The Art of Being Human A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology Textbook Lesson 4 Language

Lesson Four Language Om won are embedded in ' 106 ! THE POWER OF LANGUAGE On her first day as a interpreter for a local community college , Susan spotted a deaf man sitting alone and intensively studying the people around him in a Reading Skills class . She introduced herself with a greeting gesture and her name sign , as if to say , Hi , my name is Susan . He copied her , as if to say back , Hi , my name is Susan . your name ?

she asked . your name ?

he responded . He studied her carefully , copying her every move , and asking for her approval with his eyes . She soon realized that this man , had no concept of language . were only inches apart , but we might as well have been from different planets it seemed impossible to meet . She could not help but recognize his desire to learn , and felt called to teach him . It was long , arduous , and frustrating work . Nothing she did seemed to break through . Eventually , she settled on the idea of doing an imaginary skit in which she would talk to an empty chair as if 107

was sitting there , then pop over to the other chair to respond , thereby modeling a conversation between herself and an . It was a bizarre scene and felt strange . Week after week she had these imaginary conversations . I began to worry about my sanity , she writes . After a grueling , and apparently hopeless session , suddenly perked up . The whites of his eyes expanded as if in terror , writes . He was having a breakthrough He sat still , as if pondering the revelation , and then excitedly started looking around the room , slowly at first , then hungrily , he took in everything as though he had never seen anything before . He started slapping his hands down on objects and looking for Susan to respond . Table , she signed as he slapped his hand on the table . Book , she signed as he touched a book , and then door , clock , and chair in rapid succession has he pointed around the room . Then he stopped , collapsed his head into his arms folded on the table , and wept . He had entered the universe of humanity , discovered the communion of minds . He now knew that he and a cat and the table all had names and he could see the prison where he had existed alone , shut out of the human race for seven years . LANGUAGE LEARNING IN NEW GUINEA When I first arrived in the rainforests of New Guinea , I saw three things trees , bushes , and grass . Of course , there was a wide range of different types of trees , bushes , and grasses , but having no language for them , they disappeared into a large mass of stimuli that I simply knew as the forest . I had no language to make sense of what I was seeing no web of meanings to create the background upon which what I saw could take on some significant definition . I could not tell food from foul , or medicine from poison , and I was completely mystified by the meanings my friends could glean from the forest as we walked . With their eyes always scanning their surroundings , they were constantly reacting to the messages they could see and hear , 108

limit variously up with delight and sighing with disappointment , laughing , groaning , shaking their head this way and that as they went . Anxious to explore their world of meanings , I set about learning the language . The first phrase I identify seemed to be a common greeting , as I heard it over and over again every morning as we watched people stroll by the house on their way down the mountain toward their gardens . they would sing out as they passed . I wrote it down and repeated it to my brother Lazarus , asking him what it means . It means , I din going Io the garden . he said . Great ! I thought to myself , a subject , verb , and an object . I could use this to start unlocking the language using a technique we call frame substitution . With frame substitution , the researcher uses a known phrase as a frame and just tweaks ( substitutes ) one part of it to see what changes . How do you say , He going lo the garden ?

I asked . The words were too fast for me to decipher where one word stopped and another began , so I ran them all together in my notebook . A pattern was emerging . The change in subject from he to I had changed the beginning and end of the phrase ( I sat still and pondered the revelation for a moment and then excitedly started asking for more words . I felt like awakening to a new world . I was having a breakthrough . I excitedly started scribbling notes into my notebook . Other bits of language I had recorded suddenly made sense . It was as if had broken a code and a world of mystery was revealing itself to me . Like pointing in rapid succession to tables , books , doors , clocks , and chairs , I also started gathering new terms using the framework of this sentence as a starting point . I asked how one would say she is going to the garden and found the beginning and end changed again . I started rattling off different subjects , from he and she and on to they and we . 109

Then I was ready to discover the pronoun and Verb ending for you . How would you say , You fo the ?

I asked . he answered , which was already established as I am going to the garden . I corrected , You are going to the garden . No , no . he responded again . No , no ! I responded in frustration . You ! You are going to the garden . No , no , he said . I staying right here . You are still very confused . WHAT IS A WORD ?

One of the biggest challenges of learning a language among people who do not read and write is that they do not necessarily think about their language as a collection of discrete words in the same way that we do . Likewise , one of the biggest challenges of learning a language among people who do read and write is that they do not always talk like they write . Learning the written form may be entirely different from learning how to speak . One of comedian George favorite English words was , as in go catch the bus and head home . Humans can make about different sounds . About 400 of these are used in languages around the world , with most languages using about 40 different sounds . The sounds a language uses are called . These sounds include consonants and vowels , and in some languages there are also clicks and tones . If you do not learn a phoneme when you are young , it can be difficult to speak and understand later in life . English speakers struggle to understand the tones in a tonal language . Japanese speakers often struggle to pronounce the sound used in many languages . And the plethora of unique clicks used in languages of southern Africa are difficult for everyone except the 110

. learning Korean often struggle not only to say certain words but also to distinguish words like pul and , which both simply sound like pull to an English speaker , but uses an aspirated ' thereby distinguishing the word as grass rather than fire . Sometimes these phonemic differences create unique abilities in the cultures and speakers that use them . The of the Amazon use just 11 sounds , including three tones . The heavy use of these tones allow the to whistle messages to one another through the rainforest across great distances . In West Africa , speakers of tonal languages can use talking drums that allow the drummer to vary the pitch to mimic speech and send messages up to five miles . Tonal languages might also have an effect on human abilities . In one study , Diana found that Mandarin speakers were nine times more likely than English speakers to have perfect pitch , the remarkable ability to precisely name any pitch , whether it comes from a piano or the hum of an air conditioner . Though the local language contained a few new that made it difficult for me to learn , I was fortunate that many of the people in the village spoke Tok , a creole that had developed over the past few centuries of contact with Europeans . The language is a mix made up of mostly words along with some German and local words . I had no trouble saying You are going to the garden in Tok ( you simply say ya go . Tok has become a national lingua franca , facilitating communication for speakers of over 800 different languages in New Guinea . With a relatively small vocabulary made up of many familiar words , I was able to converse in the language in a month and became soon after that . But it was the local language that enchanted me . As notes , If people learn another language , they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world . I sensed that I was on the verge of a new way of seeing the world . 111

I changed tactics and returned to the foundations of frame substitution to build on what I already knew . How you say , ix going to the I asked . Now the code was breaking again . I noticed that the only change between that phrase and the phrase for going to the garden was am ) and could conclude that these were the words for house and garden , respectively . I excitedly asked for more and started filling my notebook . I reveled in my new language abilities . a common greeting like this gave me something to hold onto in what was otherwise a sea of unfamiliar sounds . But then a new mystery emerged the next morning . A man walked by my house as I was sitting on the veranda and said , By the time I unraveled what he meant by the statement , I was forced to realize that they were not just speaking differently . They were thinking differently too . TRANSCENDING SPACE AND TIME Vivian . Have ) ever and time ?

Yes . lime not . I don ?

about I Heart The man was passing from the other direction , heading , and that turned out to be the key difference . indicated that he was going uphill , while indicated going . Using frame substitution I found a vast collection of words indicating directions . This does not seem particularly different from English , in which we might say I heading down there up there over there etc . The key difference is not that we ( 472 say these things . It is that they have to . The direction indicator is built right into their , so they have to say which direction they are facing or going every time they say hello . In this way , it is similar to , spoken by Australian Aborigines on the northern tip of 112

limit , Australia . As says , If you do know which way is which , you literally ca get past hello . In some languages these directional take the place of left and right , so a speaker might say , your north shoe is untied or even your shoe is untied . As a result , people who speak languages like this exhibit the uncanny capacity for dead reckoning . They know exactly which direction is which at every moment of the day . Even small children know exactly what direction they are facing , even in unfamiliar territory after long travels . Stephen recounts that a speaker of ( a Mayan language in the Mexican state of ) was blindfolded and spun around over 20 times in a dark house , yet he still knew which way was which . I knew very little about all this at the time . I only knew that my friends in New Guinea were experiencing the world differently than I was . I felt much like Wilhelm von must have felt when , in the early , he started to realize that American Indian languages had radically different grammatical structures from European languages . The difference between languages is not only in sounds and signs but in worldview , he proclaimed . he recognized that any thought could be expressed in any language , he became keenly aware of the fact that a language shapes thought by what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force . In other words , if you have to figure out what direction you are facing every time you greet someone , you get pretty good at telling direction . Enchanted by the possibilities of new ways of thinking , linguists and set about documenting undocumented in earnest . By the early , Edward emerged as one of their most prominent leaders . What fetters the mind and the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes , wrote in his to the of . Like , saw a path toward new ways of seeing and thinking about the world through the documentation of languages . championed the idea as the principle of linguistic relativity . Much as Einstein Theory of 113

Relativity has done , thought linguistic relativity could disrupt our ways of seeing and understanding the world . most famous student and colleague was Benjamin , a genius fire inspector with a degree in chemical who was fascinated by languages . working as a fire inspector , he noticed that several tragic were caused by people carelessly smoking next to empty gas barrels Of course , the empty barrels were actually full of highly gas vapor . Most famously , interested in Hopi concepts of time . He noted that in English we talk about time as a thing and objectify it as seconds , minutes , hours , days , etc . It was a brilliant analysis starting from the insight that time is not really a thing but is simply the experience of duration , of a getting later . The Hopi , he argued , have no words , grammatical forms , constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call . He tied this into a broader observation of how our grammar shapes how we talk and think . For example , our grammar obliges us to provide a subject for every verb , so we say it rains or the light flashes when in fact neither the rain nor the light even exist without the action itself . When a light the Hopi simply say . would go on to claim that our grammar made it difficult for us to understand Einstein Theory of Relativity , which merges time and space , matter and energy , but make it easy to understand Newton , in which objects do specific actions . He suggested that if science had emerged within an language , the Theory of Relativity might have been discovered much sooner . Unfortunately , his claims about Hopi time may have gone too far . The idea that the Hopi have no concepts of time was discounted in the opening quote of comprehensive book on Hopi Time , in which quotes a Hopi man using several concepts of time that assumed did not exist Then indeed , in mowing al the new when people prey in the , around me , be woke up the girl again . 114

fell into disrepute among many linguists after this , but nobody expressed the core insight that language can shape thought more eloquently or forcefully . His works revealed what Stephen called a seductive , revolutionary set of ideas . goes on to note that many eminent researchers in the language sciences will confess that they were first drawn into the study of language through the ideas associated with Lee ( As linguists have turned away from , what was once known as the Hypothesis or as dubbed it , the Principle of Linguistic Relativity , is being as what Guy has called the principle . points out that unlike , who pushed the notion that language shapes thought too far , Boas and championed a more tempered approach that , as summarized , languages differ essentially in what they convey and not in what they may convey . In this way , language shapes how we think by forcing us to think about certain things over and over again like direction for my friends in New Guinea . Over the past 30 years , careful controlled experiments have shown that language does indeed shape how we think . For , in one task researchers asked participants to look at three different toy animals in a row setting on a table . The animals might be placed from left to right , facing downhill for example . Participants have to memorize the order of the animals and then turn around and place the animals in the same order on another table behind them This forces the participant to make a decision about which answer is right . One right answer would be to place the animals from left to right , but now left to right is not downhill , it is uphill . In such experiments , almost all speakers of ( a language that requires speakers to know which direction they are facing ) chose to orient the animals from right to left in a downhill orientation , while almost all Dutch speakers did the opposite . 115

Though this may seem like a minor difference , points out that how we think about space can affect how we think about other things as well . People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other , more complex , more abstract representations , she notes , such as time , number , musical pitch , kinship relations , and emotions . For example , the of northern in Australia arrange time from east to west rather than left to right . they were asked to arrange cards that indicated a clear temporal sequence such as a man aging or a banana being eaten , they arranged the cards from east to west , regardless of which direction they were facing . Mandarin speakers think of time as moving downward so next month is the down month and last month is the up month . Beyond time and space there are other interesting grammatical differences across languages that may shape how we think , but these domains have not been investigated thoroughly . For example , the of the Amazon rainforest have the most complex system of verb forms that linguists call . They operate much like tenses but require speakers to indicate precisely how they know what they In , if you want to say , he is going to the garden you have to indicate whether you know this by direct experience , you are inferring it from clear evidence , you are based on previous patterns , or you know it from hearsay . In the West we have a vast complicated philosophical field called Epistemology to explore how we know what we know . The may be master just by Virtue of how they are required to speak . WHERE THE SKY IS NOT BLUE That our grammar affects how we think is now established , but what about our words ?

In one famous example , often mistakenly attributed to , the Eskimo are said to have hundreds of words for snow . This is not exactly true on a number of counts . First , there is no single Eskimo language , and many languages spoken in the 116 region use polysynthetic word structures that allow them to make an number of words from any root . For example , a complex phrase like you like to go window shopping with me can be expressed in just one word . In such a system , there are endless possibilities building from the root words for snow ( of which there are only two ) However , linguist David Harrison notes that the identify at least 99 distinct sea ice formations including several that are essential to life and death on the ice , such as , which indicates crushed ice that is beginning to spread out and is dangerous to walk on . It should not be surprising that the would have so many words for sea ice formations . Of course , an avid skier also has several words for snow and ice that are unknown to most English speakers , such as , powder , moguls , zipper bumps , and . Just as we learned in the previous section , our language does not limit us from perceiving new things and inventing words for them , but once we have a word for something and start habitually using that word , it is much easier to see it . I experienced this myself in New Guinea . As I learned the language , the forest came alive for me in the same way that the whole world carne alive for as he discovered language . The more words I learned , the more I came to see and understand the of the world around me . The monotonous diet , which had consisted of little more than taro , sweet potato , and bananas , was greatly enhanced as I came to recognize over thirty types of taro and sweet potato , and over fifty types of banana , each with its own distinct texture and flavor . Sometimes , the words people use to describe the world clearly reflect and support the social structure and core values of their culture . One particularly example is in the domain of kinship terms . For example , Hawaiians use same word ( for mother as they do for aunt , a reflection of the importance they place on and their tendency to live in extended families . If you were born into a culture where wealth is passed through the line systems ) you might refer to your father sister as 117

, indicating that her children ( your cousins in our system ) are suitable marriage partners . This form of cousin marriage can be advantageous because it keeps the wealth within the . If you marry outside the , the family wealth would need to be divided . Our own system , which distinguishes closest blood relatives ( mother , father , brother , sister ) from more distant relatives ( aunts , uncles and cousins ) and supports a social structure and core values emphasizing independent nuclear families . The core idea here is that we use our words to divide and categorize the world in certain ways which then how we see and act in the world . But how far does this go ?

For , if we a culture that had no word for blue , would the people of that culture experience blueness ?

Could they see it ?

they see it just as you or I see it ?

This is the question that struck Gladstone in 1858 when he noticed something peculiar about Homer epic classics , The and The . There were very few color terms throughout both texts , and the few times that colors were mentioned , they seemed a little ( Honey is described as green , the daytime sky is black , and the sea is described as the color of wine . There seemed to be no word for what we would normally call blue . After careful study , Gladstone came to the conclusion that the Greeks might have seen the world very differently from us , perhaps mostly in black and white with the occasional shade of red . Nine years later , Lazarus Geiger found that the color blue was also missing from the texts of ancient India , and from biblical Hebrew . He attempted to unveil the deep history of numerous languages and found that the word for blue was a relatively recent invention in each one . Furthermore , he noticed that the order in which colors were added to a language seemed to follow a universal pattern . First a language would have words for black and white , then red , then yellow or green , then yellow and green , and finally blue . Over the next twenty years , anthropologists and missionaries 118

gathered color terms from all over the world and the universal pattern was confirmed . Geiger wondered whether or not people without words for such colors could see the colors or not . Can the difference between them and us be only in the naming , he wondered , or in the perception itself ?

Do they really not see the color blue ?

Thus opened up to science one of our favorite old philosophical nuts . I the ) we Mme blue that I tee ?

Is it possible to know ?

Ten years later the question was one of the hottest topics of the age . Anatomist suspected that a deadly train crash in 1875 was caused when the conductor failed to see and obey a red stop light . He set about testing other conductors for and promoted the importance of color perception for international safety . In this environment , Hugo Magnus suggested that blindness was a vestige of relatively recent human abilities . The ability of our retina to see colors had been evolving , he argued , and it would continue to evolve . Red was the first color we saw because it was the most intense , followed by yellow and green . He proposed that the ability to see blue was a relatively recent human ability , and suggested that primitive tribes saw the world of color much as we see it at twilight , with muted and only the most intense colors easily distinguished . But color tests around the world failed to confirm that people of different cultures varied in their ability to perceive color differences . Nubians , and Islanders had no trouble sorting and matching color samples . But there was still the mystery of why Homer would describe the sea as or honey as green , and why the word for blue would be so late in coming in the evolution of languages . Sometimes we have some basic assumptions built into our questions that lead us astray . If you ask , how did humankind sense of color evolve over the past years since Homer ?

then you are assuming that our sense of color has evolved . It is easy enough to discard that assumption , but harder to see and discard a 119 much deeper assumption about the nature of color itself . We think of colors in terms of hue , which is dependent on the color wavelength and is independent of its intensity or lightness . What is apparent now is that many languages , including that of Homer , were not describing color as we think of it at all , but were instead describing intensity . The Greeks did not classify colors by hue , but by darkness and lightness . referred to darker colors such as dark blue , dark green , violet , brown , and black while referred to lighter colors such as light blue , light green , grey or yellow . So why does red come first in the history of languages , followed by yellow , green , and blue ?

We do not know for sure , but there may be a mix of reasons both natural and cultural . Our closest primate relatives show increased excitement around the color red , which may signal danger ( blood ) or sex , and experiments with humans also show physiological effects . Red is of great importance symbolically in most cultures , and red dyes are the easiest to find and manufacture , with most cultures having some source for red dye that is often used in art and skin decoration . Yellow and green are important in identifying the health and ripeness of many plants , and yellow dyes are also fairly easy to find and manufacture . Blue is not especially important or easy to find and manufacture . Indeed , blue dyes do not appear until about three thousand years ago , and its rarity conferred it a special status in early civilizations . More importantly , some color words in other languages carry other important meanings that can change how they are used . For example , Harold notes that the of the Philippines say that the section of freshly cut bamboo is green since green is not exclusively a color term but a label of freshness . While it is now that people of different cultures can see all the same colors , there is some evidence that our color words shape how we see them . For example , neuropsychologist Jules worked with the in Africa , who do not have a word for blue . he showed them 12 color samples , 11 that we would 120

call green and that we would call blue , they could not determine that the blue one was the odd one out But , they have many words for different shades of green , and when shown a pallet of 12 green squares with one slightly different they immediately saw the difference . English speakers can not do this ( You can try at ?

His work suggests that once we a color , it is easier to notice it , and we often collapse color differences toward our modal version of a color , making it difficult to distinguish between different shades that match the same category . In other words , when people who have no word for blue look out at a sky that they categorize in the color category as black , the sky probably appears a bit darker than it does to us . METAPHORS BE WITH YOU Though grammar and words can be shown to shape how we see and think about the world , linguists George and Mark Johnson have proposed that the most profound on our thought is at the level of metaphor . They point out that metaphors are pervasive throughout our language and often unnoticed . For example , we often unconsciously use the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR to describe an argument . We say that claims are or . We and our , shooting down their points , hoping that we can win . To drive home the significance of this metaphor , they ask us to consider what it would be like if we lived in a culture that instead used an ARGUMENT IS A DANCE metaphor in which the participants try to dance together , find the beauty in each other moves , and ultimately create something beautiful together . The key point of and Johnson is not just that we use metaphors in how we talk . It is that human thought processes are largely metaphorical . As Neil Postman notes , A metaphor is not an ornament . It is an organ of perception Ir a wave on particle ?

Are 121 like ?

ai ' awarding to some of nature or a divine plan ?

In Virtually every domain of our lives and worldview , metaphors are operating , shaping our perception . of the metaphors we use in our thought are what they call dead metaphors that is , that we do not see them as metaphors at all . Take for the metaphorical concept that Michael Reddy has called the conduit metaphor , in which we think of ideas as objects and words as containers for those ideas . We put ideas into the containers ( words ) and send them ( along a conduit ) to other people . After careful analysis , Reddy notes that about 70 of all expressions we use about language are based on this metaphor . We say that we have ideas , that sometimes they are fa in words , and that sometimes it is hard to an idea arrays . This metaphor lies at the heart of many common sense notions of education , which , as it turns out , are incomplete and misguided . The notion is that a teacher job is to put ideas into words and send them to the students , who then will have the ideas . Massive lecture halls on college campuses have these assumptions built right into them , with fixed stadium seating facing the front of the room where the professor takes control of over a million points of light on giant screens , all specifically designed to help the professor convey the ideas into the heads of the students . But this is not a complete picture of how learning works . Ideas do not just into people heads and fill them up . a new idea enters the mind of another , it enters a complex system with its own structure of interests , biases , and assumptions . The learner does not just absorb ideas whole . But precisely what is going on when learning happens is difficult to describe , and so we must rely on other metaphors . There are a wide range of possibilities beyond the Mind is a container metaphor that can open us up to new possibilities . For example , Reddy suggests that we might think of the mind as a toolmaker . When new ideas come to us that we think might be 122

limit useful , we use the idea to make a tool . But because my experience , interests , problems , and biases are different than yours , I make a different tool . This , like the mind is a container metaphor , strikes us as partially true , though also incomplete . But by expanding our metaphor vocabulary . we constantly open ourselves up to new possibilities for how we think about the most important aspects of our lives . Consider some of those really big questions that are constantly on our minds in the modern world Who am I am I going to do ?

Am I going to make ' All of them are propped up on unexamined dead metaphors . Understanding what these metaphors are and how they shape our thoughts and actions might help us find answers to these questions , or perhaps lead us to new questions . For example , when asking the question am ?

we will often say that we are trying to find ourselves . This is a metaphor , and it can shape your thoughts and actions . The attempt to find the self assumes that there is a solid core self to be found . To find it , we might try different career paths , bounce between relationships , or travel from place to place looking for it . And each time we fail to find it , we feel a little more lost . The experiences seem wasted . But if we change the metaphor and instead see our task as one of creating ourselves , those same experiences can be seen as part of the creative process , each one becoming a part of who we are as we go about creating the self . Of course , neither of these is precisely right . They are both incomplete , but each fills in gaps the other missed . The notion of creating yourself overlooks the fact that we are all inherently we all have different tendencies , capacities , and limits while the notion of yourself can overlook our capacities to change and create new tendencies , develop new capacities , and overcome limits . And then there the possibility that both of these metaphors put too much emphasis on the self altogether , and perhaps we should be considering a different metaphor . As the great poet Marshall Mathers 123

once noted , You better yourself , in the moment , you own it , you better never let it go . Of course , losing yourself may mean moving beyond language altogether . This is what happened to neuroscientist Jill Taylor during a stroke the language center of her brain shut down . She says , I lost all of myself in relation to the external world Language is the constant reminder ' And how did she feel in this state ?

I had joy . I just had joy , she told in an interview . I a imide I not known be are pure wire that , Ab , the Jim ix ?

Imagine don ?

mid Mining . It all premix moment . Though we are not likely to be willing to give up our language , we can try to take control of it , and doing so requires that we recognize that even simple verbs such as i or doe are , in the words of Neil Postman , powerful metaphors that express some our most fundamental conceptions of the way things are . We are hungry . The Spanish have hunger . This distinction is perhaps not very interesting or meaningful until we put it into other domains . We might have the but we do not have criminality . People do crimes and we have large systems in place to find out exactly who did a and why . Of course , these ideas can change . Not long ago one could lie angry but could not have anger . Now , new ideas about how anger works allow people to recognize how anger can be seen as a treatable condition for which people can receive help . The key idea is that metaphors permeate our thoughts and deeply shape how we make sense of the world . They do not necessarily reflect the unchanging and absolute nature of reality . Metaphors are the primary lens through which we make meaning of the world . As long as our metaphors are dead and unexamined , they control us and our thought patterns . When we examine the metaphors that guide us , we gain the freedom to create new ones and become 124

limit makers . As Neil Postman once famously noted , word weavers are . ARE Ellen Langer , professor of psychology at Harvard University , ran a simple experiment in which she gave two groups of students an object . One group was told , This is a dog chew toy while the other group was told , This might be a dog Chew toy . Later , when an eraser was needed , only the group that was told that the object might be a dog chew toy thought that it might also be used as an eraser . The key difference is in how our minds pay attention to things and ideas we consider pliable and conditional those we consider fixed and absolute . we think of things and ideas as pliable and conditional we play with them , and by playing with them , we become more likely to find new , creative uses for them as well as remember them later on . If I knocked on your door and offered you for a ' slab of wood , what would you do ?

Most people become frustrated that they do not have a pile of wood nearby , but they are holding a ' slab of wood in their hand , the door itself ! we name something ( door ) it tends to become fixed and absolute as that thing in our mind , and disappears as all the other things it might become . We fall into the trap of categories . As Nobel physicist Niels says , Our thoughts have us , rather than us having them . To pay attention to these alternatives and to be aware of the pliable and conditional aspects of our world is to be mindful . The power of mindfulness is wonderfully summarized by Ken Bain , who notes that all of us possess enormous power to change the world and ourselves by shifting the language and categories we employ . I thinking Ibis wrong . I there a ) of seeing my

?

Are there I me ?

The brain becomes more creative . Life becomes more exciting and fun . This power to change the self by changing our words is documented . In one experiment , Langer and her ran a short seminar for maids at large hotels designed to inform them that their jobs were good exercise . Although actual behavior did not change , Langer reports , they perceived themselves to be getting significantly Remarkably , their bodies actually more exercise then before . reflected this change . Over the next month they lost an average of two pounds over the control group . They lost body fat and their blood pressure dropped 10 points . Langer points out that such results are largely the result of the placebo effect . And what is the placebo effect ?

It is the power of your mind to actually change your body and heal itself . you change your beliefs in a way that is thoroughly convincing to your mind , your brain chemistry actually changes . In fact , every drug in the world is actually already present in the brain . That why they work . Our brain has receptors for them . Every pharmacological agent or drug that there is , Tor Wager told , there is a chemical produced by your brain that does that thing ( But the power to change the self by changing your language does not stop with the physical self . It runs deep into the very essence of how you understand yourself as well . FINDING YOUR Most of us have deep unconscious understandings of ourselves that are not always . We tend to push away these dark parts of ourselves and rarely examine them In doing so , we might also be pushing away the parts of ourselves that make us who we are . we adopt a mindful approach to the world , we see ourselves as pliable and conditional rather than fixed and absolute . We can see our capacity for growth and change . This helps us see 126

those darker parts of ourselves because we recognize that they might not always be so dark . In fact , we might even see these dark aspects of ourselves as the source of our greatest . Gillian was a little girl , her teacher was often frustrated with her . She would not sit still in the classroom , constantly dancing around the room . The teacher asked her mother to have her . After looking her over , the doctor turned on the radio and left the room to retrieve her mother . The doctor brought her mom to the door and asked her to look inside . Gillian was being Gillian , dancing around the room to the music . Your daughter is not sick , the doctor said . She a dancer . Gillian mom promptly removed her from school and enrolled her in dance school . She went on to be one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of modern times , best known for her work in Call and Phantom Opera . What appeared to be a weakness in one context ( dancing around the classroom ) has become a great strength and widely celebrated in another ( dancing across the stage ) In this way , our weaknesses may in fact be strengths . Perhaps we are mistaken in separating them . As word weavers making new meanings , perhaps a new word can help us see parts of ourselves that otherwise remain hidden . A can be any apparent weakness that is a strength in another context or generates strength over time . For example , one former student struggled greatly with anxiety and panic attacks . Over her years of struggle with this weakness , she developed a remarkable capacity to calm herself in times of stress . Years later , when her boyfriend was struggling with the stress of graduate school , she was able to pass on some of her wisdom to help him calm himself . He went on to his thanks to her remarkable abilities , and so did she . Now a practicing in Clinical Psychology , she has helped hundreds of patients overcome the same debilitating anxiety and panic attacks that once plagued her . 127

New words like can help us see ourselves and the world in new Ways . They shape how we see . We act based on what We see . As Neil Postman sums it up If we tee thing one way , we at ) If we in another , we net . The to team out to he extent to one if . If student gee ! four ) mid 601 ! out thing in the way he did when he , will act the same . meant he . LEARN MORE ' A Man Without Words by Susan My Stroke of Insight A Brain Scientist Personal Journey , by Jill Taylor Through the Language Glass by Guy ' Metaphors We Live By by George Mark Johnson ' Teaching as a Subversive Activity , by Neil Postman 128

Challenge Four Word Weaving Your challenge is to invent a word , phrase , or metaphor that you think would make the world a better place and then try to spread it among your friends Objective See your own seeing by reflecting on the language and metaphors you use and how you might choose different language or metaphors to change the way you think and act . New perspectives open up new questions , so this might also help you ask new questions and make new connections to new ideas . Step One Invent a word , phrase , or new metaphor . Examples in this lesson included and new metaphors about arguments , education , and the self . What about love ?

we could use a different word to describe our complex feelings . Or maybe we could metaphors like falling in love . Anything goes . Step Two Introduce the word , phrase or metaphor in basic conversation as if the word has always existed and see if your friends catch on and start using it themselves . Step Three If they ask about it , give them a strong pitch as to why it should exist . Step Four Show us or tell us about your adventure . Post a Video or share your story with 129