Words fail

Thanks to everyone who kept our last discussion going afterward. You gave me homework.

Research suggests language may be doing considerably more than helping us describe the world. In The Whorfian Mind, researchers found that linguistic categories for color could influence early neural processing, even when people weren't consciously attending to color. In Metaphors We Think With, changing a metaphor used to describe the same problem changed how people reasoned about it, often without them recognizing the metaphor as an influence.

So language may influence what we notice, remember, categorize, and reason about, sometimes without asking our permission.

That's...uncomfortable.

If words help organize our experience, where does the world end and our description of it begin? Can we have a thought we don't have words for? We call language a tool, but can we actually put it down? What have we gained from our symbiosis with language, and what might we have traded away?

Let's spend an hour and a half getting increasingly uncomfortable about our relationship with words.

Open Access background reading- optional:
Thibodeau & Boroditsky, Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning
Thierry et al., The Whorfian Mind: Electrophysiological Evidence That Language Shapes Perception,