Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

Post by jkn » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 6:33 PM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #27

jkn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems unlikely to me: there are many nomadic tribes, but this linguistic particularity and these abilities in spatial orientation were only reported for this tribe (AFAIK).

According to the professor on whose research this information is based, a third of the world's languages have this linguistic peculiarity. You can hear her account around 30 minute mark of this RadioLab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/

Can't listen to it right now, but this article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870346730457538...

suggests that speakers of all these languages share the good spatial orientation abilities. Anyway it's true then that my argument doesn't hold. One should first verify if there is a subset of nomadic peoples that lack this language feature, and that they have poorer orientation abilities.

Post by mike_ivanov » Fri, Apr 27, 2012, 6:37 PM UTC

ihnorton wrote: post #18

mike_ivanov wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two. Edit: clarity.

It's worth noting that they are from the same linguistic family. Having studied Latin, to me Russian seemed pretty familiar conceptually once I got past the whole cyrillic thing. I am admittedly nowhere near fluent, and I realize the experience would be different for someone without previous 2nd-language exposure. About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)...…

Russian is my native language. I picked up English when I was about 30. Also I learned some German in school, but I can't speak it.

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

Re: Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers