-grained, the approximate description of the macroscopic world – this is where the direction of time comes in.
"It's not that the world is fundamentally oriented in space and time," Rovelli says. It's that when we look around, we see a direction in which medium-sized, everyday things have more entropy – the ripened apple fallen from the tree, the shuffled pack of cards.
While entropy does seem to be inextricably bound up with the arrow of time, it feels a bit surprising – perhaps even disconcerting – that the one law of physics that has a strong directionality of time built into it loses this directionality when you look at very small things.
"What is entropy?" Rovelli says. "Entropy is simply how much we're forgetting about the microphysics, how much we are forgetting about the molecules."
THE BEGINNING AND THE END
If there is an arrow of time, where did it come from in the first place?
"The answer is embedded in the beginning of the Universe," says Carroll. "The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That's why time has a direction for us."
The extraordinarily low entropy of the Universe at the Big Bang is both an answer and an enormous question. "The thing we understand the least about the nature of time, is why the Big Bang had low entropy, why the early Universe was like that," says Carroll. "And I think honestly, as a working cosmologist, I think that my fellow cosmologists have dropped the ball on this one. They don't really take that problem seriously enough."
Carroll published a paper in 2004 with his colleague Jennifer Chen, in which they aimed to explain why the Universe had such low entropy close to the Big Bang, rather than just assuming or accepting this was the case. "There's plenty of loopholes in the theory, plenty of aspects of it that are not completely baked – but I also think it is by far the best theory on the market," says Carroll. "It doesn't cheat."
Other cosmologists agree that it is indeed time to turn serious thought to this problem of the Universe's low entropy origins. "The likelihood of our current Universe having initial conditions of this kind, and not any other kind, is around one in 10 to the 10 to 124 (1:10^10^124)," says Cortês. (Another way of saying it is that the event had a probability of 0.00…01 – with 10^(10^124) zeroes omitted – a number so large it's awkward to express in conventional maths, Cortês notes.) "I mean I could safely say, this is the largest number in modern physics, outside of philosophy or mathematics."
Simply taking such unlikely low-entropy origins as given is a grand case of "shoving the problem under the rug", Cortês says. "If physicists keep doing this, after a while it's going to be a very big pile under the rug. It's left to us cosmologists to explain why time only moves forward."
Even if we don't yet know why, the Universe's low entropy past is a plausible source of time's arrow. Like most things that have a beginning, the arrow will also have an end. The first person to spot this was, once again, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.
"Boltzmann thought, 'ah, entropy is growing in the Universe and maybe it's going to maximum at some point'," says Rovelli. At that point, heat would be evenly distributed throughout the Universe, no longer flowing from one place to another.
There would be no energy available in a useful form for doing work – in other words, almost nothing interesting would be happening throughout the entire Universe. As astrophysicist Katie Mack describes it, "As that process continues, everything is decaying so much that all that’s left is the waste heat of everything that ever existed in the Universe." This fate is known as the thermal death of the Universe, or heat death.
"Stars will stop burning, nothing will happen anymore. There will be nothing but small thermal fluctuations," says Rovelli. "Suppose this happens – and we don't know for certain if it's going to happen, but suppose it does – should we say that there is no time direction there? Of course there's no time direction, because every phenomenon that happened one way could also go one way or the other. Nothing will distinguish the two directions of time."
This is perhaps the strangest thing about the arrow of time: "It only lasts for a little while," says Carroll.
It's very hard to picture what might happen if the arrow of time eventually vanishes. "When we think we produce heat in our neurons," says Rovelli. "Thinking is a process in which the neuron needs entropy to work. Our sense of time passing is just what entropy does to our brain."
The arrow of time that arises from entropy brings us a long way closer to understanding why time only goes forward. But there may be more arrows of time than this one – in fact there is arguably an entire volley of arrows of time pointing from the past to the future. To understand these, we have to step from physics into philosophy.
HUMAN TIME
The ways that we intuitively understand and experience time shouldn't be taken lightly, says Jenann Ismael, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, New York. If you think about your own experience of time, you may soon be able to recognise several of the psychological arrows that form a core part of human experience. One of these arrows is what Ismael terms "flow".
"If you look out at the world, you don't experience a purely static representation of the instantaneous state of the world," she says, like in a movie made up of a number of static frames every second. "We see directly that the world is changing."
This experience of the flow of time is built into our perception. "Vision isn't like a movie camera at all," says Ismael. "Actually what happens is your brain is collecting information over some temporal period. It's integrating that information so that at any given moment, what you're seeing is a computation that the brain has done. So that you not only see that things are moving, you see how fast they're moving, the direction in which they're moving. So the whole time, your brain is integrating information over temporal intervals and giving you the result. So you see time, in a way."
There's a second feature of time that Ismael distinguishes from flow, which she terms "passage".
The idea of passage is closely bound up with time-oriented experiences such as memory and anticipation. Take the example of a wedding, or any much-anticipated life event. Our experience of these moments has many layers – from the fractious planning stages, to the intensity of the day itself, to recollections that stay with us for years. There is a directionality to these different experiences: the way we anticipate an event in the future is fundamentally different from how we remember it when it's passed.
"All of that is part of what I think of as the experience of passage, this idea that we experience every event as anticipated from the past, experienced in the present, remembered in retrospect," says Ismael. "It's kind of Proustian in its density."
These aspects of the directionality of psychological time – as well as many others, like the sense of openness we have about the future but not the past – could all trace their roots back to the arrow of time born of the Industrial Revolution.
"I think it does all come back to entropy," says Ismael. "I see no reason now to think that the kinds of arrows that are involved in human psychology are anything but ultimately rooted in the entropic arrow. But it's an empirical question. This project to understand human experience in relation to the entropic arrow, I've no reason to think it's going to fail."
That project is what Carroll hopes to do, taking several features of our experience of time and relating them back to entropy. His first target is causality, another element of the arrow of time, as causes happen before their effects.
To say the least, this project is a major undertaking for all physicists and philosophers involved. And still, lurking in the shadows behind all such efforts, there remains that nagging question about why entropy was so low in the earliest Universe.
"I think we understand why we have this sense of flowing," says Rovelli. "We understand why the past seems fixed to us that the future seems open. We understand why there are irreversible phenomena, and we can reduce all that to the second law of thermodynamics, to the rise of entropy.
"It's very much related to the fact that if we trace it back, back, back, to fact that the Universe started very small, in a very peculiar situation. Then somehow, it's falling down from that peculiar situation.
"But of course there's one question open, I mean, why? Why did it start in that particular way?"
Link to original article here:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221003-why-does-time-go-forwards-not-backwards
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
"Why we need to be more emotional to save the world" by Ari Wallach for BBC
Lovely article by Ari Wallach on BBC Future.
Why we need to be more emotional to save the world
By Ari Wallach*
1st March 2020
If our species wants to enjoy a long-term future, it might need to tap into the very human qualities of emotion.
Think about some of the knottiest problems facing the world today and the suggested solutions to them. Climate change? Answer it with carbon sequestering and transitions to clean energy. Migration? Answer it with streamlined visas and new systems of border control.
Humans tend to seek solutions to problems like these – both macro and micro, simple and complex – through a short-term, external perspective that doesn’t obligate individual participation.
In the West, the dominant approach to tackling the challenges we face has been to amputate emotion from our decision-making whenever possible. We instead opt for cold, technical solutions.
This hyper-rational perspective is at least as old as Aristotle, who described passions as capricious, dangerous roadblocks on the path to becoming fully human. It became integral to the Western ethos during the 18th Century Enlightenment and still persists today.
And there is a utilitarian wisdom to this position. Emotions can be stoked by forces outside of our control. Lynch mobs and market bubbles can occur when our emotions run away with themselves and feelings spread like contagions through crowds. Propagandists can exploit our emotions to stir up loyalty among their supporters and belligerence towards outsiders. In response, rational movements, such as Effective Altruism, hold that the best way to create positive, long-term change is through a dispassionate calculation of the greatest good one can generate through one’s actions.
But trying to suppress our emotional responses to our current circumstances cannot eliminate the role they play entirely. Our feelings are not only an integral part of our moral, social, and personal well-being, but also are vital tools for solving complex challenges we face individually, organisationally, and even as a species. As Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center says, “[Emotions] provide us with quintessential information about what’s important and what to do next and how to do it and who to do it with.”
Humanity is in a period of great upheaval. For people and organisations attempting to thrive in this tumultuous time, old mindsets and approaches no longer work. To create a better future where everyone can flourish, leaders and organisations need to find ways to engage and encourage emotions more fully.
In recent decades, an array of scientific insights have reshaped the way we view emotions, particularly in the way they affect how we think about the future. We have learned that emotions can be harnessed to guide us toward rational choices and cooperative action. Emotions can be geared toward long-term thinking and behaviour and are essential to the evaluation of simulated possible futures, known as “pragmatic prospection”.
If we are to truly shift course, to make individual commitments that allow us to build better futures, we need to find ways of using emotion to our advantage. For as Anne Frank said, “...feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem." They are and will always be a part of us and we need to learn how to leverage them for the betterment of ourselves and the generations to come.
A good starting point for developing this kind of mindset is to nurture a suite of feelings known as “self-transcendent emotions”. These emotions – which include feelings of empathy, gratitude, and awe – evolved to help manage social relationships with others and orient humans to a world that is bigger than themselves. They can be found in any coalitional behaviour – from hunting a woolly mammoth to building a suspension bridge – which requires people to sacrifice short-sighted, egoistic gains in order to work together toward mutual benefits. They also manifest in intimate, individual actions, such as the advent of grandparenting.
Self-transcendent emotions allow people to manage complex, cooperative situations without needing to overtax their resource-intensive, rational thought processes. They also help delay the need for instant gratification or reward.
For example, empathy – our connection to other people’s thoughts, emotions, and well-being – motivates us to act positively on behalf of others.
Harnessing empathy – specifically transgenerational empathy – can help us make decisions that impact us for the better both today and for generations to come. This might include eating less red meat, which helps both our own cardiovascular health as well as the health of the ecosystem for decades to come. Empathy for future generations provides the positive emotional jolt needed to transcend our short-term impulse to take the easy way out – to take a car versus mass transit and at a more psychological level to have the difficult conversation today rather than let the underlying discontent fester for days or even decades.
But for all its power, empathy is also fragile, often going missing just when we need it most. For instance, people find it difficult to empathise with those who differ from them politically, racially, or ideologically. Similarly, empathy comes more naturally when we have direct access to people’s emotional cues – their faces, voices, and stories. As a result, people tend to empathise preferentially with others who are close to themselves: spatially, socially, and temporally. When this happens, we also dole out kindness in uneven, nepotistic, and potentially short-term ways.
But this limit is not “baked in” to the nature of empathy. Like other emotions, people can regulate empathy, pointing it toward targets with whom they might typically find it difficult to connect.
One way to build empathy is by cultivating a sense of psychological safety, especially through close connection to other people. For instance, reminding people of positive attachment figures, such as supportive family members, renders them more empathic and helpful to others. Likewise, reflecting on positive people in our histories can also help us to extend empathy to those beyond our immediate spheres. If we connect to the sacrifices made by our ancestors that have allowed us to flourish today, we can build upon that gratitude to influence how we might become great future ancestors for generations to come.
We also have reason to believe that emotional primes, like recalling experiences of awe or the perception of something vast, can promote altruistic action. Awe helps reduce the occurrence of “temporal discounting”, the tendency to undervalue a future reward in favour of an immediate, but lesser, return. The popular rise of the environmental movement, for instance, is often linked to the collective awe inspired by astronaut Bill Anders’ iconic “Earthrise” image.
If more policymakers were to seek a sense of awe from images like this or experiencing the raw beauty of nature, might they be more open to taking the drastic steps we need to tackle environmental issues like carbon emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss?
We as individuals too may rethink how we live our lives if we could harness this sense of awe. This has in part already been happening with the backlash against plastic. Natural history programmes like Blue Planet 2 create a sense of wonder at the natural world before cruelly showing us what we are doing to it. They led millions to seek ways of reducing their use of plastic and forced multinational corporations to do likewise.
Even less-desired emotions can be activated if they are useful to a task at hand. For instance, individuals who are about to get in an argument may guide themselves into anger, and individuals who are about to ask for a favour may likewise choose to feel sad. Emerging research suggests that we can also “point” emotions like these – by using visualisations of desired outcomes – toward particular long-term goals, like helping future generations to thrive or in planning for our far futures.
As humans, we often tend to get stuck in short-term thinking and look for external solutions to the challenges we face, but we need not settle for this limitation. There are many ways to cultivate long-term choices and priorities that can be of benefit for us today and to those that will follow.
Rather than ignore or suppress our emotional nature, if we can harness this very human side of us to support a future that we can feel positive about and become the good ancestors, and possibly even the great ancestors, the future needs us to be.
* Ari Wallach is the founder of Longpath, an organisation focused on cultivating future-conscious thinking and action in order to ensure human flourishing on a thriving planet Earth for centuries to come.
Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200228-how-our-emotions-could-help-save-the-world
Why we need to be more emotional to save the world
By Ari Wallach*
1st March 2020
If our species wants to enjoy a long-term future, it might need to tap into the very human qualities of emotion.
Think about some of the knottiest problems facing the world today and the suggested solutions to them. Climate change? Answer it with carbon sequestering and transitions to clean energy. Migration? Answer it with streamlined visas and new systems of border control.
Humans tend to seek solutions to problems like these – both macro and micro, simple and complex – through a short-term, external perspective that doesn’t obligate individual participation.
In the West, the dominant approach to tackling the challenges we face has been to amputate emotion from our decision-making whenever possible. We instead opt for cold, technical solutions.
This hyper-rational perspective is at least as old as Aristotle, who described passions as capricious, dangerous roadblocks on the path to becoming fully human. It became integral to the Western ethos during the 18th Century Enlightenment and still persists today.
And there is a utilitarian wisdom to this position. Emotions can be stoked by forces outside of our control. Lynch mobs and market bubbles can occur when our emotions run away with themselves and feelings spread like contagions through crowds. Propagandists can exploit our emotions to stir up loyalty among their supporters and belligerence towards outsiders. In response, rational movements, such as Effective Altruism, hold that the best way to create positive, long-term change is through a dispassionate calculation of the greatest good one can generate through one’s actions.
But trying to suppress our emotional responses to our current circumstances cannot eliminate the role they play entirely. Our feelings are not only an integral part of our moral, social, and personal well-being, but also are vital tools for solving complex challenges we face individually, organisationally, and even as a species. As Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center says, “[Emotions] provide us with quintessential information about what’s important and what to do next and how to do it and who to do it with.”
Humanity is in a period of great upheaval. For people and organisations attempting to thrive in this tumultuous time, old mindsets and approaches no longer work. To create a better future where everyone can flourish, leaders and organisations need to find ways to engage and encourage emotions more fully.
In recent decades, an array of scientific insights have reshaped the way we view emotions, particularly in the way they affect how we think about the future. We have learned that emotions can be harnessed to guide us toward rational choices and cooperative action. Emotions can be geared toward long-term thinking and behaviour and are essential to the evaluation of simulated possible futures, known as “pragmatic prospection”.
If we are to truly shift course, to make individual commitments that allow us to build better futures, we need to find ways of using emotion to our advantage. For as Anne Frank said, “...feelings can't be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem." They are and will always be a part of us and we need to learn how to leverage them for the betterment of ourselves and the generations to come.
A good starting point for developing this kind of mindset is to nurture a suite of feelings known as “self-transcendent emotions”. These emotions – which include feelings of empathy, gratitude, and awe – evolved to help manage social relationships with others and orient humans to a world that is bigger than themselves. They can be found in any coalitional behaviour – from hunting a woolly mammoth to building a suspension bridge – which requires people to sacrifice short-sighted, egoistic gains in order to work together toward mutual benefits. They also manifest in intimate, individual actions, such as the advent of grandparenting.
Self-transcendent emotions allow people to manage complex, cooperative situations without needing to overtax their resource-intensive, rational thought processes. They also help delay the need for instant gratification or reward.
For example, empathy – our connection to other people’s thoughts, emotions, and well-being – motivates us to act positively on behalf of others.
Harnessing empathy – specifically transgenerational empathy – can help us make decisions that impact us for the better both today and for generations to come. This might include eating less red meat, which helps both our own cardiovascular health as well as the health of the ecosystem for decades to come. Empathy for future generations provides the positive emotional jolt needed to transcend our short-term impulse to take the easy way out – to take a car versus mass transit and at a more psychological level to have the difficult conversation today rather than let the underlying discontent fester for days or even decades.
But for all its power, empathy is also fragile, often going missing just when we need it most. For instance, people find it difficult to empathise with those who differ from them politically, racially, or ideologically. Similarly, empathy comes more naturally when we have direct access to people’s emotional cues – their faces, voices, and stories. As a result, people tend to empathise preferentially with others who are close to themselves: spatially, socially, and temporally. When this happens, we also dole out kindness in uneven, nepotistic, and potentially short-term ways.
But this limit is not “baked in” to the nature of empathy. Like other emotions, people can regulate empathy, pointing it toward targets with whom they might typically find it difficult to connect.
One way to build empathy is by cultivating a sense of psychological safety, especially through close connection to other people. For instance, reminding people of positive attachment figures, such as supportive family members, renders them more empathic and helpful to others. Likewise, reflecting on positive people in our histories can also help us to extend empathy to those beyond our immediate spheres. If we connect to the sacrifices made by our ancestors that have allowed us to flourish today, we can build upon that gratitude to influence how we might become great future ancestors for generations to come.
We also have reason to believe that emotional primes, like recalling experiences of awe or the perception of something vast, can promote altruistic action. Awe helps reduce the occurrence of “temporal discounting”, the tendency to undervalue a future reward in favour of an immediate, but lesser, return. The popular rise of the environmental movement, for instance, is often linked to the collective awe inspired by astronaut Bill Anders’ iconic “Earthrise” image.
If more policymakers were to seek a sense of awe from images like this or experiencing the raw beauty of nature, might they be more open to taking the drastic steps we need to tackle environmental issues like carbon emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss?
We as individuals too may rethink how we live our lives if we could harness this sense of awe. This has in part already been happening with the backlash against plastic. Natural history programmes like Blue Planet 2 create a sense of wonder at the natural world before cruelly showing us what we are doing to it. They led millions to seek ways of reducing their use of plastic and forced multinational corporations to do likewise.
Even less-desired emotions can be activated if they are useful to a task at hand. For instance, individuals who are about to get in an argument may guide themselves into anger, and individuals who are about to ask for a favour may likewise choose to feel sad. Emerging research suggests that we can also “point” emotions like these – by using visualisations of desired outcomes – toward particular long-term goals, like helping future generations to thrive or in planning for our far futures.
As humans, we often tend to get stuck in short-term thinking and look for external solutions to the challenges we face, but we need not settle for this limitation. There are many ways to cultivate long-term choices and priorities that can be of benefit for us today and to those that will follow.
Rather than ignore or suppress our emotional nature, if we can harness this very human side of us to support a future that we can feel positive about and become the good ancestors, and possibly even the great ancestors, the future needs us to be.
* Ari Wallach is the founder of Longpath, an organisation focused on cultivating future-conscious thinking and action in order to ensure human flourishing on a thriving planet Earth for centuries to come.
Link to original article:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200228-how-our-emotions-could-help-save-the-world
Monday, February 6, 2017
"The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had" by David Robson
The 'Untranslatable' Emotions You Never Knew You Had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson
26 January 2017
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these "untranslatable" experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was "untranslatable" in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
*Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
*Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
*Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
*Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
*Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
*Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
*Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
*Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
*Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
*Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
*Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
*Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
*Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
*Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
*Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term's true meaning. "The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list," he says. "I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard."
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
Original BBC Future article here:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170126-the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
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