How Learning a New Language Rewires Your Brain—Lessons from the Pirahã Tribe | Daniel Everett : 1258

The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey

Dave Asprey

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4.6 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is the Way You Speak Limiting How You Think?

For years, scientists debated how language shapes the brain, but new research reveals it goes far beyond communication. Some languages lack numbers, grammar, or even complex sentences—yet their speakers navigate reality in ways that defy expectations.

In this mind-bending episode, linguist Daniel Everett, known for challenging Noam Chomsky’s theories, shares how his time with the Pirahã people reshaped our understanding of language, cognition, and even consciousness.

If language rewires thought, what happens when AI starts using it? Can a machine truly think? And what if whales, with their massive brains, have a language of their own?

What You’ll Discover in This Episode:

• The hidden power of language—why learning a new one literally reshapes your brain

• The Piraha people’s mind-blowing approach to communication and what it reveals about human thought

• Can AI truly “think” in language, or is it just an advanced mimic?

• How your environment affects memory, navigation, and cognitive function

• The psychedelic connection to language evolution—could altered states have unlocked speech?

Transcript

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0:00.0	What have you found about the way we structure language and the way our brains work?
0:04.3	I have found that memory appears to be greater in hunter-gatherers who only have oral language
0:11.2	and not written language. There are studies that show that reading Mandarin uses parts of the brain
0:17.4	that reading Latin-based scripts, alphabetic scripts, doesn't.
0:20.9	I've also seen studies say if you speak Mandarin
0:24.4	and you read in Mandarin versus if you speak a Latin language.
0:27.6	You see meaningful changes in networks across the brain.
0:31.3	What if everything you thought you knew about language was wrong?
0:34.4	Try to prove me wrong.
0:35.6	For decades, linguists believed in universal grammar, a built-in blueprint for how all humans speak.
0:41.0	Creating explanatory theories that extend so vastly far beyond any evidence that's available.
0:46.0	Language and the existence of universal grammar continue to be tested and explored in the
0:51.1	evolving field of linguistics.
0:52.9	But one man, deep in the Amazon, uncovered
0:55.2	something that changed everything, Daniel Everett, linguist, explorer, disruptor. His discoveries
1:01.0	shattered the foundations of modern linguistics. He lived with an uncontacted Amazonian tribe
1:05.8	for seven years, unlocking a language with no numbers, no recursion, no past tense. A language so unique, it rewrote the rules of human communication.
1:14.7	Now he's taking us beyond language to the roots of thought, culture, and human cognition itself.
1:19.8	I'll define communication as the transfer of information.
1:23.1	What makes us human?
1:24.1	How do words shape reality?
1:25.8	And if language isn't universal, what else isn't?
	...

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