But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? This week, we're going to bring you a conversation I had in front of a live audience with Richard Thaler, taped on Halloween at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D. Richard is a professor of behavioral sciences and economics at the University of Chicago and is a well-known author. If a transcript is available, you'll see a Transcript button which expands to reveal the full transcript. So one possibility for bilinguals would be that they just have two different minds inside - right? Just saying hello was difficult. Evaluating Changes in Motivation, Values, and Well-being, by Kennon M. Sheldon and Lawrence S. Krieger, Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 2004. The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. All of these are very subjective things. I'm . Toula and Ian's different backgrounds become apparent on one of their very first dates. It Takes Two: The Interpersonal Nature of Empathic Accuracy, What Do You Do When Things Go Right? Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. It's inherent. And all of a sudden, I noticed that there was a new window that had popped up in my mind, and it was like a little bird's-eye view of the landscape that I was walking through, and I was a little red dot that was moving across the landscape. Imagine this. Who Do You Want To Be? | Hidden Brain Media Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. If you're just joining us, I'm talking to John McWhorter. So I think it's something that is quite easy for humans to learn if you just have a reason to want to do it. There was no such thing as looking up what it originally meant. And as odd as that sounds, I can guarantee you if you watch any TV show with women under a certain age or if you just go out on an American street and listen, you'll find that that's a new kind of exclamatory particle. Hidden Brain | Hidden Brain Media UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: (Speaking foreign language). MCWHORTER: Yeah, I really do. So new words are as likely to evolve as old ones. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. This is HIDDEN BRAIN. It is the very fabric, the very core of your experience. VEDANTAM: Our conversation made me wonder about what this means on a larger scale. Follow on Apple, Google or Spotify. Transcript The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Dictionaries are wonderful things, but they create an illusion that there's such thing as a language that stands still, when really it's the nature of human language to change. So it's easy to think, oh, I could imagine someone without thinking explicitly about what they're wearing. So you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. BORODITSKY: Well, there may not be a word for left to refer to a left leg. 437 Episodes Produced by Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Website. Hidden Brain Let's start with the word literally. So I think it's an incredible tragedy that we're losing all of this linguistic diversity, all of this cultural diversity because it is human heritage. You know, lots of people blow off steam about something they think is wrong, but very few people are willing to get involved and do something about it. And that is an example of a simple feature of language - number words - acting as a transformative stepping stone to a whole domain of knowledge. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio. al, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004. Assessing the Seeds of Relationship Decay: Using Implicit Evaluations to Detect the Early Stages of Disillusionment, by Soonhee Lee, Ronald D. Rogge, and Harry T. Reis, Psychological Science, 2010. I decided it was very important for me to learn English because I had always been a very verbal kid, and I'd - was always the person who recited poems in front of the school and, you know, led assemblies and things like that. Our team includes Laura Kwerel, Adhiti Bandlamudi and our supervising producer Tara Boyle. That is exactly why you should say fewer books instead of less books in some situations and, yes, Billy and I went to the store rather than the perfectly natural Billy and me went to the store. The categorization that language provides to you becomes real, becomes psychologically real. That's what it's all about. If you dont see any jobs posted there, feel free to send your resume and cover letter to [emailprotected] and well keep your materials on hand for future openings on the show. You can support Hidden Brain indirectly by giving to your local NPR station, or you can provide direct support to Hidden Brain by making a gift on our Patreon page. Writing has come along relatively recently. But what happens when these feelings catch up with us? I'm shankar Vedantam in the 2002 rom com. This week, in the fourth and final installment of our Happiness 2.0 series, psychologist Dacher Keltner describes . VEDANTAM: Languages seem to have different ways of communicating agency. And so I was trying to keep track of which way is which. Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: (Speaking foreign language). But if you seed a watermelon, nobody assumes that you're taking seeds and putting them in the watermelon, you're taking them out. So that's a measurement difference of 100 percent of performance. And, I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that. You couldn't have predicted this I know-uh move-uh (ph). Because were a small team, we dont have a publicly-available list of every piece of music that we use. You're not going to do trigonometry. BORODITSKY: Actually, one of the first people to notice or suggest that this might be the case was a Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. They know which way is which. And, I mean, just in terms of even sounds changing and the way that you put words together changing bit by bit, and there's never been a language that didn't do that. And MIT linguist Ken Hale, who's a renowned linguist, said that every time a language dies, it's the equivalent of a bomb being dropped on the Louvre. This week, we kick off a month-long series we're calling Happiness 2.0. MCWHORTER: Oh, yeah, I'm a human being. VEDANTAM: It took just one week of living in Japan for Jennifer to pick up an important new term. And in fact, speakers of languages like this have been shown to orient extremely well - much better than we used to think humans could. Today in our Happiness 2.0 series, we revisit a favorite episode from 2020. We recommend movies or books to a friend. BORODITSKY: Yeah. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. This week, we continue our look at the science of influence with psychologist Robert Cialdini, and explore how th, We all exert pressure on each other in ways small and profound. Copyright Hidden Brain Media | Privacy Policy, Freely Determined: What the New Psychology of the Self Teaches Us About How to Live, Going the Distance on the Pacific Crest Trail: The Vital Role of Identified Motivation, Athletic Scholarships are Negatively Associated with Intrinsic Motivation for Sports, Even Decades Later: Evidence for Long-Term Undermining, Rightly Crossing the Rubicon: Evaluating Goal Self-Concordance Prior to Selection Helps People Choose More Intrinsic Goals, What Makes Lawyers Happy? Does Legal Education Have Undermining Effects on Law Students? So - but if I understand correctly, I would be completely at sea if I visited this aboriginal community in Australia because I have often absolutely no idea where I am or where I'm going. Maybe it's, even less than 100 meters away, but you just can't bring yourself to even throw your, coat on over your pajamas, and put your boots on, and go outside and walk those, hundred meters because somehow it would break the coziness, and it's just too much of, an effort, and you can't be bothered to do it, even though it's such a small thing. And there are consequences for how people think about events, what they notice when they see accidents. : The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events, Shelly. Something new will have started by then, just like if we listen to people in 1971, they sound odd in that they don't say like as much as we do. And dead languages never change, and some of us might prefer those. Hidden Brain Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam Science 4.6 36K Ratings; Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. See you next week. In this favorite episode from 2021, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isnt something to be found its something we can develop from within. BORODITSKY: That's a wonderful question. Decoding Emotions - Transcripts Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships. Hidden Brain - KQED | News, Radio, Podcasts, TV It's too high. Stay with us. In many languages, nouns are gendered. Of course, you also can't experience anything outside of time. How to Really Know Another Person - Transcripts We talk with psychologist Iris Mauss, who explains why happiness Why do some companies become household names, while others flame out? We'd say, oh, well, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales or whatever. You can search for the episode or browse all episodes on our Archive Page. BORODITSKY: And when they were trying to act like Wednesday, they would act like a woman BORODITSKY: Which accords with grammatical gender in Russian. So for example, grammatical gender - because grammatical gender applies to all nouns in your language, that means that language is shaping the way you think about everything that can be named by a noun. al (Eds. Perceived Partner Responsiveness Scale (PPRS), by Harry T. Reis et. We'll begin with police shootings of unarmed Black men. Now, many people hear that and they think, well, that's no good because now literally can mean its opposite. In English, actually, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, I broke my arm. Toward Understanding Understanding:The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships, by Harry Reis, Edward P. Lemay Jr, and Catrin Finkenauer, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2017. And to arrive in a new place where you can't tell a joke and can't express an idea - oh, it's just really painful because you feel like your whole self is hiding inside and no one can see it. VEDANTAM: I want to talk in the second half of our conversation about why the meanings of words change, but I want to start by talking about how they change. VEDANTAM: The word chair is feminine in Italian. Perceived Partner Responsiveness Minimizes Defensive Reactions to Failure, by Peter A. Caprariello and Harry T. Reis, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2011. Parents and peers influence our major life choices. UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Speaking foreign language). Perceived Responses to Capitalization Attempts are Influenced by Self-Esteem and Relationship Threat, by Shannon M. Smith & Harry Reis, Personal Relationships, 2012. No matter how hard you try to feel happier, you end up back where you started. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button. What turns out to be the case is that it's something in between - that bilinguals don't really turn off the languages they're not using when they're not using them. MCWHORTER: Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. VEDANTAM: Still don't have a clear picture? Many of us believe that hard work and persistence are the key to achieving our goals. How To Breathe Correctly For Optimal Health, Mood, Learning But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? You 2.0: How to Open Your Mind | Hidden Brain Media Psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of figuring out what you want. If you're studying a new language, you might discover these phrases not in your textbooks but when you're hanging out with friends. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. Laughter: The Best Medicine | Hidden Brain : NPR BORODITSKY: I spoke really terrible Indonesian at the time, so I was trying to practice. My big fat greek wedding, an american woman of greek ancestry falls in love with a very vanilla, american man. FEB 27, 2023; Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button . But is that true when it comes to the pursuit of happiness? Parents and peers influence our major life choices, but they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. But that can blind us to a very simple source of joy that's all around us. I'm Shankar Vedantam.