Lera Boroditsky PhD
10:45 a.m.
Friday, June 29, 2018
International Academy of Endodontics, Annual Meeting
The Scottsdale Princess
Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
“How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think"
Do people who speak different languages think differently? Do languages merely express thoughts, or do they secretly shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Are some thoughts unthinkable without language? Why do we think the way we do? Why does the world appear to us the way it does? Humans communicate with one another using 7,000 or so different languages, and each language differs from the next in innumerable ways. At stake are basic questions all of us have about ourselves, human nature, and reality. I will discuss research conducted around the world and focus on how language shapes the way we think about color, space, time, causality, and agency.
Topics:
Language, cognition
Attendees will learn:
- How languages differ
- How patterns in language create habits in thinking
- How language constructs the fundamental building blocks of cognition: space, time, number, causality.
Affiliations:
UCSD
About the Presenter:
Lera Boroditsky is an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart). She has been named a 25 Visionaries Changing the World by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer. She once used the Indonesian exclusive “we” correctly before breakfast, and was proud of herself about it all day.
Her research has been widely featured in the media, including dozens of articles across outlets like the New York Times, The Economist, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, and Scientific American. She has also written for the popular press on topics in language and cognition, including feature articles in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and The Economist.