Language: The Closest Thing Humans Have to Magic

I have been increasingly fascinated by language for the last two or three years. Specifically, I think in the last two years I have started thinking about it much more.

And strangely enough, I remember where this fascination started.

I was watching one of Brian Greene's videos about time travel. It was a panel discussion, and there was a linguist on the panel. I don't remember the exact conversation anymore, but she was talking about how language affects the way we think about directions and, more interestingly, how we think about the past, present and future.

For example, we naturally think that the future is somewhere "ahead" of us.

We look forward to something.

We leave the past behind us.

The future is ahead.

The past is behind.

It sounds completely natural. Almost physical.

But apparently this is not universal.

Different languages and cultures can arrange time differently. Some languages have been found to represent time vertically. In some cultures, people arrange time according to geographical directions rather than simply left to right. There are languages where speakers rely heavily on absolute directions such as north, south, east and west rather than constantly using left and right.

And that intrigued me.

Because think about what that means.

Something that feels like reality to me—the future being "ahead"—might actually partly be the language I have been speaking all my life.

Now, this is not actually what this article is about.

But this is where my fascination with language started.

Because once I started thinking about language itself, I realized how absolutely bizarre it is.

Think About What Is Happening When We Talk

Suppose I am thinking about something.

At the physical level, whatever a "thought" ultimately is, something is happening inside my brain. Neurons are firing. There are electrical and chemical processes happening.

Now I want you to have some approximation of that thought.

How do I do that?

Humans somehow figured out that I can move my lungs, vocal cords, tongue and mouth in a very specific manner and convert what is happening inside my brain into sound waves.

Not random sounds.

Because obviously I can make thousands of random noises and they won't communicate anything.

There is basically a system—a language.

So I convert my thought into this strange code, and then I physically produce pressure waves in the air.

Those waves travel towards you.

They hit your ears.

Your brain processes them.

And suddenly something that was happening inside my brain causes something to happen inside yours.

Think about how insane that is.

I didn't touch you.

I didn't open your brain.

I didn't connect a wire between our nervous systems.

I just disturbed the air in a particular pattern.

And now your brain is thinking about something because my brain was thinking about it.

Today I can do this from thousands of kilometres away.

If communication infrastructure existed there, theoretically I could be sitting on Earth and say something to somebody on the Moon, and after the signal delay my thought could cause a change in the state of another human brain on the Moon.

If that is not some form of magic, I don't know what is.

Of course, there is one correction to the way I originally thought about this.

The exact same chemical reaction is probably not being recreated in the other person's brain.

And actually, I think the reality is even more interesting.

Language does not transfer my thought into your brain like transferring a file between two computers.

It gives your brain instructions to reconstruct something.

For example, if I say:

"Think about your childhood bedroom."

That's it.

Four or five words.

I don't know what your childhood bedroom looked like.

I didn't send you a photograph.

I didn't describe the walls, the bed, the window, the smell of the room or who lived there with you.

But your brain did all of that.

Those few sound waves activated information that already existed inside you.

Maybe you suddenly remembered the colour of the walls.

Maybe your bed.

Maybe your parents.

Maybe a particular morning.

Maybe even a feeling.

So perhaps language is not exactly a system for transferring thoughts.

It is more like sending very compressed instructions to another brain and allowing that brain to reconstruct something from them.

Which, somehow, I find even more fascinating.

And Then I Started Thinking About Words

There is another thing about language which has always interested me.

We have this phrase:

"Actions speak louder than words."

And I think there is a reason humanity needed to invent this phrase.

Because naturally, words are incredibly powerful on us.

Suppose somebody repeatedly does things that are not in your favour. They behave selfishly. They don't help you. Their actions keep showing you that perhaps they don't really care about you.

But every time they speak to you, they are extremely nice.

They tell you that they care about you.

They tell you that you matter.

They give you explanations.

They use pleasing words.

You may know, rationally, that their actions are telling you something completely different.

But somehow it remains difficult to completely dislike them.

Now reverse it.

Suppose somebody's actions towards you are mostly fine, but they repeatedly say horrible things to you. They insult you. They tell you that they don't respect you.

There is a very good chance you will hate that person much more.

Which is strange.

Because logically we might say actions should matter more. Actions are what actually affect your life.

But the brain gives enormous importance to words.

And perhaps the reason is that words tell us something actions alone sometimes cannot: intention.

Imagine somebody forgets your birthday.

Then they say:

"I'm really sorry. I have been completely overwhelmed and I genuinely forgot."

Now imagine the same person saying:

"I remembered. I just didn't think you were important enough to call."

The action is exactly the same.

They didn't call you.

But psychologically these are completely different events.

The words changed what the action meant.

And maybe this is precisely why we need to remind ourselves that "actions speak louder than words."

If humans naturally judged behaviour perfectly and ignored contradictory language, nobody would need to tell us this.

Maybe the proverb exists precisely because our brains don't do that.

Then I Watched Arrival

Somewhere during all of this, I watched Arrival.

And that movie took this idea much, much further.

The central idea, without getting too much into the movie itself, is that learning a completely different kind of language changes the way someone experiences time.

Past, present and future stop working in the ordinary linear way.

Obviously, this is science fiction.

But the idea behind it isn't something the movie completely invented.

There is an idea in linguistics usually associated with what is called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity.

The strongest version would basically suggest that the language you speak determines what you can think.

That strong version is not generally accepted.

But there is a weaker and much more interesting version for me:

The language you habitually use can influence what you pay attention to and how you categorize and remember things.

And suddenly I was back to that Brian Greene panel again.

If your language constantly requires you to know north, south, east and west because that's how you describe locations, then you need to constantly maintain some awareness of your geographical orientation.

Language didn't magically put a compass inside your head.

But the language forced your brain to repeatedly pay attention to something my language allows me to mostly ignore.

And over years, wouldn't that affect the way you perceive the world?

I think this distinction is important.

It may not be that language tells you what you are capable of thinking.

But language might train you in what you habitually notice while thinking.

And I find that fascinating.

And Then There Is Mathematics

This is where I become even less willing to quickly dismiss the idea that language can change how we perceive reality.

Because consider mathematics.

Mathematics is, in some sense, a language.

On paper it is just symbols.

Take calculus.

If you don't understand mathematics, those symbols are almost meaningless scratches on paper.

But learn what those symbols mean and suddenly you can use them to describe acceleration, planetary motion, changing quantities, electricity, fluid dynamics and all kinds of things happening in the physical universe.

The symbols didn't change the universe.

The planet was already moving.

Gravity was already there.

But the language gave the human mind a way to conceptualize these relationships with extraordinary precision.

And then I started wondering:

Would Newton have been able to think about certain problems in exactly the same way without the mathematical notation available to him?

Maybe eventually, somehow.

But surely the notation itself becomes part of the thinking.

The same thing happens in programming.

I have been in software development for many years, and when I see something as simple as:

if (x > 10)

I don't translate every symbol into a full English sentence first.

The notation itself has become something I think with.

And maybe that is the part we underestimate.

Language isn't merely something we use after thinking.

Sometimes language is the machinery with which we think.

Writing Makes This Even Stranger

Then take this one step further.

Speech allows my brain to affect another brain across space.

Writing allows my brain to affect another brain across time.

Somebody had a thought two thousand years ago.

That person's brain no longer exists.

The neurons that produced the thought are gone.

The person is gone.

Almost everything physically associated with that moment is gone.

But they converted some approximation of that thought into symbols.

Two thousand years later, I look at those symbols.

Light enters my eyes.

My brain processes those shapes.

And suddenly a thought that originated inside the nervous system of somebody who died two thousand years ago causes something to happen inside my nervous system today.

That is incredible.

It is not time travel in the Arrival sense.

But information really did travel through time.

And then perhaps this explains something much larger.

Maybe Civilization Is Basically Accumulated Thought

No human being could independently invent modern civilization during one lifetime.

Imagine being born without access to any language-based knowledge left by previous generations and having to independently discover agriculture, numbers, geometry, metallurgy, medicine, law, electricity, computers and everything else.

Impossible.

But we don't start from zero.

A person figures something out.

They explain it to another person.

Someone writes it down.

Another generation improves it.

Someone discovers a mistake.

Another person adds something.

Thousands of years later, a child can learn in school in a few months ideas that humanity may have taken centuries to discover.

Language allows knowledge to survive the brain that produced it.

And once that happened, human intelligence was no longer limited to what one individual human could discover during one lifetime.

We basically created a collective memory outside our biological brains.

And perhaps that is one of the foundations of civilization.

Agriculture requires cooperation.

Governments require coordination.

Law requires shared rules.

Science requires knowledge accumulation.

Companies require people to coordinate around things that don't physically exist in front of them.

Almost everything at civilization scale requires humans to somehow put ideas from one brain into many other brains.

Language makes that possible.

So when I sometimes think that language might be the greatest thing humans ever figured out, I don't mean it poetically.

I mean it quite literally.

Maybe "invented" isn't even the correct word. Language probably evolved biologically and culturally rather than somebody simply inventing it one afternoon.

But whatever process produced it, the result is extraordinary.

We developed a system where one biological organism can encode an internal state into vibrations in air, another biological organism can decode those vibrations, and from that tiny signal reconstruct ideas, memories, intentions and even imaginary worlds.

Then we figured out how to encode those sounds into marks.

Then those marks allowed thoughts to survive their creators.

Then mathematics gave us languages for describing things ordinary language struggled to describe.

Then computers gave us languages where symbols don't merely communicate ideas to other humans but actually instruct machines to perform operations.

And now, strangely enough, we are building machines that themselves process language.

I don't know how far the idea in Arrival can actually be taken.

I certainly don't think learning another language is suddenly going to allow us to see the future.

But after thinking about all of this, I am also not very comfortable with the simplistic idea that language is merely a communication tool.

It clearly does more than that.

It affects what we notice.

It affects how we interpret other people's intentions.

It gives structure to abstract thought.

It allows knowledge to accumulate beyond an individual lifetime.

It allows one mind to cause physical changes in another mind across enormous distances.

And, through writing, it allows dead people to continue changing living brains thousands of years later.

So perhaps language doesn't just describe our reality.

In some very real ways, it participates in constructing the reality humans are capable of experiencing, understanding and sharing.

And I think I am still only beginning to understand how strange that actually is.