Speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently
science.org
science.org
Before being introduced to feyli I simply enjoyed beach walks as a sum of various experiences - the warmth, the sound, the view. having a label for that specific feeling of sand sifting between my toes made it stand out in isolation. Each time I walked along the shore, my attention would hone in on that particular sensation, heightening my awareness and deepening the experience. It felt as though that one word added a new layer to my sensory palette
Love how nuances in language can carve out niches in our perception, spotlighting elements of our environment that might otherwise blend into the background
Yes.
Language is itself compression of thoughts. Thoughts themselves are compression of something larger (observations, experiences, combinations of other thoughts, etc). It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.
> It seems that there is more than one very famous mathematical proof that dictates that systems such as these cannot be complete, or even consistent.
At least three approaches to similar results arising from questions posed by Hilbert - but do these results impose "a (undefined) limit"?
Axiomatic systems that can never be complete or consistent can still be used to reason about objects without limit; both the countable and uncountable numbers spring to mind.
Is an axiomatic system that can never be complete "limited"? Surely there's always something more to add on that asymptotic(?) approach to 'completeness'?
Is it possible that being complete or consistent is a limit, bounded by completeness , unable to discuss the paradoxical?
I believe that is what "languages determine perceptions of the world" in Sapir-Whorf hypothesis means. Not "not all languages are Sapir-Whorf complete, only some are", which is obviously wrong, and also what is probably catching you. All languages on Earth are probably complete, just except that says nothing about modeling paradigms and syntaxes and all sorts of mannerisms shared and not shared among those equal and complete languages.
It depends on how you define things, but in a very reasonable definition it does actually mean that. If we consider a computational model to be a way using a finite string in countable alphabet to represent every single computable function, then yes, there is an algorithm that can take a program in any computational model 1 and find another program in computational model 2 that also implements the same computable function. Implements here means that both programs will for the same input return the same output if they both halt, or both will not halt.
Now the running time, or algorithmic complexity of both algorithms, is not under consideration here. The x86_64 program running in native hardware might finish the computation in milliseconds, where a browser that does the same computation using purely HTML and css that our universal transpiler generated might run in trillions of years.
It's one of Sw Sarvapriyananda's favourite quotes. Wittgenstein was quite Vedantic it seems.
> Feyli (the ethnic attire of the Maldivian) was worn both by men and women in Maldives during the monarchy.
Is it the same word used for both things, or maybe a slightly different word?
(It lists only ethnic wear as a translation for “feyli.”)
Op is being asked by natives of he'd like some local clothes while he repeatedly jams his foot into the wet sand and points at it.
You might be thinking of "kangaroo", which is also said to originate from a local word for "I don't know", but in that case it's not a serious hypothesis.
> The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool."
--Terry Prachett
While a specific word for it may be useful, I don't see how it is necessary as an aid to recall of the sensation.
We won't know it while this thread is active, but if you go to the beach in a week, and exclaim "wow, this feyli thing is pretty nice", then you'll know that your senses for feeling the "sand between your toes as waves recede on a beach" is heightened.
Because the nature of language itself is that of compression. In fact, this is why there are often miscommunications, and significantly more on the internet than with people you know well.
Language works kinda like this: Alice has a thought in their head, they compress that thought into words, Bob hears the words and decompresses the words into thoughts.
The intent is so that we can communicate thoughts between one another. But our compression and decompression algorithms are different. Quite incredible when you think about it, since these are fuzzy algorithms so the decompression algorithm works for even different compression algorithms. You can work with someone speaking a broken form of your language or even a completely different language (mutually intelligible). In fact, you can train yourself to be better at decoding and you may notice someone that hangs out with "foreigners" a lot is easily able to understand someone speaking in a broken form of your language with a heavy accent while this is completely unintelligible to another person. This can even be done with novel source languages and accents. (try turning off the subtitles and you'll get better).
But the major miscommunication issue is the priors that our compression and decompression algorithms work with. The previous concept works because we broaden the possible priors, but if you assert strict ones you will miscommunication more and misunderstand more. This is why when people try to deceive you they will assert very narrow ways of understanding certain words. But in reality, words only mean what we mean them to mean, as the purpose of language is only to communicate thoughts in heads. But that's why good faith is so important. You shouldn't just try very hard to make sure your words are easy to interpret, but also try very hard to interpret the intent behind the words of another. Reading between the lines isn't only for hidden messages, but every conversation.
"… they discovered the best way not to be unhappy, was not to have a word for it." — Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
And Newspeak similarly sought to remove the concept of "bad", by making it "ungood" (Orwell, 1984)
One is data, the other is a function. I'm not sure how we could possibly measure memory directly. The only thing we can measure is some form of interaction with it, which means we are measuring the interaction itself.
Our best understanding of memory (AFAIK) is that it is constructed just-in-time by the process of recall. So does the distinction matter? How much of memory is tied to comprehension? Having a word for something is one method of comprehension, but there are others. What happens when the word is provided later?
We know that human behavior tends to be driven by narrative. I would be interested to see a similar study where unique expressions are isolated. Do people with a particular/specific way of talking about something do it differently?
I always like to think about how comprehension influences memory. Like. Can we truly remember something if we don't understand it? Or more precisely can the data be committed to memory losslessly. And to your point about the provision of words later, it brings to mind studies on the Sapir Worf hypothesis, ie how language might shape thought.
I wonder if some language patterns are an emergent effect of the way memory is created and reconstructed. There seems to be some mysterious isomorphism here, but no one has really gotten a handle on the specifics of either phenomenon.
I'd even argue that while memory can be fallible, it doesn't necessarily mean that language patterns are solely an emergent effect of memory creation or reconstruction. there's potential that cultural, social, and experiential factors interplay with the linguistic aspect
Of course then the argument is whether the culture determines the language or the language determines the culture, but I find that a silly debate: clearly the two influence other in turn, shifts in culture will eventually be manifested in language but language is a very efficient medium to transmit habitual thinking patterns too.
As far as I'm aware, the question isn't about if the weak SW exists, but how much influence language exerts on thoughts. I'd be surprised if it was close to zero but I would also be surprised if it was above 50% (whatever percent means here).
This was set as a task for a group of us during a diversity training at Goldman. It so happend I was in a group that included a couple of French quant phds. You can imagine their extreme bewilderment by miscounting in such a simple task, but this error seems to be a heuristic that is somehow wired into the perception of words when learning to read.
Having accepted that speakers of different languages understand visual information in text differently, it seems not to be that big a leap to accept that visual memory would also work differently.
In visual search experiments, participants typically hear a word and find the matching item among an array of object images. Crucially, the other objects in the array can be manipulated to resemble the target item visually or linguistically. For example, when asked to find a beaker among other objects, participants look more at objects whose names overlap (e.g., beetle) or rhyme (e.g., speaker) with the target word than at unrelated objects (e.g., carriage)
Also in Chinese, reciting the times tables are shorter and (unproven) probably easier to memorise, "3 1 3, 3 2 6, 3 3 9". Although I'm not sure why that can't be done in English either.
It was a long time ago for me now, but I learned the times tables (using your example) as "three ones'r three, three twos'r six, three three's'r nine" etc. Seems like it's just the addition of a single "zrr" syllable after both numbers to me, and to me that seems easier to say than e.g. "3 2 6", maybe just because it's an automatic reflex to add the extra sound and not adding it makes it seem just a stream of numbers out of context.
Quickness is definitely not prioritized.
I've never been to China, and have no idea if this is wide-spread — I saw a documentary on children in China being taught mathematics at an early age using an abacus. Eventually, they remove the abacus but the child still mimes using it. And then gradually this disappears too.
Essentially they're training their muscle-memory to do their maths for them.
It was quite extraordinary to see, especially since I, while I flatter myself I'm reasonably intelligent in some areas, and worked in programming and related areas for many years, my ability to do any maths without a pencil and paper is abysmal. OTOH, it's not impossible I have un-diagnosed dyscalculia.
And, as it turns out, they measured something else indeed. They measured recall of a visual scene after guiding subjects in different ways. English speakers were guided with e.g. clock and clown or clock and mirror. The first pair have some overlap, so (as theory suggests) subjects start looking at both. The second pair has no overlap, so the word clock doesn't make the subject scan for the mirror. Then they tested recall on these pictures. There are differences between people with different language proficiency, but they are small.
So it doesn't show that speakers of different languages remember visual scenes differently, but rather that people only recognize objects from partially heard words quickly in the language(s) they're proficient in.
I wish they'd stop clickbaiting for this kind of technical studies.
I mean, it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language. When we watch a scene, we kinda describe it automatically using words, and that description is bound to be affected by the language used.
I wonder what was the everyday experience of a human before language. It must have been pretty different from the world we experience as literate monkeys.
You get to be today’s 10,000! (xkcd reference)
Not everyone has an internal monologue! 50% to 60% people experience their thoughts completely nonverbally. There isn’t a voice constantly narrating their lives. Some people don’t even process words as words but add pictures instead.
Best part: the two groups don’t realize the other group even exists. We all think everyone thinks in the same way as us.
Sauce: https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...
There is also thinking through proprioception. The sense of awareness of the relative placement of the body in space. That, like the other ways of thinking, also overlaps quite a lot with both visual thinking (moving around imaginary objects) and lingual thinking (writing words in the air idly or sub-vocalization). It is probably not appreciated enough as a mode of thought.
Anyway, I suspect it's something of a false dichotomy, and it's not a binary/multi-way clean split, but that most people think like I do -- in a mix of modes, to varying degrees, using all their senses, all their models of the world, simultaneously. But the assumption that I'm relatively normal is the usual conceit here, isn't it? :)
Yes it’s a spectrum and different modes of thinking are better for different tasks. The author of Visual Thinking describes 3 types: linear language thinking, abstract visualizer thinking (common to engineers, mathematicians etc), and object visualizer thinking (common to artists, machinists, etc). Most people can do all 3 with different levels of proficiency/comfort, but only 1 is usually the primary.
The dichotomy I mentioned is about having or not having that inner monologue/narrator.
> They confessed they had thought it was a fictional concept made up as a narrative device in the TV show Dexter
I imagine a person saying "I have an internal narrator", and other person thinking "shit, I don't hear stuff like TV shows, that person is different". A misunderstanding.
I can bet that if the expression "internal narrator" was changed to "an internal voice that you can feel but cannot hear", more people would say they have it, and those poll numbers would change.
The phrase doesn't matter. What I want to highlight, is that I can never describe my internal thoughts exactly. There's always a chance for misunderstanding (me not being able to put in words my thought process, or you not being able to translate my description to a meaningful experience to you).
If a better method for determining this appears (eg. scanning some brain areas), then I could be convinced. Otherwise, it's all anedoctal.
At this point of the discussion, it's time for p-zombies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
This thought experiment expresses well the problem of asserting someone else's consciousness experience. It can't be done yet.
Thank you for mentioning this! This explains a lot of myself to me.
I can imagine an abstract space (like Einstein's gravity as a well thing), and then rotate it to look at it from different angles etc -- but I can't hold a realistic image of a vase in my head, only the shape.
When I say "I have an internal voice", some people might misunderstand this phenomenon as something more than it is. For example, one might hear it and think I actually experience an audible narrator.
I have an internal monologue, but I don't experience an audible voice. It's not a sensory thing, but there is a clear "lookup word, form phrase" thing going on internally, in which language plays an essential role. If I wasn't curious about how that works, or interested in the subject, perhaps I wouldn't have noticed that it is there.
Similarly, I know I have some picture based thoughts as well. I can't avoid but have it. Maybe if I was more interested on that, I would have noticed it more proeminently than my language-based stuff.
In other words, I do believe we have varying degrees of mental models, but I just can't grasp how can an experiment could validate someone thinks "completely nonverbally". The brain doesn't even have a single "language area", it's spread all over the place and can be highly plastic depending on the individual. How can we even measure how a person thinks?
https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...
Or when you look at a photo and think which person is taller - are you thinking in words? Cause I'm imagining cutting and pasting one person next to the other and comparing them visually.
When you try to remember a song melody you probably don't use words to describe the sounds (it was c, g, e, d, ..) you probably imagine the melody in your head, right?
I think most (all?) people use both language and other modes of thinking, just the proportions are person-specific.
It's often there for me though, like a default. I don't think "left leg, right leg" when I'm walking, and I don't think "geez, I'm walking now", but when I'm walking my go-to thinking defaults to some internal monologue: "gonna buy some food", "can I cross the road?", etc.
When I go to bed this is more evident. It's silent, dark, and all senses are numb. This is when the internal voice gets more noticeable. I just can't get rid of it, until the very moment I go to sleep.
Later in life I learnt a trick from my wife who uses visualization for this. For example I need to buy something tomorrow after work - so I'll imagine myself stepping out of the bus, turning to shop instead of going directly home, and then I'll imagine myself passing by the shelf in the mall where the thing is and taking it to the basket. And like magic - I get an "internal notification" with this fake future memory when I step out of the bus, and then another when I pass by that shelf in the shop.
It's like magic :) Makes remembering stuff so much easier.
This is a slippery slope where some will say this is no real word and that's not syntax unless you define language in fivethousand words on normed paper all while catching the damn ball. That's just them crying look at me.
(Catch the ball, hold the rope, grab the stick).
So if someone said “catch the ball” to me in English, I’d imagine a ball coming at me that I need to catch. But if someone said the same sentence in my native language I’d imagine holding on to a ball that was handed to me
They have done exactly this in this in the study, in fact, along a number of dimensions. Though I won't comment on the validity of their statistics.
I have an internal monologue but I also have thoughts without language. Like if I think I have to buy groceries, I picture myself going to the supermarket without words.
This conclusion sounds like quite the leap.
Even if the two observations they generated turned out to be 100% ironclad true, generalizing to "speakers of different languages" as a title and "linguistic diversity" from observing just two languages seems like a big jump.
They are an embarrassment to science, and journals should ban them or move them to the editorial pages. Doing a bit of research shouldn't be a license to speed BS under cover of fact.
This sounds like language thinker bias, or your definition of language is more abstract (like in Computer Science) than human languages. I can "construct a scene graph" just fine, and while I have to use words to describe the scenes to you, no words played a part in coming up with these examples or thinking about them:
- imagine a rope running through several wooden blocks on a table and pick up various blocks, how do the rest of them behave?
- imagine wooden discs of various sizes with holes, stack them on a pole, does it happen to be a valid solution for Tower of Hanoi?
- imagine a toy car, start lifting one end, at what point does it tip over?
I for sure am not using a human language for that.
> Different languages based on primitives might construct different scene graphs.
This is probably very much true in the same style as your native language biases your perception of color boundaries.
For example: Finnish has just one word for "leg", not separate words for "leg" and "foot", so I view the abstract concept of the whole limb as one thing, not separated into two parts at the ankle. In using language, I may accidentally say in English "I hurt my leg" after kicking my foot into something; they're the same.
For the reverse, Finnish has separate words for the front and back parts of the neck -- and I don't mean just throat, which is just the trachea area, I mean the whole frontal part of it. So, the thought of e.g. dirt on the back of my neck is separate from the though of dirt on the front of my neck. (No, I don't use the words in the thought.)
- Hafiz, the Persian poet
Not that I don't believe there isn't large cultural differences between remembering visual scenes.
I am not sure who funds this type of garbage but it shows that "science" is rifle with ridiculous findings.
Suppose their "findings" are true - do I as a dual language speaker remember visual scenes in both ways? Laughable at best. Expressing visual scenes in different ways is obvious, since different languages have different constructs, but that shouldn't be comflated with experience.
It's also much more subtle than the splashy headlines indicate - it's about which details you're more likely to remember, not some fundamentally different experience of the world.
Small effect sizes and not super interesting effects IMO unless you're doing deep neuroscience stuff on memory and attention, but it's pretty clear language plays a role.
My dad responded that it was known within his domain that immigrants who forgot their mother tongue would forget things they learned in their homeland, including stuff they had studied at school or college.
This was some 20 years ago, I haven't dug into it since then, but seems unlikely to me that memory and language isn't tightly linked.
I'll do some digging, check back in a day or two.
By the time of the test, children of all ages had acquired most of the vocabulary necessary to describe the target event. Despite this, they did not translate preverbal aspects of their memory into language during the test. In no instance did a child verbally report information about the event that was not part of his or her productive vocabulary at the time of encoding. We conclude that language development plays a pivotal role in childhood amnesia.
I also found this follow-up study by someone else[2], again from the abstract:
This research suggests that children cannot independently translate preverbal memories into words even with extensive task support. Therefore, language acquisition may indeed play an important role in the offset of childhood amnesia.
However this[3] recent paper argues that this effect might only be relevant for strategic recall, where the kid is asked to recall the memory, but not spontaneous recall which happens involuntarily.
Of course, I imagine spontaneous recall isn't very useful for recalling what you've studied in your home country...
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00442 Breaking the Barrier? Children Fail to Translate Their Preverbal Memories into Language
[2]: https://repository.lib.ncsu.edu/handle/1840.16/1427 The Sound Barrier: Two-Year-Old Children's Use of Newly Acquired Words to Describe Preverbal Memories
[3]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2022.101050 Spontaneous verbal recall: A new look at the mechanisms involved in episodic memory retrieval in young children
This is just such a bad-faith, effortless, shallow dismissal. If you wish to criticise the study, please do it on the basis of the methodology and not just because you think that somehow it can't be true.
> This is like that "research" where speakers of different languages percieve time in different ways.
This was a claim put forward by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s which has been discredited since at least the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
Also, it was always conjectural and never grounded in solid empiric evidence in the way that is at least attempted in the article you're criticising here (whether successfully or not). And for good reason: at that time, linguistics simply wasn't yet as developed a field as it is now and doing experiments like we can do them today would probably have been hard to conceive. For all his faults, Benjamin Lee Whorf is one of the fathers of modern linguistics, and it's not right to criticise him based on today's standards.
I speak 4 languages that I got for free, without studying them. Just by being an immigrant, and connected to different european countries. This type of multilingualism is quite common in central europe. I remember meeting kids in Brussels who could speak 10 or 12 languages even, insane!
And yes I can confirm that it sure feels like my memory is very good. I often describe it as a gift and a curse. Ignorance is bliss takes on a powerful meaning when you can't forget things.