February 17th 2024: Shaped by Language

How Language Shapes the Way We Think
Lera Boroditsky 

MEET LERA BORODITSKY
Lera Boroditsky is an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego and editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart).

THIS SUNDAY
"There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000." -  TED.com