That was a really good clap.
Good job, Amy.
Des que j’ai deux ou trois ans, ma mere ma parlee en Francais.
Dann im universitet, ich habe fur drei Jahren Deutsche gelernt… aber Ich benutze es nicht…
In researching bilingual brains, that is, how brains work when someone speaks more than
one language fluently, scientists have found there are differences.
Bilingual brains activate in different ways depending on the language they’re speaking,
and and also demonstrate incredible cognitively flexibility, switching back and forth between
languages in a phenomenon called code-switching.
And a new study has found an interesting link between language and time: the language you
think in can impact the way you perceive time.
Every language has its specific vocabulary for organizing the world around us, but when
it comes to time, there are two general categories this is done: distance, as in crossing an
area, and volume as in a space being filled.
Swedish and English both use physical distances to express a measure of time.
In English we’d say “a short break” or “a long wedding.”
We use these descriptive terms as though the passage of time is a measurable distance.
In Greek and Spanish on the other hand, time is marked with terms that refer to volume.
In Spanish you'd say "a small break" or "a big wedding."
So the question the researchers had was whether people who think about time with distance
or volume measurements have a better sense of how much time has passed.
To measure this, they had Swedish-Spanish bilinguals watch a line grow across a screen
or watch a container being filled, the first a measure of time as distance and the second
a measure of time as volume.
And in each instance the subject was given a prompt in one of the two languages — 'duración'
in Spanish or 'tid' in Swedish.
The results showed that subjects perceived time as it’s measured in the language of
their prompt.
When given the Spanish prompt, participants estimated time based on volume, in this case
how full the containers were.
When they were given the Swedish prompt they could better estimate time as distance, using
the line’s travel as a marker.
So this might not matter to any of us on a day to day basis, but it’s interesting to
have some scientific evidence pointing to how much language impacts the way we perceive
something universal, the passage of time.
And we even found this in our office!
Maybe it’s because I’ve been exposed to multiple languages.
When I think of a big wedding I think of a lot of people and a long night.
But other people in our office only think about the number of attendees.
Language, it seems, can creep in and affect our most basic senses, from emotions to perception
and, apparently, time.
Which means it’s possible that learning a new language could change the way you experience
the world… which in itself is wild to think about.
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So this is our human brain, but would the same thing happen to artificial intelligence?
We talk about giving computers consciousness in this episode right here.
So who out there speaks multiple languages and is aware of these different cues for understanding
time?
Let us know in the comments, be sure to like this video, and subscribe so you never miss
an episode of Seeker.