Steven Pinker: Language and Consciousness, Part 1 Complete: Thinking Allowed w/ J. Mishlove

[Music] thinking aloud conversations on the Leading Edge of knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey mishlove [Music] hello and welcome I'm Jeffrey mishlove this is the first in a four-part series on language and Consciousness today we'll be exploring the question of whether or not our very thoughts are shaped by the language that we use with me is Professor Steven Pinker a member of the Department of brain and cognitive Sciences at MIT and director of the cognitive NeuroScience Center at MIT Dr Pinker is the author of numerous books including visual cognition and most recently the language Instinct

welcome Steve thank you it's a pleasure to be with you you know I have to confess I have always assumed that our thoughts are constrained by the limitations of of the language that we use for example I'm very interested in Consciousness and it's always struck me that people who use uh languages like Sanskrit have have a much richer uh texture in which to look at the various nuances of consciousness and I know that you take a a different point of view I think about language yeah I don't think we that we think in in language

or think in words I think we think in visual images we think in auditory images we think in abstract propositions of what is true about what uh and I think that a language is a way of communicating thoughts of getting them out of one head and into another by making noise M uh I think that uh even if you look at language itself you see that there's got to be something underlying the words themselves because words can be ambiguous so if you take one of those uh unintentionally uh ambiguous newspaper headlines like uh stud tires

out which was in a New Hampshire newspaper when they banned stud tires but most people give it a different interpretation yes the fact that there can be two ideas underlying the word stud for example or underlying the word tires shows that words and thoughts can't be the same thing well isn't it considered pretty much of a truism for people that that different color have more words for some things that are important to them I mean we we talk about the eskimos for example having many words for snow right and even that is really bit exaggerated

there is a famous essay called the Great Eskimo vocabulary hoax where someone actually went to a dictionary of the Eskimo language and counted the number of words for snow and the first dictionary they picked up had following number of words for snow not 400 not 200 not 100 two uh now that was a pretty stingy dictionary and if you go to slightly bigger ones you can come up with maybe a dozen maybe 20 but if you think about it English has a lot of words for snow too we've got Avalanche and blizzard and hard pack

and powder and SLE and slush and we're not really that far behind the eskimos this doesn't deny the point that if you're an expert in something you're going to have more jargon words for it but I don't think it's that you have all these jargon words and you think more thoughts or more finely MH discriminating thoughts I think if you uh know a lot about something you invent the words to uh Express them and I think the fact that we invent slang we invent jargon we invent new figures of speech when we need to show

that we have the idea first and we think to ourselves H how am I going to clothe this in words so I can make it clear to some other person well language of course is More Than Just Words a language has a Cadence it has certain sounds and pitches and Timbers don't you think these things may may affect the environment in which we think well those are certainly what make for great literature and poetry and pros and uh artists and writers take advantage of those things to get across a certain emotional effect and I that's

why great poetry and great literature is often very hard to translate because even if you translate the meaning you're not getting the uh the resonances of the sounds you might have like a harsh staccato set of St sounds in one language and their exact translation might be something very mellow and smooth and so you might lose that extra layer of meaning that resonates with the literal meaning but the fact that you can translate it all when you think about it shows that there's got to be something other than words because what would it mean for

two sentences in in different languages to be translations of each other if not for the fact that both of them have the same meaning where the meaning isn't exactly the same as either string of words when we translate it's obviously not like one of phrase books where it's how do I get to the train station and then you find the equivalent in Hungarian because if you know two languages you can translate an unlimited number of sentences there's got to be something I think under underneath it something like um a set of propositions that don't really

have sounds that don't have any left to right linear order the way language does but there is a a set of we a web of connections between Concepts and that are also connected with other aspects of experience with visual images with Body Sensations well if if we were to follow that line of thinking it it would seem to me that one might say that a person who has no language at all could still think could still have thoughts and I think that's true in fact uh recently uh there have been a number of techniques that

scientists have used to try to tap the minds of creatures that don't have language we now know that uh babies for example before they begin to talk have a a fairly sophisticated uh understanding of the world around them they pay attention to objects they make predictions about how objects will behave what will fall what won't fall what can pass through uh what how people behave uh babies clearly are making sense of the world and that's before they're uh they're saying a word animals too I think there's a lot of good evidence that many uh non-human

animals engage in some form of thought even though obviously they don't have the words and even people with words uh if you look at the autobiographies of great scientists and and authors and Poets and sculptors one thing that runs through all of them is that they say that their moments of inspiration often come from a a vivid visual image and that they then have to struggle to find the words to express that image not only in The Sciences like Einstein who who claimed to have come upon his insight about relativity Theory by say imagining what

it would be like to be in a plummeting elevator and then to take a coin out of your pocket and try to drop it mhm uh often novelists uh will say that the first idea for a novel will be a a a scene with people uh in the scene and then they struggle for the words to express it yes so I think that aspect of experience jibes with what the science of mind has recently found out namely that language is a very rich part of the mind but only one part well I I suppose it's

incontrovertible if you look at the biographies of and autobiographies of creative people that they describe their uh breakthroughs or intuitions coming to them in many different forms other than other than normal language but when we look at babies or when we look at other animals uh many critics of This research would say we have to be careful not to project or to anthropomorphize or uh or or to read more into the data than is actually there yeah that that that's certainly true and you can't just uh look at a baby guess what it's thinking and

leave it at that but there are the techniques are very clever and they involve indirect uh ways of looking at say the baby's eye movements what the baby is staring at and uh control displays to try to figure out what's uh what's going on in the baby's mind uh and babies might even be able to keep track of number they might even do a simple form of arithmetic they seem to know that one and one is two and these are things that you don't just get by hunches but uh by seeing how long they look

at various kinds of displays and what surprises them and what bores them you seem to be suggesting then that the mind has a language of its own independent of of the language that the mouth uses yes right uh you can think of it as mental ease mental EAS the language of thought and I think speaking is almost like translating mental EAS into English or Japanese and understanding is almost like translating English or Japanese into mental e depending of course on which language you actually speak but I think that's why we can understand each other why

uh we can do we can translate why we can uh coin new words when we need them uh if words and thoughts were the same thing it would be impossible to coin a new word where would it where would the impetus to coin a word come from if you didn't have some idea that you needed to Express and also when you're speaking and writing you people often have the sense that they didn't Express themselves properly they'll say oh no that isn't what I meant to say don't misunderstand me what came out wrong what I really

meant to say was such and such or when you're writing you get frustrated and you you tear up the paper and you say darn that sentence wasn't what I meant I know what I want to say but I just can't put it into words and I think there's something real behind those that that intuition well that's a subtle feeling when when you you know that you have an intention that's not quite expressed by the language that you use uh has that been subjected to rigorous research well what has been uh researched is the subtle shades

of meaning that different orders of words convey it's probably true that no two sentences have exactly the same meaning even ones that are very very close like uh oh just to give you an example um I sprayed paint on the wall I sprayed the wall with paint they sound like synonyms like two different ways of expressing the same thought the thoughts they express overlap by a lot but there's a subtle difference most people will say that if you sprayed the wall with paint the Wall's completely covered with paint whereas if you sprayed paint on the

wall it could just be a little dab in one corner and if it's when Ling started to pay very close attention to the nuances of meaning of different orders of words that you discover that there's a reason why people often feel that their thoughts aren't being expressed properly by words that even tiny differences in the words can convey very subtle differences in meaning I think you've also suggested that the the possible sentences that can be constructed are virtually infinite even though you know the number of words and letters are are much more finite I I

think they're they're infinite in in the mathematician sense that there's an infinite number of numbers now of course there isn't any room in the universe to store an infinite number of numbers or an infinite number of sentences but we can infer that in principle the number is infinite by the old trick that you probably learned in elementary school your your teacher may have given you the following demonstration let's say you think that you found the largest number well I'll prove to you it isn't the largest number I'll add one to it and that's a number

that's even larger right and it's the same thing with with language in the Guinness Book of World Records actually claimed to have found the world's longest sentence it was a sentence by fauler in his novel Absalom Absalom and it was 1,300 words long but and it began something like they both bore it as though in desultory flagellation or some sequence of words that I can't even remember but I'll prove to you that that is not the world's longest sentence cuz I can say Pinker said that faler wrote that they both bore it as though in

desolator flagellation and you can say who cares that Pinker said that faler wrote and someone else could say Jeffrey said who cares that Etc so in that sense in principle there's no limit to the number of sentences that a human mind can create and understand except for the fact of course that eventually we die so we can't process uh literally an infinitely long sentence well well let me go back though to the distinction between thought and language Let Us assume for the moment that there is mental EAS that we have a a way of thinking

that is quite independent of language and uh you even have argued I think convincingly that that certain people who who were born deaf and never learned language were still able to express thoughts once they were taught sign language yeah yes um now deaf people who have sign language are people with a language because sign language is a fully expressive grammatical complex language so the crucial case are those unfortunate deaf people who grew up without sign language and occasionally they're discovered and um there's some very interesting case studies looking at their conception of the world and

even though they're obviously cut off from a lot of our culture because we convey our culture through words it's clear that they're they have minds and that the minds are capable of some abstract understanding just to give some simple examples um one one person could repair a broken bicycle locks you think about it that's not so easy I don't know if I could repair a broken Bicycle Lock And it obviously involves a kind of mechanical intelligence knowing what the lock is for knowing how the different parts interact and so on they can handle money money

involves very subtle concept of debt and what you owe and social exchange they can pantomime their life history pantomime isn't the same as sign language pantomim is more like you know Shades they can do that and so they have memory of their own autobiographies which they can communicate uh and when people first encounter a languag death person they often get a sense of the intelligence simply by the eye contact and by the nonverbals you really get a sense that there's a mind there uh and it's just that there's lots that they don't know yeah well

so I think we might conclude from that that that there there is a mental ease there is a way that we think without language or words but then we might begin to ask ourselves the question of is our mental shaped by language nonetheless obviously it would be in the case when you're listening to someone else's speech yes absolutely the uh certainly the contents of mental EAS are uh supplied a lot by Language by learning about uh objects and Far Away places and Abstract Concepts from conversations and with other people and by reading so it's like

the entry Port into the mind that the actual sentences of mental ease often derive from language although not not directly because we never remember the exact wording of what we hear we remember the gist um and the gist is probably something like mental e and I think probably the uh in the evolution of the human species evolution of language and the evolution of language and thought probably went together each one helped the other if you can think more complex thoughts that puts pressure on you to be able to share them and if you've got other

people supplying you with uh complex language that puts pressure on you to be able to have those thoughts and you can imagine a kind of feedback loop where each one help the other well surely in in this conversation my thoughts are being shaped by your words and and I I think your thoughts must be shaped to some degree by my words clearly yes absolutely and so now I suppose the question is uh to what extent are are we conditioned is our mentales conditioned by the kinds of uh reinforcement that we get from other people in

the culture around us well C yes certainly a large extent when we talk about persuading and convincing and uh winning friends and influencing people I mean that one thing that's really true about human beings clearly is that a lot of our social interactions are by words so we certainly try to get people to see things our way by by aiming these noises at them what we call language um I think that it's basically it's the Machinery of the mind it's the ability to have thoughts that's independent of language but language is obviously very important to

supplying the actual content of the thoughts I think now uh some cultures uh particularly in Asia have developed let's say a mystical tradition that we haven't had with nearly as much depth in the west and I think that's reflected in their language uh is it fair to say that the people who are raised in in that environment that linguistic environment might be more prone to to have mystical experiences i' I'd be willing to bet that the m the experiences come first and the reason they have the words for them is that they need the words

to um to to talk about them I'll give you an example that's a little closer to home closer to my experience anyway since I don't know much about the these Eastern cultures but but uh Yiddish the language that my grandparents uh spoke has many words for which there are no exact equivalence in English I mean the word Nas which any yish speaker will instantly recognize describes the emotional state of Pride and satisfaction uh from typically from a family member most prototypically from one's child when when when your when your son wins the Nobel Prize you

experience n now there's no exact English equivalent Pride doesn't quite capture it uh I think though having even explained it to you even if you didn't know a word of yish you'd probably know exactly what emotion I was talking about it's maybe talked about more often in the in yish culture but I don't think I've uh I don't think I've expressed something that you can't even grasp even if you never heard heard the word before you probably know what I'm talking about maybe you'll even start to use the word and I suspect that for some

of the words in these Eastern cultures it may be like that I probably haven't had much occasion to talk about those States but if I was in in that kind of circumstance where I would experiencing experience them and someone said oh by the way that's called blah blah blah I think I'd be able to use blah blah blah MH well maybe it's a question of habits that that certain language groups H habitually cultivate certain states that then they like to talk about I I think so and I think that's why the the kernel of truth

behind the Eskimo snow myth they probably have a few more words for snow than we do is probably for the same reason that bicycle mechanics have more words for parts of bicycles and Painters have more words for Shades of mauve and so on as as you say when you're in the habit of dealing with different aspects of the world and dealing with other people who are also dealing with those aspects you're going to invent the world to be able to communicate them but I that that the fact that we can invent words is what makes

me think that the experiences come first but what what about the the the Cadence of the languages like some languages a Polynesian language or or Japanese or German at times seems like it's very crisp precise a lot of sharp vowel sounds other languages the Romantic languages sharp consonants I think other languages emphasize the vowels more and uh does doesn't that create a whole different personality I I tend to doubt it to be honest um I think that the sounds of language uh change without necessarily A change in the culture English sounded very different several hundred

years ago than it does today I don't know if the mind of English speakers has changed also we know think about the way that different cultures adopt new languages I mean the English language now is spoken uh over huge parts of the world but I don't know if it's the sounds of English have actually caused all the cultures that have adopted it to start thinking differently MH but I think where it probably might have an influence is in art and literature and poetry yes those the sounds of the language might make it more appropriate to

uh Express certain kinds of emotion and might resonate more with certain kinds of experience there's a wonderful line in one of uh Woody Allen's movies where his he's um trying to seduce a woman and she says um say something to me in Spanish Spanish is such a romantic language and he says I don't know any Spanish I can say something to you in Hebrew the humor in that is that there is something about the the Rhythm and the Cadence of Spanish that that puts us in the mood perhaps of more romantic thoughts uh but I

think that's probably the extent of it well it seems to me that your message then is that our thoughts are really totally free at least as as regards any constraints that might be imposed by language the whatever modifying influences language has uh it it doesn't anywhere impose a constraint on what we can think I don't think it imposes a sharp constraint I think it does I think it helps to think in certain ways for the following reason you've got as you're thinking a complex thought as you're formulating an argument to yourself or as you're trying

to solve a puzzle you often have to keep a bunch of things in mind sort of like juggling a lot of balls in the air and if you can keep some of those in Mind by imagining yourself saying the words so you've got almost like a little echo in the back back of your head that's one more mental scratch pad that you can use to keep the ideas from fading subvocalization like subvocalization right uh and if a word if a thought corresponds exactly to a word you can play it to yourself in your uh auditory

imagery and that so if you have a language that has words for certain things you can probably keep more of them in mind I know people who know sign language who often when they're thinking know sign language and spoken language who when they're following a complex argument when they're say sitting in a lecture or you've told them something very mindboggling they're trying to reason it through they'll be gesturing with their hands even though there's no other signer in the room simply because the muscle memories of the motion you just made with your hands if they

have linguistic meaning are yet another form of short-term memory that you can use so I think that's a way in which language does interact with thought but it's not that you are incapable of thinking certain thoughts if you don't have the words for them but what about most most of the time don't most people report if you were to ask them how do you think they would say I think in words they a lot of people do um although remember a lot of people don't a lot of people say that they think in images that

they think in Body Sensations I think that what you're aware of is probably a tip of the iceberg as to what's actually happening in the mind and words are the things that we can talk to each other about me how am I going to tell you what I'm thinking unless I use words yes and so the the thing that's going to be most up most in my mind if I'm trying to convey to you how I think are going to be things like the the vocalizations these uh the auditory imagery of words and that's what

we notice although I don't think that's what where the the real um heart of the matter is in thought processes I think that's just the part that's most accessible to us in other words it's a a consequence of the accident that we were born with mouss instead of multimedia projector systems exactly we we use we use our um uh our mental imagery of words I think to uh as a one extra like almost like a piece of paper that we jot down a phone number to remember it uh but of course all inside our heads

but clearly when you look at the all these ambiguous ambiguities in language Hershey Bar's protest that's another headline meant at the town of Hershey outlawed protest right uh you whoever wrote that headline probably didn't even occur to that person that had another meaning uh he might have reported that he was was literally thinking in words but uh if he was thinking in words then uh these both of these meanings should have been apparent but uh there's got to be an idea underlying it that he had in mind that he probably wasn't even aware of so

you're arguing that the ambiguities that exist in language would suggest that that they can't possibly constrain our thoughts exactly I think the there's in fact most of us don't even uh realize how ambiguous language is and that's why it's been so hard to program computers to have a conversation we think each sentence has a meaning you actually try to program a computer to do it and the computer will find 19 meanings and and won't know which one you had in mind but those are uh really below our level of awareness MH well in a way

I suppose it's close to a miracle that we can sit here and have this conversation and understand each other and thousands of people at some other point in time are going to be listening to some sort of electronic representation of this conversation and they'll know what we're thinking that that's what that is astonishing that people are just noises are coming out of our mouths and we could be narrating the play-by-play of a basketball game or we could be talking about a soap opera plot and there would just be slightly different noises but human brains are

capable of unpacking the meaning behind the noises to figure out in our case that we're talking about language itself but we could have been talking about anything mhm well obviously we've raised more questions in all of this than than we have answered I mean the the mechanism of mental ease the way in which the sub vocalizations and and the words and the pictures all fit together and interact with our brain uh is is a a subject of great interest that uh we will explore together in the future portions of this series Stephen this has been

uh an eyeopener uh for me because I have to confess honestly it's it's caused me to change my opinion about about language I I was certain that that there were certain inherent limitations in the English environment and you really have convinced me otherwise and I find that very liberating and so for that I thank you it's been a pleasure we've got just a few uh seconds yet before we need to close this program I might mention uh for people who are viewing that we're we're going to look more into the uh mechanisms of how we

uh produce language and how we understand language and we'll look at the evolution of language and uh finally as as we approach the fourth part of the series we're going to explore the nature of Consciousness itself you have some very interesting ideas about the uh uh modules in in the nervous system that produce conscious so Steven thanks so much for being with me it's my pleasure thank you and thank you for being with us [Music]