The relationship between the reality we perceive and language increasingly appears to be a two-way connection. The idea that reality influences our language is clear, but less so than the fact that our language influences how we perceive reality. Therefore, many researchers are working on ways to test for its existence to better understand this relationship.

This search for connection has left us definitely intriguing researchtells us a lot about how we understand abstract concepts Like time. Daniel Cassanto is one of the researchers trying to explore these issues.

According to research by colleagues such as Cassanto and Lera Boroditsky, some of which was compiled in an article for BBC Future by Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren, it is possible to observe how different cultures represent time in a particular axis and direction. These representations are associated with language variables.

For example, from people who speak languages ​​written from left to right, Spanish, English, etc. when asked to represent time. time will be “written” in the same wayas a line running from left (past) to right (future).

Boroditsky has confirmed through various experiments how this is true for English speakers but not for Mandarin Chinese speakers. Like Japanese, Mandarin is usually written from top to bottom. According to the experiments, this was also the way its speakers represented time, with the past at the top and the future at the bottom. Bilingual participants handled it more easily in both cases.

Boroditsky conducted another set of experiments, this time comparing English speakers with Hebrew speakers. this HebrewIt is written from right to left, like Arabic. The result also showed that English speakers tended to view time as a line moving from left to right, whereas the opposite was true for Hebrew speakers.

Counting time depends on everything

There is another dimension where we can represent time: forward or backward. For anyone reading this article, the reference will be absolutely clear: it went back in time; forward in time, the future. But there are also languages ​​in which the relationship is the opposite.

The logic here is that we can visualize the past as what lies ahead; but we can’t know what the future awaits us as if we are behind us. While the link is clear, this example may more likely illustrate the opposite causal direction, namely the perception that changes our language.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

What if we forget time as a single dimension? In another article, Cassanto and Boroditsky have argued that the view of time as a line cannot always be taken as definitive either. Therefore, in Greek, a time span will be large or small, not short or long. Spaniards here will be somewhere in the middle.: Someone might take a short break or talk about the weekend getting too short.

These questions seem trivial, but they are far from it. So far, we’ve explored some of the directions time can take in our imaginations. One was missing, a bottom-up representation of time. This notation is common in physics, for example light conesrepresents a three-dimensional space with two space dimensions and one vertical time dimension.

Modern physics has reached levels of complexity that make some interpretations quite a mental effort. For example, the idea that time can flow at two different speeds at different points in space, or even freeze inside a black hole.

Are there people more qualified to visualize these facts? Are the languages ​​we know important? These are more than relevant questions when drawing comments on the boundaries of knowledge in these areas.

But there may also be more practical implications. For example, in the economy. In this discipline; saving is an important factorCan it be linked to the language? The answer is yes, according to analysis by Keith Chen, a behavioral economist with an economics specialization closely linked to psychology.

The key, according to his analysis, will be how languages ​​talk about the future. Similar to, but not identical to, English, Spanish combines verbs to form future forms. Not all languages ​​do this. According to Chen, having verb forms associated with the future “segregates” it in our imagination, making it difficult to think long-term. Macroeconomic data seems to support his idea, but the large number of variables to consider in economic development make it difficult to verify.

Who broke the vase?

This is not the only situation where the evidence in favor of this association is promising but insufficient to form a scientific consensus. An example comes from another work by Boroditsky.

The question here is not how we represent time, How do we remember events?. In Spanish, as in Japanese, the vase can break. But in English this means that the vase broke on its own. This doesn’t make much sense.

According to Boroditsky’s experiments, English speakers better remembered who broke the vase. The difference in ability to remember the event, while significant, was not large (most participants were able to remember the event).

Memory is another subject that plays a fundamental role for Nola Klemfuss. In an article published in the journal Boundaries in Psychology, warned against making hasty conclusions from experiments. According to his alternative hypothesis, memory may be behind what experts interpret as a perception of reality.

This is because many of the experiments described so far rely on participants’ ability to perform tasks (such as chronologically arranging the pictures or remembering who broke the vase). These are activities in which memory plays a sometimes important and sometimes fundamental role. The “coordination” of memory processes with our language can help participants perform tasks better.

The role of memory is no stranger to Casasanto, who explained in the BBC article: “We know that people remember what they pay most attention to. And different languages ​​force us to pay attention to various different things, such as gender, movement or color.”

But the debate is still open. Experts such as Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker have traditionally opposed these hypotheses and are sometimes grouped under the term Whorfians as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Criticism assumes: The relationship between language and perception of reality is unidirectional..

Critics like Mark Liberman, who explained his stance in a debate with Boroditsky in 2010. According to their common interpretation, they see a list of dictionary entries identifying the current set of thoughts, this premise is false. Moreover, this misinterpretation attracts other errors and exaggerations.”

Boroditsky, for his part, said, “Language shapes our thinking, just as studying medicine or learning to fly a plane creates an experience and transforms what we can do. Different languages ​​support different forms of cognitive experience.

Pictures | Persnickety Prints, Old Pieter Brueghel, Skylar Kang