The world of brain research has a secret flaw. For decades, research into the workings of the mind has been conducted primarily by English-speaking scientists on English-speaking participants. Yet their conclusions have been branded universal. Now a growing body of work suggests that there are subtle cognitive differences between populations that speak different languages - differences in areas such as perception, memory, math and decision-making. Generalizations we make about the mind may actually be wrong.
In a study published in the journal Trends in cognitive science, Asifa Majid, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford, has outlined the lack of understanding that comes from ignoring languages other than English. “We can’t take for granted that what happens in English is representative of the world,” she says.
Take, for example, the Pirahã, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon. They count approximately — what scientists call a “one-two-many” system. And as a result, they don’t perform well in arithmetic experiments compared to, say, speakers of languages like English, whose vocabulary includes large cardinal numbers: 20, 50, 100. “The way your language expresses numbers influences how you think about them,” says Majid. “It has its own number words with which we can think exactly large quantities. So 17 or 23, that doesn’t seem possible without words in your language.”
If you’re reading this, you speak (or understand) English. That is not surprising, because it is the most used language in human history. Currently approx one in six people speaks English to some extent. Yet there are more than 7,150 living languages today, and many of them make meaning in completely different ways: they vary widely in sound, vocabulary, grammar, and scope.
When English is used to research how the human brain works, scientists formulate questions based on the elements that English expresses, making assumptions about what the mind, knowledge, or cognition are based on how the language describes them – not what they might represent in other languages or cultures. Moreover, participants in cognition studies are often ‘weird’: Western, well-educated, industrialized, wealthy and democratic. But the majority of the world’s population does not fall into this category. “There is a bias in academic research, partly because of where it is done, but also because of the metalanguage used to talk about the research,” says Felix Amecaprofessor of ethnolinguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who was not involved in Majid’s work.
“If I ask you now: ‘How many senses are there?’ I suspect your answer will be five,’ says Ameka. But in the West African language Ewe, spoken by more than 20 million people, including Ameka, at least nine senses are culturally recognized, such as a sense focused on physical and social balance, one focused on how we move through the world, and one centered on what we feel in our bodies. But while this is common knowledge, it does not permeate what is considered scientific fact. “Western science has a huge wall,” says Ameka.
