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The most fascinating talk I’ve watched in a while comes from cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, who explores whether the language(s) we speak shape the way we think. (Thanks to Tina for sharing this!) Here are some highlights, but the whole video is worth your time, including the little short film before the talk and the Q&A afterwards.
Have you ever wondered how grammatical genders in some languages influence the way we see the world? For example, ‘the sun’ is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish. Boroditsky’s research found that when asked to describe grammatically feminine words, study participants used soft adjectives, and for masculine words they used more dominant ones. This bias also manifests itself in the physical world: The Statue of Liberty is a woman because the French word liberté is feminine.
The grammatical gender of words affects languages in different ways. Boroditsky – who also speaks Russian – explains that the word for ‘chair’ is masculine in Russian, so if you wanted to say ‘My chair was white’, you’d have to use the masculine form of ‘my’, the masculine form of ‘was’ and the masculine form of ‘white’. Russians mark the masculinity of a chair four times in one short sentence, which inevitably creates a bias.
Another really thought-provoking question Boroditsky poses is: is the way people think about time based on how they think about space, and vice versa? In Western culture, we write from left to right, so we usually imagine the future to be to the right of the present and the past to the left. In Hebrew, which is written from right to left, the future and the past are at opposite ends. People in Taiwan write from top to bottom, so time is spatially organised accordingly.
What’s fascinating is that ‘action words’ usually have the same directionality. If you asked a Westerner to draw ‘person A giving person B an apple’, the giving person would usually be on the left and the receiving person on the right, because that is how we understand action to unfold over time.
In the local language of the Kuuk Thaayorre, a group of Indigenous Australians, there is no left or right. Instead, they use cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) to describe almost anything: ‘The dog bit my eastern leg’, or ‘The boy standing south of Mary is my brother.’ Not only does this require them to always stay oriented, but interestingly, when they use their hands to gesture to the past or future, they do so depending on which direction they are facing, showing that the way we conceptualise time in language affects how we think about space.
There are so many other amazing insights in this talk! Boroditsky does a fantastic job of demonstrating that each language creates a somewhat different way of being human and engaging with the world. – Kai
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DD relies on word of mouth
If you’re enjoying DD, chances are your friends and colleagues will, too! Help me reach more readers by sharing the link to this issue with others:
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter with the best of the internet, thoughtfully curated. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
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Save 10% on paperback and ebook options
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Apps & Sites
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Open-source, self-hostable to-do app
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A web-based, open-source to-do list app that offers a free self-hosted version. The app comes with features you’d expect from a good task management app, including sharing/assigning tasks within teams and various views to organise your tasks (list, gantt, kanban, etc).
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Bookshelf is a beautifully designed companion app (iOS) for book lovers that helps you keep track of books and build a reading habit. The app has an inbuilt AI chat tool that lets you interact with books to, for instance, ask for summaries. You can also scan passages of the book and add your own notes to them.
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Podcast curation newsletter
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While I’m somewhat sceptical of all the AI summarisation tools, being able to quickly scan potentially interesting podcasts could be quite useful. With Podmob, you put together a list of your favourite podcasts and it then sends you a summary with excerpts and insights of each new episode to your inbox. Friends of DD enjoy 50% off the first three months.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Spotube is an (I assume unsanctioned) open-source desktop client for Spotify, that supports all platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux). It utilises Spotify and Youtube’s public API to create a resource-friendly user experience without needing a Spotify Premium Account. There are no Spotify or Youtube ads since it uses public and free APIs. (Although it recommends supporting the creators by watching, favouriting and subscribing to the artists’ channel.)
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Favourite Books: Max Quinn
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Six book recommendations by designer & author of fiction newsletter A Novel Tribe, Max Quinn
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by Sandro Veronesi
The entire life of a man known for his unwavering stillness in the face of the trials of life, this has everything. Comically surreal at times, profound at others, it’s remarkably easy to read for a book of such breadth and depth, never lacking for pace or intrigue.
by Max Porter
A gifted young boy makes friends with an ageing artist, who is blamed for his eventual disappearance. Part told in the strange prose poetry of an ancient woodland spirit who looks over the village, Max Porter’s talent is of a strange, singular variety and I loved every word of it.
by Andrew O’Hagan
A group of young Scottish lads travel to Manchester for a riotous weekend of Northern Soul music and debauchery, forming intense bonds along the way. Years later, diagnosed with terminal cancer, one of them asks the other to help him die. A beautiful novel about friendship, loyalty and our right to choice, it’s life affirming in a way that only being confronted by death can be.
by Ian McEwan
A personal favourite from a career full of triumphs, Saturday tells the story of a chance encounter between a neurosurgeon and a criminal that escalates into a dangerous hostage situation. McEwan builds a vivid world, his characters as meticulously researched as ever, and meditations on wide ranging topics jump off the page but are balanced by can’t-look-away plot for a literary thriller of the highest order.
by Mark Haddon
A simple premise where two sides of a family meet in a holiday let, it’s the finely poised tension of relationships and acutely observed details that bring this to life. A glorious five word sentence – ‘The train unzips the fields’ – from the opening paragraph were among the first words I ever said to my now wife. I was enraptured by Haddon’s writing then and still am a decade on.
by Katherine Boo
Not strictly a novel but certainly reads like one, Boo documents the everyday lives and dramas of the inhabitants of Mumbai’s sprawling airport slum. So engrossing that it’s hard to believe it could be written as a rigorous journalistic account, I recommend reading the afterword to gain an appreciation of Boo and her team’s dedication and methods before the story itself.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Max Quinn in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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How dopamine rules our lives
In the age of the so-called ‘attention economy’, dopamine plays a critical role in how we engage and interact with one another. This is a fascinating deep dive into the chemical that makes us want more. “Dopamine is the chemical of desire that always asks for more – more stuff, more stimulation, and more surprises. In pursuit of these things, it is undeterred by emotion, fear, or morality. Dopamine is the source of our every urge, that little bit of biology that makes an ambitious business professional sacrifice everything in pursuit of success, or that drives a satisfied spouse to risk it all for the thrill of someone new.”
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Restoring the health of our countryside
Whenever a hike intersects with a road, I’m surprised by how far the noise of engines and tyres travels. Wildlife experiences these effects much more severely. Traffication “reveals how road traffic shatters essential biological processes, affecting how animals communicate, move around, feed, reproduce and die. It awakens us from our collective road-blindness, opening up a whole new chapter in conservation. This urgent book is an essential contribution to the debate on how we restore the health of our countryside – and of our own minds and bodies.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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Sorry, no more jazz recommendations because I started listening to a jazz song in 1997 and it’s still not over.
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Food for Thought
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As I mention in my intro, one of the most fascinating talks I’ve watched recently. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky tries to answer: do languages merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? The intro includes a short film that is worthwhile too, but for just the talk, jump to the five minute mark.
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I’ve been a ‘future dog owner’ for most of my life and currently thinking about finally committing to getting a rescue dog at the end of the year. So this piece arguing against pet ownership offers some great food for thought at the right time. It does not deter me completely but rather highlights the many considerations that go into the decision. “But keeping pets shouldn’t only be about me or you – it’s a relationship, and one in which humans arguably take much more than they give. And by continuing pet keeping as it’s done now – by breeding millions of new puppies, kittens, fish, and other animals each year – we’re making the decision that all the overt abuse and lower-grade cruelty and neglect is more than made up for by the joy wrought by the human-animal bond. I’m no longer so sure it is.”
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Even if you think quitting capitalism is a pipe dream, this piece by Joan Westenberg is a great collection of ideas, movements and practical advice that encourage us to imagine better. “Once we chip away at capitalist assumptions constraining imagination, radically different social forms emerge where equity and sustainability reign. Relationship anarchy supplants hierarchy. Identity is rooted in purpose, not profession. Technology aligns with ecology. Innovation seeks social gain, not market share. Production localises. Possession communalises. Value redistributes. Labour diminishes. Resources do not infinitely grow, but capabilities and connections do.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Photographer Brendon Burton weaves fiction and truth in isolated, surreal locations to create mysterious visual narratives. Stunning! (via)
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I’m usually not one to promote marble (for its horrendous environmental footprint) but this cute little Japanese bar in NYC has the most spellbinding material palette. “Sporting a mesmerising green-blue hue, the counter stands out against the wood-clad room where the property’s original oak parquet flooring and ceiling panelling are paired with custom-made oak and burl wood veneer panels on the walls.”
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Belgian artist Vincent Bal is a shadowologist – drawing doodles around the shadows created by various objects. Prints are available from his Etsy shop. Friends of DD enjoy a 7% discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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With its unconventionally tall x-height, Miniature balances flamboyance and functionality in an earnest display font, ranging from light to black across five distinct weights.
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Notable Numbers
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Vacant US office space is rising at an alarming rate as decades of overzealous construction combined with changing work habits leaves commercial buildings at their emptiest since 1979. A recent analysis shows that nearly 20% of office space in major US cities stood unleased by the fourth quarter of 2023, up from 18.8% a year earlier.
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Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to Facebook. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies.
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China’s population fell for a second consecutive year in 2023. The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023.
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Classifieds
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Listen to the Time Sensitive podcast. Leading minds on their life and work through the lens of time. Perspectives from art and architecture, to climate, technology, and beyond.
Storytelling is not an artform reserved for marketers. If you’ve ever found it hard to communicate your value(s) to the world, time to explore how to with Story of You.
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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