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Connection of language between brain and mind
How language represents thought
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As time passed, the subject of whether language influence our perception of reality and thought has been introduced by a plethora of linguists and philosophers. People have been asking this for many years. Yet, the subject has been a dilemma that is hard to answer. However, The subject gained prominence when Benjamin Whorf asserted in his essay that “ we need to recognize the influence it [language] has on other activities, culture and personal.” (Whorf 1944: p.135). Based on his studies, Whorf claimed that Hopi and, what he called, SAE (Standard Average European) speakers have distinct experience of reality that is due the difference in language. Therefore, they see the world with completely different eyes.
However, I believe that the answer
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This, he claimed, makes us think of time as an object that can be saved or wasted. However, the Hopi speakers describe time as a continuous smooth cycle. And this makes them have different view of time. However, this doesn 't mean that the language we speak has forced us to think of time in a certain manner; when in fact, our view of time, or the way we deal with it, is reflected in our language and thoughts. Moreover, perception requires a perceiver which means that any experience is filtered through the senses as well as through the mind. Direct sensory experience can be responded to intellectually, but at a more basic level, the response is thoughtless, instinctive, and immediate. For example, the reaction to getting burned is to jerk away from the source of heat, and the smell of something delicious causes the mouth to water. Sensory experience is also analyzed by the mind, and this is where the relationship between language and perception comes to bear. Some people believe that all thought is based in language and that it is impossible to think at all outside of language. Others believe
Sometimes we think that words are a way to express what we have on our minds. Right? Think again. Guy Deutscher justifies just that. Our mother tongue does train our brains into thinking a certain type of way, also altering our perceptions of reality. In the NY Times article, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?,” Guy points out that the mother tongue is Hebrew and leaves us with how we perceive the world. Guy’s protestor, Benjamin Lee Whorf, exclaims that language doesn’t have a particular word for a concept and that the concept itself could not be understood by the speaker. Guy argues that he does not have enough evidence that will substantiate the theory. He claims that Whorf is wrong on so many
involves all of the five senses, the way we perceive them. Perception is not restricted to
When considering what constitutes a different culture, people often believe this has to do only with location, background, ethnicity, race, or other similar identifies. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition, defines culture as “the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization.” This definition does not appear to require that a group of people need to be directly from or descended from people who lived in a different location, instead emphasizing the importance of socialization in developing a cultural identity. Socialization also helps to shape how people view their world. It has been proposed by many that a cultural world view is strongly influenced by language. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that language is significantly related to how people perceive and interact with the world around them (Otto). This hypothesis demonstrates the importance of language in cultural identity and suggests that lack of a shared language is a barrier to communication.
Language has the power to influence and reshape our thoughts and actions. In Anthem, by Ayn Rand, there is a society which controls the language of everyone in it. Under the World Council, everyone is to follow the many rules put in place and no one even tries to break them. There is no “I” in their language, there is only “we”. With the power to influence and reshape people, language has a big impact on our thoughts and actions.
Our five senses –sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch help the ways in which we perceive the world around us. And while they seem to work independently at time they can effect each other and the way we comprehend something. Seeing something pretty, touching something soft, eating something cold and smelling something rotten are the sense we use to connect with the world around us and will all effect how we move forward in that situation. When you look at the top picture say the color of the word not the word itself. It is harder than it seems and takes a little practice to do it efficiently. It is because we see the spelling we were taught not the color it was written in. It is hard to process it the other way, but not impossible. Take the bottom picture for another example is this a
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes three aspects of the psychological process; basic sensations, perception, and the associations of memory (Merleau-Ponty, 1994). Basic sensations receive raw information from the world and transduce them for our perceptual processes. Perception unifies the infinite amount of information about our environment, from our environment, into a meaningful structure. Perception is interpretive, but its presentation of the world is as distal and objective. There are three central features of perception for Merleau-Ponty. First, perception is synthesized independently by the body and not by the mind (consciousness).
Languages are continually changing and developing, and these changes occur in many different ways and for a variety of reasons. Language change is detectable to some extent in all languages, and ‘similar paths of change’ can be recognised in numerous unrelated languages (Bybee, 2015, p. 139). Since users of language all over the world have ‘the same mental processes’ and ‘use communication for the same or very similar ends’ (Bybee, 2015, p. 1), similar changes occur on the same linguistic aspects, and in many cases these changes produce similar results in multiple languages. However, language change is limited by the function it performs. Languages must be learnt to such an extent which allows communication between the generation above and below one’s own (McMahon, 1994, p. 5). Hence language change is a gradual, lethargic process, as only small changes in
Perception, at most times, is a credible way to assess the world around us. Without perception, we would not know what to do with all the incoming information from our environment. Perception is constructed of our senses and the unconscious interpretations of those sensations. Our senses bring in information from our environment, and our brain interprets what those sensations mean. The five most commonly accepted senses -- taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch -- all help create the world around us as we know it.
In her article, How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think, Lera Boroditsky (2009) explains how the results of her experiments support the idea that the structure of language shapes the way we think. In one of her experiments, she found that English speakers would place cards showing temporal progression in temporal order from left to right, Hebrew speakers would place them right to left, and that the Kuuk Thaayorre would place them from east to west. This shows that the written language affects how time is represented to them. In another one of her experiments, she asked German and Spanish speakers to describe some items and found that the masculinity or femininity of the noun in their respective languages affects how it is ultimately described. This can also be seen in how artists represent the human form of abstract entities like death. Boroditsky concludes that “Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.” (Core reader p. 49) I would like to add that language is also the foundation of a person’s culture, pride, and self by exploring articles written by Eric Liu, Amy Tan, and Gloria Anzaldua.
Sensation refers to the process of sensing what is around us in our environment by using our five senses, which are touching, smell, taste, sound and sight. Sensation occurs when one or more of the various sense organs received a stimulus. By receiving the stimulus, it will cause a mental or physical response. It starts in the sensory receptor, which are specialized cells that convert the stimulus to an electric impulse which makes it ready for the brain to use this information and this is the passive process. After this process, the perception comes into play of the active process. Perception is the process that selects the information, organize it and interpret that information.
Lastly, behavior can also be determined by sensation and perception, the stages of processing the information gathered from the senses. Sensation and perception depicts the world for humans. Without them, humans would not be able to truly experience what is going on around them. The first step, sensation, is the gathering of the information from the outside would through the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. The information is then organized and interpreted by the brain through
Visual perception and visual sensation are both interactive processes, although there is a significant difference between the two processes. Sensation is defined as the stimulation of sense organs Visual sensation is a physiological process which means that it is the same for everyone. We absorb energy such as electro magnetic energy (light) or sound waves by sensory organs such as eyes. This energy is then transduced into electro chemical energy by the cones and rods (receptor cells) in the retina. There are four main stages of sensation. Sensation involves detection of stimuli incoming from the surrounding world, registering of the stimulus by the receptor cells, transduction or changing of the stimulus energy to an electric nerve impulse, and then finally the transmission of that electrical impulse into the brain. Our brain then perceives what the information is. Hence perception is defined as the selection, organisation and interpretation of that sensory input.
Language, similar to all knowledge issues, is dependent on the circumstance of the situation in which the knowledge question is posed. Language can also affect the capacity of one when sharing personal experiences because of the conveyance of emotion is not always a true and concentrated version, but rather a diluted and falsified version. Language can be a necessary tool when dealing with the transmission of concepts from one generation or person to another, the exposure of concepts or claims to public scrutiny. Language can be both a universal and national tool and hence can both limit and enhance the delivery of sense perceptive stories, emotions, memories, imaginative scenes, and intuitive occurrences.
Does language influences on people’s identity? Identity may be a word that most of people take it easy to understand, but we do not really know all the things that involves. Identity can be defined generally as the characteristics that define you as a person, for example the place where you were born, cultural background, religion, language, among others. Identity can be constructed through several aspects of a relationship between self and others. An important aspect that builds our identity is the interaction with others, and in order to interact we use language. Language can lead us to identity and identity can leads us to social aspects. Some of these social aspects are the aim of this paper, such as language choice and code-switching,
Secondly, it is that language in entertwined with the structure of the relationship between the Individual and Other, meaning that language is integral to any relation between consciousnesses. Ones language is