The language you speak changes the colors you see?

The language you speak changes the colors you see

by Olivia Goldhill

These words don’t simply reflect what we see, but multiple experiments suggest they influence our perception. In one recent study, published in Psychological Science and reported by the British Psychological Society, researchers showed groups of Greek, German, and Russian speakers (103 people in total) a rapid series of shapes, and were told to look out for a grey semi-circle. This semi-circle appeared alongside a triangle in different shades of blue and green, and participants later reported whether they saw a complete triangle, a slight or strong impression of the shape, or didn’t see it at all.

Researchers found that Greek and Russian speakers, who have dedicated words for light and dark blue, were more likely to see a light blue triangle against a dark blue background (and vice versa), than they were to identify green triangles against green backgrounds. Speakers of German, which has no such distinction, were no better at seeing shades of blue triangles than green.

Interesting.

Terence McKenna hypothesized that the world is made of language, and that the words we know and understand shape how perceive our respective realities.

If validated, it would lend support to at least a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which most linguists scoff at but seems to have been pushed away too early IMHO.. Academics are slow to accept new thoughts.

The words are just another sensory input pattern, which are learnt (experienced/associated) and available for easier recall using the brains spatio-temporal networks. If that same sensory pattern is reactivated again in the very near past, this recently reactivated pattern in the near past, is going to be added-up with other sensory input patterns within the present, and this will tip (influence) ones patterns, so that perception moves towards those past experiences (what some people might call attractor's).

Perceiving a banana as yellow is therefore helped by past learning (experience/association), and also by being primed with the word banana, and or the fruit's particular shape in the near past... in fact any/all the contextual sensory input will therefore influence perception.

You could see the brain as a notepad with amazing 'plasticity' that allows one access to the past. You could put this 'storage-in-the-past', which the brain is accessing, within the confines of the brain itself, as most neuroscientists do. But it makes more sense to me, to leave the experience exactly where and when it was created - stored in the past. Then we can better explain most anomalous phenomena (where one comes into possession of information that one should not have been aware of) as the natural result of accessing storage, exactly whereabouts it was originally left in space-time, and which therefore may not be our own experiences. Although it's much more likely to be our own, because our experiences are learnt, and 'keyed' by our own brain structure, a reasonably unique structure at a macro level, somewhat analogous to a fingerprint, but formed from less unique structures, at a deeper micro level (protiens etc). Until right down at the bottom level, we're inferring the nature of the storage structure itself, from which everything else higher up is actually built.