Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Tron Carroll.

We've talked a lot on the podcast about the idea of thinking and consciousness, right?

What is it that is going on inside our heads, inside our brains, that makes us a conscious living being?

Of course, a lot of what we know about consciousness is first person, right?

We know about our own consciousness from thinking about what's going on inside our heads.

What do we know about how other people are doing their thinking?

Of course, you need to be able to communicate. You can observe people and just sort of be completely scientific about it,

but most of our experience with the thoughts of other people comes from talking to them, reading them, talking about them, and so forth.

So to facilitate this kind of communication, human beings invented language, a symbolic system that lets us represent things, and then talk about them.

It's then very natural to ask how much is the way that we think influenced by our language?

When we make different choices about how language should work, those choices can then affect how we actually do our thinking.

There's an idea called the Superior War of Hypothesis. Back in the early days of the 20th century, the strong version of it said that language actually determines how we think.

You can't think in ways other than the ways that language gives you. No one really believes that anymore, but there's a weaker version that says that language influences how we think.

And the growing number of psychologists actually believe that. Today's guest is Lera Borditsky, who is a neuroscientist and psychologist,

she's a Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego. And I got to know her because in her work on neuroscience and psychology and language, she talks a lot about time.

Time is one of my favorite things, so we end up at the same conferences. But the point is, when we talk about time interestingly, we very often use spatial metaphors.

You talk about moving the meeting forward. What is that supposed to mean? How do you move us thing in time forward or backwards? Does moving something forward in our, mean it's an hour earlier or an hour later?

Well, that depends on whether you metaphorically think of yourself as moving forward in time or the meeting as moving toward you as you stay stationary.

Neither one of those ideas is correct or incorrect. They're just metaphorical choices that relate a spatial picture to the time language that we use.

So Lera has studied how different cultures use language, particularly you talk about time, but in other ways as well. And you'll figure out that not everyone uses just simple forward backward language.

There are cultures and languages that relate time to up and down. There's cultures and languages that relate it to what compass direction you're pointing in or where the big mountain on your island is.

This kind of stuff illuminates how we think about the world in very interesting ways. Do you have a long way to go to figure it out?

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