Why do people think the way they do?

Haven't you stopped to shake your head from time to time and wonder why on Earth people think the way they do?

Well, let's turn that around. Maybe they don't think.

That is, maybe they don't think the way you do because they simply don't have the same vocabulary.

My stepson, knowing about my interest in speech and language development, suggested a recent Radiolab program about words and their ability to open up new worlds. It seems that people don't have the ability to think about certain things, say global climate change for example, until they have the vocabulary to do it. People can only think the way they do about words they know. Interesting.

Listen to New Words, New Worlds here:



"In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school--a school in which the teachers (who didn't sign) taught in Spanish. No one knows exactly how it happened, but in the next few years--on school buses and in the playground--these kids invented a set of common words and grammar that opened up a whole new way of communicating, and even thinking."