Challenge for the day: Pick one you especially don’t want to lose: Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. I’m in favor of seeing as a primary sense.
I always thought that my preference for sight over the other four senses derived from some basic biological and mental abilities and needs. I figured that evolution endowed us all with a hierarchy of senses. Survival depends on knowing where one is, and sight gives us immediate clues about place. Because mental mapping is valuable if we want to make our way around the neighborhood without taking time to re-explore, sight is our best cartographic tool. Of course, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I can close my eyes and know when someone drives me past a bakery, and in a dark hallway, I can touch the wall to find the light switch.
It's really easy for us to talk about what we see. Or is it? Can we describe sounds or tastes better? What about describing what we touch? “It’s rough.” “It’s smooth.” “It feels like….”
What if people reared in different cultures compared how they describe what they sense? Would cultural influences matter? I would have been one to say that such descriptions are universal before I read Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass:Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages.* People everywhere, I thought, should understand what I mean by “rough” or “smooth” surfaces, by “grating” or “calming” sound, or by “sour” and “chocolatey.” They should understand analogies and metaphors that I base on physical phenomena and the way I perceive them.
Here’s what a recent study showed: “There is no single universal hierarchy of the senses or a dichotomy between higher and lower senses: Influenced by culture, every language has its own sensory story to tell.”** As Professor Asifa Majid has revealed, “Our work shows that there is far more diversity in the linguistic coding of the senses than earlier work had imagined.” To put it in other words: “The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.”***
To find out whether or not culture influences the way we deal with what we sense, Majid and colleagues “asked whether the senses are equally expressible (or, alternatively, ineffable) in all languages.” Turns out that’s a big “no.”
Turns out more specifically, for example, that people in different cultures with different languages describe pitch variously: As “high” and “low”; “thin” and “thick”: and “big” and “small.” And there are similar examples for colors, shapes, tastes, and smells. Culture, not biology, not those 3.5 billion years of overall and phylogenetic evolution, is an important influence. Our species has a diversity that extends beyond some superficial appearances in skin color, facial features, or stature. That diversity lies in the very way we understand and express what we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel.
Think you share a common sense of the senses with everyone else on the planet? Think again. And if we can’t agree on such fundamental perceptions of perceptions, how can we agree on what it means to be “good” or “beautiful”? Is it possible that the very way we perceive and the way we perceive our perceptions are chasms across which people of different cultures build only rickety bridges for exchanging AND understanding ideas? Has every culture established in its language a secret and fundamental code that restricts communication? Do those differences at the most fundamental levels of expressing our understanding of the world keep us from fully accepting one another?
If so—if the way we encode the world we sense differs—then it’s no wonder we have so much trouble trying to achieve a peaceful coexistence.****
*Deutscher, Guy. New York. Metropolitan Books, 2010.
You can read a counter argument in John McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford University Press, 2014.
**Majid, Asifa, et. al. differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. PONAS November 6, 2018, 115 (45) 11369-11376, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11369
***from the abstract
****You might also consider the talk by Lera Boroditsky online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Hakkxnu-s
I always thought that my preference for sight over the other four senses derived from some basic biological and mental abilities and needs. I figured that evolution endowed us all with a hierarchy of senses. Survival depends on knowing where one is, and sight gives us immediate clues about place. Because mental mapping is valuable if we want to make our way around the neighborhood without taking time to re-explore, sight is our best cartographic tool. Of course, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I can close my eyes and know when someone drives me past a bakery, and in a dark hallway, I can touch the wall to find the light switch.
It's really easy for us to talk about what we see. Or is it? Can we describe sounds or tastes better? What about describing what we touch? “It’s rough.” “It’s smooth.” “It feels like….”
What if people reared in different cultures compared how they describe what they sense? Would cultural influences matter? I would have been one to say that such descriptions are universal before I read Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass:Why the World Looks Different in Different Languages.* People everywhere, I thought, should understand what I mean by “rough” or “smooth” surfaces, by “grating” or “calming” sound, or by “sour” and “chocolatey.” They should understand analogies and metaphors that I base on physical phenomena and the way I perceive them.
Here’s what a recent study showed: “There is no single universal hierarchy of the senses or a dichotomy between higher and lower senses: Influenced by culture, every language has its own sensory story to tell.”** As Professor Asifa Majid has revealed, “Our work shows that there is far more diversity in the linguistic coding of the senses than earlier work had imagined.” To put it in other words: “The surprise is that, despite the gradual phylogenetic accumulation of the senses, and the imbalances in the neural tissue dedicated to them, no single hierarchy of the senses imposes itself upon language.”***
To find out whether or not culture influences the way we deal with what we sense, Majid and colleagues “asked whether the senses are equally expressible (or, alternatively, ineffable) in all languages.” Turns out that’s a big “no.”
Turns out more specifically, for example, that people in different cultures with different languages describe pitch variously: As “high” and “low”; “thin” and “thick”: and “big” and “small.” And there are similar examples for colors, shapes, tastes, and smells. Culture, not biology, not those 3.5 billion years of overall and phylogenetic evolution, is an important influence. Our species has a diversity that extends beyond some superficial appearances in skin color, facial features, or stature. That diversity lies in the very way we understand and express what we see, hear, touch, taste, and feel.
Think you share a common sense of the senses with everyone else on the planet? Think again. And if we can’t agree on such fundamental perceptions of perceptions, how can we agree on what it means to be “good” or “beautiful”? Is it possible that the very way we perceive and the way we perceive our perceptions are chasms across which people of different cultures build only rickety bridges for exchanging AND understanding ideas? Has every culture established in its language a secret and fundamental code that restricts communication? Do those differences at the most fundamental levels of expressing our understanding of the world keep us from fully accepting one another?
If so—if the way we encode the world we sense differs—then it’s no wonder we have so much trouble trying to achieve a peaceful coexistence.****
*Deutscher, Guy. New York. Metropolitan Books, 2010.
You can read a counter argument in John McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Oxford University Press, 2014.
**Majid, Asifa, et. al. differential coding of perception in the world’s languages. PONAS November 6, 2018, 115 (45) 11369-11376, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11369
***from the abstract
****You might also consider the talk by Lera Boroditsky online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71Hakkxnu-s
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