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Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Language colors the way you see the world
By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs
“Language,” says Rita Mae Brown, author of Starting from Scratch (1988), “exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.”
The idea is not new, having been around since the 1930s when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the controversial hypothesis that the structure of language affects the way people think. But only recently did we know why. In a recent study, researchers, led by Richard Ivry, tested the effect of language on visual perception. Ivry is professor at the University of California in Berkeley.
Since it has already been established that language is processed mainly in the left side of the brain, which receives signals from the left side of the retinas in both eyes, and objects received in the right side of the eyes go through the left retinas of the eyes (and vice versa), they wanted to know if preoccupying the left side of the brain with language stimuli could affect its capability to visually perceive objects. The results appear in this month’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
In the initial phase of the study, participants were shown a picture of green squares arranged in a circle, with a single square of blue or a different shade of green placed either in the left or the right side. The result shows that if the unique square was positioned on the left, participants detected both the blue and green square about the same time. But if the square was on the right, the subjects took longer to identify the green-shade square than the blue one. This shows that the language-association of the blue square is clearer than that in the shade of green.
During the final phase of the study, researchers asked the participants to memorize a series of words during the visual tests, the memorization being designed to preoccupy the language center in the left side of the brain and see how it would perform in interpreting visual information. The result shows that the left brain was not able to distinguish the blue square faster than the shade-of-green square. This confirms that language distracts the brain from seeing the world effectively.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, famous author and poet and founder of the transcendental movement, helped clarify this phenomenon when he said: “Language is the archives of history.” Our own language, the way we perceive and understand the information we get, determines how we see the world, how we interpret the reality we see through our eyes. In as much as we speak a different “language” we, too, see the world differently. (For comments and suggestions, please email to ztliteratus6046@lycos.com)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 18, 2006 issue)
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