Month: January 2020

My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head. All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time.

Literally the first person I asked was a classmate of mine who said that she can not “hear” her voice in her mind. I asked her if she could have a conversation with herself in her head and she looked at me funny like I was the weird one in this situation. So I began to become more intrigued. Most people I asked said that they have this internal monologue that is running rampant throughout the day. However, every once in a while, someone would say that they don’t experience this.

My life began to slowly spiral out of control with millions of questions. How do they get through the day? How do they read? How do they make decisions between choice A and choice B? My friend described it as “concept maps” that she sees in her brain. Another friend says that she literally sees the words in her head if she is trying to think about something. I was taking ibuprofen at this point in the day because my brain was literally unable to comprehend this revelation. How have I made it 25 years in life without realizing that people don’t think like me?

I posted a poll on instagram to get a more accurate assessment of the situation. Currently 91 people have responded that they have an internal monologue and 18 people reported that they do not have this. I began asking those people questions

about the things that they experience and it is quite different from the majority.

I would tell them that I could look at myself in the mirror and have a full blown telepathic conversation with myself without opening my mouth and they responded as if I had schizophrenia. One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”

And to their surprise, they did not know that the majority of people do in fact experience that echoey voice in their head that is portrayed in TV and film. Another person said that if they tried to have a conversation with themselves in the mirror, they would have to speak out loud because they can’t physically do it inside of their mind.

I started posting screenshots of these conversations on my instagram and my inbox started to flood with people responding to my

“investigation.” Many people were reassuring me that I was not crazy for having an internal monologue, while others were as absolutely mind blown as I was. People were telling me that I ruined their day and that they now do not understand anything about life. Maybe you are all just a figment of my imagination, but regardless, yesterday made reality seem even more skewed.

How do they think? How does this affect their relationships, jobs, experiences, education? How has this not been mentioned to me before? All of these questions started flooding my mind. Can those people without the internal monologue even formulate these questions in their mind? If they can, how does it happen if they don’t “hear” their voice? I mentioned earlier that I was spiraling out of control. Well, as I write this and as I hear my own voice in my head, I am continuing to fall down the rabbit hole.

Whether people just have different definitions of their thoughts, or if people literally don’t have an internal monologue, there is one thing that we do know… you will definitely get a headache if you keep thinking about this. Just trying to wrap my head around it is causing irreversible brain damage. I suggest asking people around you what they experience. If you are one of the few that do not have this internal monologue, please enlighten me, because I still do not understand life anymore. Send help.

It’s not true that people never change, but it’s very hard to change an aspect of your personality simply because you want to, research suggests.

Most people have an aspect of their personality they’d like to change, but without help it may be difficult to do so, according to a study led by a University of Arizona researcher and published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Contrary to the once-popular idea that people’s personalities are more or less set in stone, research has proven that personalities do change throughout the lifespan, often in line with major life events. For example, there is evidence that people tend to be more agreeable and conscientious in college, less extroverted after they get married and more agreeable in their retirement years.

While it’s well-established that personalities can change in response to life circumstances, researcher Erica Baranski wondered if people can actively and intentionally change aspects of their personalities at any given point simply because they desire to do so.

She and her colleagues studied two groups of people: approximately 500 members of the general population who ranged in age from 19 to 82 and participated in the research online; and approximately 360 college students.

Both groups completed the 44-item “Big Five Inventory,” which measures five key personality traits: extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness to experience and neuroticism, also referred to as emotional stability. The participants were then asked whether they desired to change any aspect of their personality. If they answered yes, they were asked to write an open-ended description of what they wanted to change.

Across both groups, most people said they desired to increase extroversion, conscientiousness and emotional stability.

The college students were surveyed again six months later, and the general population group was surveyed again a year later. Neither group had achieved the personality goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the study, and, in fact, some saw change in the opposite direction.

“In both samples, the desire to change at ‘time one’ did not predict actual change in the desired direction at all at ‘time two,'” said Baranski, a postdoctoral psychology researcher in the University of Arizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance. “In the general population sample, we didn’t find that personality change goals predicted any change in any direction.”

College Students Saw More Change

While the general population group exhibited no change in personality traits between the first and second rounds of data collection, the college student group did show some changes; however, they were either in the opposite direction than desired or were for different personality traits than the one the person intended to change.

Specifically, college students who expressed the strongest desires to be more conscientious actually exhibited less conscientiousness six months later. That could be because those individuals exhibited low levels of conscientiousness to begin with, putting them at a disadvantage from the outset, Baranski said.

In addition, students who said they wanted to be more extroverted showed increases in agreeableness and emotionally stability rather than extroversion in the follow-up. Baranski said that perhaps as part of their effort to become more social and extroverted, they actually focused on being friendlier and less socially anxious – behaviors more directly related to agreeability and emotionally stability, respectively.

Baranski said college students may have exhibited more change than the general population because they are in such a transformational period in their lives. Still, the changes they experienced didn’t align with the goals they set for themselves.

“College students are thrown into this new environment, and they may be unhappy and may look within selves to become happier and change some aspect of their personality,” Baranski said. “But, meanwhile, there is a bombardment of other things that they’re told they need to achieve, like doing well in a class or choosing a major or getting an internship, and those goals might take precedence. Even though they know more sustained and introspective change might be better, the short-term effort is more attractive and more necessary in the moment.”

Overall, Baranski’s findings illustrate how difficult it can be for people to change aspects of their personality based on desire alone. That doesn’t mean people can’t make the changes they want. They just might need outside help doing so – from a professional, a friend or maybe even a mobile app reminding them of their goals, Baranski said.

Baranski intentionally did not interact with study participants between the first and second rounds of data collection. That approach differs from that of another researcher, Southern Methodist University’s Nathan Hudson, who in several other separate studies assessed personality change goals over a 16-week period but followed up with participants along the way. In that research, which Baranski cites, experimenters assessed participants’ personality traits and progress toward their goals every few weeks. With that kind of interaction, participants were more successful in making changes.

“There is evidence in clinical psychology that therapeutic coaching leads to change in personality and behavior, and there is recent evidence that suggests that when there’s a lot of regular interaction with an experimenter, personality change is possible,” Baranski said. “But when individuals are left to their own devices, change may not be as likely.”

Future research, Baranski said, should look at how much intervention is needed to help people achieve their personality goals, and which types of strategies work best for different traits.

“Across all the studies that have been done on this topic over the last several years, it’s clear that most people want to change an aspect of their personality,” Baranski said. “If left unattended, those goals aren’t achieved, so it would be helpful for people who have those goals to know what is necessary for them to accomplish them.”

In a fascinating study of the bilingual brain, Albert Costa explains exactly what is going on when we switch effortlessly from one language to another.

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

In my experience, one of the best places to observe a wide variety of bilingual or multilingual individuals is Geneva, where a stable Francophone society is thickly overlaid with an international society, bringing their own mother tongues and the universally accepted lingua franca of English. In this setting, the linguistic grounding of children can be dauntingly complex. One friend, Italian by birth, has a child of five who switches between Italian, French and English, the syntactic structures still sometimes a little strange. Another set of children have a Danish father and a Bosnian mother; the conversation at lunch flows impressively from Danish to English, French and Bosnian, with German somewhere in reserve too.

Most of the interesting questions about bilingualism are cultural. Is it usual to use different languages for different areas of experience — English for life at the office, for instance, and Bengali for cooking? If so, does this reflect lived experience or the greater expertise different languages offer in different areas? (You can’t, for instance, say that a river is ‘shallow’ in French, only, inadequately, that it is ‘not deep’.) What are the differences between bilingual life in a bilingual society, and speaking an outside language — between, for example, speaking Welsh in Swansea and speaking Gujarati? Most importantly, what actually constitutes a language? Is a speaker who can switch between Scots (not Scottish Gaelic) and English, or Dutch and Flemish, bilingual in the same sense as someone with a Greek father and a German mother?

There is something quite uncanny about the ability to move rapidly between languages which even practitioners find hard to describe. Anyone who has learnt a language recognises that moment when you pass from translating in your head to just speaking it, the words emerging from inchoate thoughts before you can quite formulate them. It feels like an engine just moving over points to a quite different set of tracks; or perhaps like the ability of most musicians to transpose from one key to another — you read the notes in C major, but your fingers move in E flat, without having to think about each note.

What is happening here? How does the growing child encompass both ‘Es war einmal ein armer Mann…‘ and ‘Once upon a time there was a poor man…’, knowing that they are in some sense the same sentence and in others quite different sentences?

The answer may lie in the structures of the brain. Albert Costa’s engaging book explores just how multiple languages are acquired and sorted out by the brain, as well as what the possession of more than one language might mean for the development of mental capacity and its retention. There is some evidence that babies still in the womb can be aware of the difference between languages, and this is certainly the case very soon after birth. Scientists are witnessed solemnly exposing infants to rudimentary languages with artificial rules — that the syllables Tu Pi Ro must always follow each other in that order. When an established rule is broken for the first time in the artificial language (but not in other languages around) the baby shows surprise and increased attention.

There have been repeated claims that people who can speak more than one language are more intelligent — with the result that rich New Yorkers are always hiring Japanese or Mandarin-speaking nannies, or whatever the current fashionable tongue may be. Costa goes into the science in considerable detail. It does seem as if bilingual ability affects some aspects of the performance of tasks, but often not in any significant way. Sometimes it appears to have an impact in a negative manner — the active vocabulary of bilinguals can be smaller than that of monolingual speakers. In other cases, such as the resolution of conflicting information, bilingual speakers tend to do better. This is unproven, though of course it is always useful to be able to speak another language.

It may be that different categories of bilingualism lead to different conclusions here. It seems quite plausible that someone who has spoken more than one language from birth would not be stretching his or her brain in the same way as another who painfully has set about mastering the grammar of a foreign language in youth or adulthood. Speakers of acquired languages display such different levels of confidence and mastery that it’s unlikely to have solid or consistent effects on intelligence or cognitive development. In German I can hold a conversation, read a novel, write a letter — and once or twice I have even dreamt in it; in Arabic I could just about buy a train ticket or ask for directions. It doesn’t seem likely that they have the same contribution to mental capacity. It would also be worth investigating whether a person who had kept mentally active by acquiring a language in middle age would find that it warded off mental decay more successfully than a bilingual speaker from birth.

The world may be growing more, not less, multilingual as transport links improve and increasing numbers are exposed to others unlike themselves. English speakers are shielded from this truth because, uniquely, our need to acquire foreign languages is decreasing. Forty years ago, one had to learn a few words of Portuguese to travel round Portugal or Brazil, but nowadays their inhabitants are much less likely to be monoglot.

The ability of the brain to absorb an entirely different way of expressing and of understanding the world, to sort it out into meaningful and rational compartments, is a matter of wonder and apparently near-limitless scope — a linguistic prodigy such as the 19th-century army officer Frederick Burnaby, who spoke seven languages fluently, is now often restricted by the demands of time rather than mental capacity. There is no short cut to language acquisition. It appears that your children can’t learn languages through technology alone; it has to be through an interactive, personal process.

Costa’s book, his last before his unfortunate early death, is stronger on the science of brainpower than on the structure of languages themselves, or on the cultural effects of bilingual societies. He writes in that engaging way, buttonholing the reader with direct address, with which authors of popular science books try to jolly up their often very difficult subjects. (‘At this point the only thing left to do is to invite you to join me on this journey to discover how two languages live in the same brain.’)

Personally, I find this style a bit painful, but Costa’s work certainly derives from a great fund of knowledge, considerable curiosity and that solidly scientific spirit which hardly cares whether it unearths a whacking great truth or discovers that something everyone firmly believes has nothing much in it after all. I guess that we’re hardly at the beginning of our investigations into what the brain actually does, or can do.

Early life adversity including neglect and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse is the single biggest risk factor for psychiatric disorders, new research suggests.

In what has been described as a seminal review, investigators at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas, conclude that childhood maltreatment is “by far” the biggest contributing factor leading to impaired health in adults.

Physically, early abuse is associated with reduced life expectancy due to higher risk for heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer, study co-author Charles Nemeroff, MD, PhD, professor and chair, department of psychiatry at Dell’s Mulva Clinic for the Neurosciences, and director of its Institute for Early Life Adversity Research, told Medscape Medical News.

In terms of the psychiatric impact, “maltreatment increases the risk for depression, drug abuse, suicide, alcohol abuse, and it also worsens the course of all psychiatric disorders that have been looked at,” Nemeroff added.

The paper was published in the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

High Rates of Maltreatment an Underestimate?

Shockingly, estimates show that about one in four children will experience abuse or neglect, although this might well be an underestimate as most cases of maltreatment go unreported.

“This is especially true for certain types of childhood maltreatment (notably emotional abuse and neglect), which may never come to clinical attention but have devastating consequences on health independently of physical abuse and neglect or sexual abuse,” Nemeroff and co-author Elizabeth Lippard, PhD, write.

Pointing to a recent meta-analysis showing that 46% of patients with depression experienced childhood maltreatment, the authors also note that up to 57% of patients with bipolar disorder also report high levels of childhood abuse and/or neglect.

The research also suggests childhood maltreatment is associated with poor treatment outcomes in patients with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or bipolar disorder.

These findings underscore the need for clinicians to conduct detailed evaluations of trauma history, said Nemeroff.

“It’s extremely important for clinicians to get a detailed childhood trauma history of a patient so they know what they’re dealing with. Many patients don’t volunteer information, particularly during the first visit, about whether they have had any adverse early childhood experiences,” he said.

“We need to try to understand how best to treat these patients because they don’t respond well to conventional treatments — medication or psychotherapies,” said Nemeroff.

Evolving research is examining the timing, duration, and severity of childhood maltreatment. Some studies suggest maltreatment earlier in life that continues for a longer period is associated with worse outcomes. However, the authors emphasize that exposure to maltreatment at any time during childhood significantly increases the risk for mood disorders.

The review also includes studies of the negative consequences of bullying. While there’s some evidence to indicate that cyberbullying often precipitates suicide and that this appears to occur more often with women than men, said Nemeroff, much of the data in this area is “anecdotal.”

Most Prevalent, Least Studied

With respect to subtypes of childhood maltreatment, the authors note that emotional abuse and neglect are likely the most prevalent in psychiatric populations, but are the least studied.

In part, this is because patients who experience these types of abuse are often the least likely to come to clinical attention compared with those with physical and sexual abuse, which often results in physical injury.

“In many studies, but not all, neglect has the most devastating consequences in terms of mood and anxiety disorders,” said Nemeroff. However, he added, few individuals suffer a single isolated type of abuse.

“Very often, they’re victims of mixed forms of abuse like physical and sexual abuse, and emotional abuse.”

Emerging evidence suggests childhood maltreatment may increase the risk for mood disorders and disease progression via inflammation, as indicated by measures such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and inflammatory cytokines, including tumor necrosis factor-alpha and interleukin-6.

Anti-inflammatory medications are a promising novel therapeutic strategy in depressed patients with elevated inflammatory markers. However, this evidence is still preliminary, the authors note.

Another potential mechanism is through alterations of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) circuits that regulate endocrine, behavioral, immune, and autonomic responses to stress.

Genetic predisposition also likely plays a role in the pathogenesis of mood disorders following early life stress. Only 35% to 40% of individuals exposed to traumatic events will develop PTSD, said Nemeroff. “That’s probably largely determined by genetics.”

He estimated there might be a dozen or so genes, each of which provides a small degree of vulnerability to psychiatric disorders after exposure to trauma.

Intergenerational Genetic Trauma

The authors also point to novel research pertaining to the complex area of intergenerational transmission of trauma and psychopathology — a phenomenon that has been studied in Holocaust victims.

“It turns out that when an individual is traumatized, their ova, in the case of women, and sperm cells, in the case of men, can be changed by epigenetic mechanisms,” said Nemeroff. “In that way, the child that’s a product of these gametes can carry with it an effect of previous generations’ trauma.”

Research also suggests that childhood maltreatment may lead to structural and functional brain imaging changes. Some evidence has linked early abuse with lower gray matter volumes and thickness in the ventral and dorsal prefrontal cortex, including the orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, hippocampus, insula, and striatum.

Studies that are more recent also suggest an association with decreased white matter structural integrity within and between these regions.

“Different types of abuse and neglect result in different brain changes. It probably depends in part on how old the child is at time of the insult,” said Nemeroff.

Researchers are gaining ground in understanding why not all people exposed to childhood trauma develop a mood disorder. Environmental factors, as well as genes, may mediate the relationship between childhood abuse and mood disorders, the review authors note.

Studies also show that social support and secure attachments can buffer depression risk.

Nemeroff believes there are three critical areas for further research. These include determining whether brain and body changes that occur because of childhood abuse and neglect are reversible. In addition, he said, there needs to be more research into optimal treatments for this patient population and better methods of identifying those at risk of early adversity.

“It won’t be long before genome-wide scanning will become part of the electronic medical record,” said Nemeroff. “We screen for genetic diseases all the time in other areas; why wouldn’t we do it for this?”

In addition, when at-risk patients are identified, interventions could focus on the family unit, single parents, families living in poverty, and parents working two jobs, said Nemeroff.

Educating guidance counselors, teachers, and nurses, is also important, he said, but it is also critically important to educate clinicians about how to conduct proper evaluations.

Strengths, Limitations

Commenting for Medscape Medical News, David Fassler, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry, Larner College of Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington, described the review as “comprehensive.”

The authors “demonstrate that the available research consistently supports the finding that childhood maltreatment increases the risk of mood disorders,” said Fassler.

“They also appropriately address the limitations of their review, including varying definitions of maltreatment and the use of different assessment instruments across studies,” he said.

Given the prevalence of childhood maltreatment, the review “further underscores the importance of comprehensive initiatives designed to protect young people from such traumatic and harmful experiences. Hopefully, the findings will also inform future research on the treatment and prevention of adult mood disorders,” Fassler said.

The research was supported by NIH grants K01AA027573, MH117293, and AA024933. Nemeroff reported consulting for Bracket (Clintara), Fortress Biotech, EMA Wellness, Gerson Lehrman Group, Intra-Cellular Therapies, Janssen Research and Development, Magstim, Navitor Pharmaceuticals, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, Taisho Pharmaceutical, Takeda, TC MSO, and Xhale; holding stock in AbbVie, Antares, BI Gen Holdings, Celgene, Corcept Therapeutics Pharmaceuticals Company, EMA Wellness, OPKO Health, Seattle Genetics, TC MSO, Trends in Pharma Development, and Xhale; being a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America (ADAA), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSPP, Bracket (Clintara), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Skyland Trail, and Xhale and on the boards of directors of ADAA, AFSP, Gratitude America, and Xhale Smart; receiving income or equity of $10,000 or more from American Psychiatric Publishing, Bracket (Clintara), CME Outfitters, EMA Wellness, Intra-Cellular Therapies, Magstim, Takeda, TC-MSO, and Xhale; and holding patents on a method and devices for transdermal delivery of lithium, a method of assessing antidepressant drug therapy via transport inhibition of monoamine neurotransmitter by ex vivo assay, and compounds, compositions, methods of synthesis, and methods of treatment (CRF receptor binding ligand). Fassler has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Am J Psychiatry. 2020;177:20-36. Abstract

© Fabio Santaniello Bruun/Unsplash

In the early twentieth century, anthropologists and linguists including Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (his student) developed a provocative hypothesis: that the language we speak impacts the way we see the world, and our behavior in it. Since then, scholars have been debating the validity of what became known (some say inaccurately) as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and researching the boundaries of language’s influence on our cognition. In the following excerpt of the recently published Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, Guardian writer and editor David Shariatmadari explores the latest research in the debate — and the questions it continues to raise about the links between language and behavior.

— Elizabeth Weingarten, Managing Editor

It’s easier to prove or disprove a hypothesis in a well-defined area of experience that can be readily compared across languages. That’s why a lot of scholars interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ideas focused their research on color. Because color is a physical property, determined by the wavelengths of light that are reflected or absorbed by an object, you might assume that all languages have just as many words for colors as there are colors in the world. But the human eye can distinguish around 1,000,000 different shades, and I’d be surprised if you could quickly name more than ten. Choices are evidently made about how we divide up the spectrum of visible light — and languages make those choices differently.

The exact manner in which languages slice up the spectrum — the way they happen to label colors — can have a measurable effect on our perception. Not exactly shocking. But there are more mind-boggling examples of Whorfian effects out there. Could the language you speak, for example, make you more likely to injure yourself, or even die?

Swedish is a north-Germanic language, very closely related to Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. It sits within the larger Indo-European language family, meaning it shares ancestors with English, French, Greek, Russian, and so on. Finnish, on the other hand, is part of the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Hungarian and Estonian. The grammar and native vocabulary of these languages are completely different, despite the geographical proximity. The Swedish for “father” is far. In Finnish it’s isä. In Swedish “eye” is öga, in Finnish silmä.

While there is undoubtedly a deep linguistic divide, the Nordic neighbors have similar standards of living, legal systems and modes of social organization. There’s a huge amount of trade and cultural exchange, and around 300,000 ethnic Swedes live in Finland. It’s odd, then, given this cultural closeness, that the two countries should have sharply different rates of workplace accidents, with those in Finland being significantly higher. Even more bizarrely, this pattern holds among the Swedish minority in Finland: factories in Swedish-speaking areas are in line with the Swedish national rate. And we’re not simply talking about bumps and bruises. The industrial fatality rate among Swedes is 31 percent lower than for Finns.

Strange as it may seem, it’s possible that language holds the key. In Swedish, prepositions (words like “to,” “over,” “through,” etc.) allow for the fine-grained description of movements over time. Finnish, which relies more on case endings (those suffixes which tell you about the connections between words), tends to emphasize the static relationships of objects to one another. According to the psycholinguist John Lucy, linguists researching the discrepancy determined that “Finns organize the workplace in a way that favors the individual worker (person) over the temporal organization of the overall production process.” That kind of organization seems to reflect the way sequences of events are structured in the Finnish language. As a result, “Lack of attention to the overall temporal organization of the process leads to frequent disruptions in production, haste, and, ultimately, accidents.”

Those same qualities of Finnish may also have produced a distinctive cultural genre. Lucy reports the results of research into film-making according to language family. “Indo-European (Swedish, Norwegian, English) productions formed coherent temporal entities in which action could be followed from beginning to end across scenes, whereas . . . Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian productions showed more emphasis on static settings with only transitory movement.”

These effects are extraordinary, but they’re difficult to pin down. Although the research concerned made as much effort as possible to isolate the effects of linguistic structure, it’s still reasonable to ask where the linguistic ends and the cultural begins. Separating out the effects of being brought up in, say, a Finnish-speaking household from the effects of Finnish grammar itself would be a challenge.

This question becomes more intriguing still when we consider grammatical gender — the requirement in some languages for all nouns to be defined as male, female and sometimes a third category, neuter. English and Finnish don’t have grammatical gender. A table, a car or a tree are neither male nor female. In Spanish, however, the word for “table” — la mesa — is feminine, takes the feminine definite article, la, and must be replaced by the female pronoun, ella. “Car” is masculine — el coche — as is “tree” — el arbol. In German, “table” — der Tisch — is masculine, “car” — das Auto — is neuter, and “tree” — der Baum — is masculine. The assignment of these words to different gender categories appears to be arbitrary.

What does it matter? Surely in the course of everyday thinking, German, Spanish, and French speakers don’t really imagine that rocks, scissors, and paper are somehow more or less female, male or something in between? For these speakers, gender must fade into the background, merely part of the nuts and bolts of language, of no more consequence than the fact that we add an “s” to nouns when there are more than one of them. Well, cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky devised experiments to check this hypothesis and came up with some surprising results.

First, she gathered a group of German and Spanish speakers to investigate whether the gender markers attached to nouns were meaningfully interpreted as being either masculine or feminine. Boroditsky and her colleagues selected twenty-four objects and gave them masculine or feminine proper names. An apple might be called Patrick, for example. Half the time the name matched the grammatical gender; half the time it didn’t. Subjects were then tested on their recall of the names. When the name matched the gender, they were better at remembering it than when it didn’t — suggesting that there is a sense of an object actually seeming masculine or feminine when the grammar marks it that way.

What to make of this? Boroditsky’s further hypothesis was that speakers whose language assigns the word “apple” masculine gender might conceive of it more in terms of stereotypically masculine qualities, and vice versa for speakers who assign it feminine gender. If this were true, it would have all sorts of implications for the mental life of these speakers, their grasp of the way the world works and how they understand natural and artificial processes. Not only that: in descriptions of the “meaning” of a word, we would have to add the associations it has as a result of its gender. A truly complete translation of le soleil, the French, masculine sun, would need to communicate the difference between it and the German feminine sun, die Sonne.

To investigate this, Boroditsky used another list of twenty-four objects that had the opposite genders in German and Spanish. She then asked native speakers of those languages to write down the first three English adjectives the objects brought to mind. The aim was to see whether the descriptions they produced tended to “match” the gender of the word. The “masculinity” and “femininity” of these adjectives was rated by a separate group of English speakers to provide an unbiased measure.

The results are remarkable. Let’s take the word “key” — which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers chose adjectives like “hard,” “heavy,” and “jagged.” Spanish speakers chose “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” Or “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers chose “beautiful,” “elegant,” “pretty,” and “slender” and the Spanish speakers chose “big,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.”

What this appears to show is that, if your mother tongue teaches you that keys are categorized as masculine, your idea of “key” is infused with what are judged masculine qualities in your culture — and this applies even when you’re using another (genderless) language. With these results, Whorf’s theory seems to rise from its shallow grave.

Excerpted from Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language. Copyright (c) 2019 by David Shariatmadari. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.