* Asifa Majid, ‘Cultural Factors Shape Olfactory Language’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 629-30.
* Jonas K. Olofsson and Jay A. Gottfried, ‘Response to Majid: Neurocognitive and Cultural Approaches to Odor Naming are Complementary’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 630-31.

Another quick post, catching up on new items in Trends that revisit a topic I’ve covered before. I got quite excited about claims that there are neuroscientific reasons why we don’t have a good vocabulary for smell. You can find my witterings on the subject here, and in two follow-up posts.
      Majid argues that an earlier piece by Olofsson and Gottfried should not have attributed the paucity of olfactory language in English to brain mechanisms. In other cultures — specifically, in the Maniq and Jahai languages of the Malay peninsular — the language of smell seems much richer. Culture, then, may have a lot to do with it. Olofsson and Gottfried respond peaceably and welcome the possibility of further research in a wider variety of languages. They propose that ‘neurocognitive and cross-cultural approaches offer complementary insights’, and can inform one another.
      When I wrote the earlier posts I didn’t expect to come back to this subject, although I’d enjoyed working through a great passage from Virginia Woolf’s Flush, in which a dog’s sensory world is described. However, maybe there is more life in it; let’s all keep an eye out for olfactory eloquence!

* Stephen C. Levinson, ‘Turn-taking in Human Communication – Origins and Implications for Language Processing’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2016), 6-14.

Of all the topics featured on this blog so far, I think turn-taking has been one of the most interesting to me. Some time ago, in a couple of posts here and here, I noted that cognitive scientists were getting interested in the development of language, and turn-taking was identified as a key characteristic of human speech. I put forward some literary examples in which turn-taking turned strange and problematic — where we could see hypothetical scenarios in which turn-taking could no longer be relied on.
      And in a recent Trends article, it’s back. Levinson provides a fascinating account of the way turn-taking works in the mind; it appears to be ‘at the limits of human performance’, requiring lots of resources to perfect and maintain. However it is also an ancient part of our evolution, shared with other primates in one form or another. Levinson asks, at the end, for more research into the ‘systematic imprint on language structure’ that turn-taking might cause: how deeply are grammar and syntax (and what else? phonetics and lexical structures?) shaped around this fundamental basis?
      That’s not really a question for a literary scholar like me, and this post isn’t going to be full of answers anyway: I have a lot to do at the moment! However, I’d say that some of this research could be literary research. Writers constantly test the interface between linguistic structure and turn-taking in their depictions of dialogue, creating grammatical patterns, exchanging puns, trying out rhythms within and between statements. They know something about it; they are capable of producing things that strike us as forced or unrealistic (often to a purpose), and they are capable of producing things that seem just right.

* Martin B.H. Everaert, Marinus A.C. Huybregts, Noam Chomsky, Robert C. Berwick, Johan J. Bolhuis, ‘Structures, Not Strings: Linguistics as Part of the Cognitive Sciences’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 729-43.
* Mark Dingemanse, Damián E. Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten H. Christiansen, Padraic Monaghan, ‘Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 603-15.

Turn-taking is not the only aspect of language that’s been discussed in Trends in Cognitive Sciences recently. Two other big reviews venture onto vast territory. Everaert et al. propose that linguistics and cognitive science should interact much more closely, that language should be seen as a ‘computational cognitive mechanism’, and that we should move beyond ‘surface-oriented approaches’. Dingemanse et al. also tilt at a pretty big windmill by taking on the idea that in human languages form and meaning only have an arbitrary relationship. They weigh up evidence for ‘systematicity’ (ways in which patterns of sound organise types of words) and ‘iconicity’ (ways in which words’ forms stand for their meanings) and conclude that we probably need these things to explain how languages work.
      This is all intriguing, but I still find that the more palpable topic of turn-taking is the one that makes me think. I like the way that it’s something deeply embedded in the basis of linguistic communications, which can still protrude strangely from highly developed social interactions.

One of my themes for this year is going to be impulsivity, I think. You’re probably wondering how I reached that decision. Well, the truth is, I didn’t give it much thought. Just went for it. Ha ha ha very good one. In fact the idea arose in conversations with my psychiatrist colleague Neil Hunt, who has been the inspiration for a couple of other posts, here and here.
      Impulsivity seems to be a hottish topic in psychology. Cognitive scientists are exploring its biological mechanisms, the brain regions and neurotransmitters involved. Psychiatrists are dealing with it as a symptom in several major mental disorders, and as an emerging category in itself. The 2013 edition (the fifth) of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) has numerous new designations for impulse control disorders. So, yes, it’s a hottish topic.
      It strikes me that it’s something that literature depicts and explores. From my reading of Daniel Kahneman and others (Thinking Fast and Slow, etc.), and from observing people in the world (it’s hard to avoid doing that), I get that it’s hard to tell how impulsive people are. Even in ourselves, what seems like a slow and deliberated decision may have been made all too quickly. Watching others, it is often impossible to know.
      Writers can offer us what seems like some sort of grip on fictional minds: we can be told, or shown, how impulsive a given action was, and we can assess whether this seems realistic or not, typical or not. Sometimes it’s not so clear: in a play, for example, we see something that looks like deliberation, but we cannot necessarily infer that the time taken has truly got past an immediate impulse. And what seems hasty might be well brewed. Some of the most interesting examples in Shakespeare make an issue of this, and in future posts I am bound to come back to them.
      In one of the lectures I gave to Cambridge students last summer, I offered a few examples of fast and slow thinking. It’s the first lecture linked to here.

*

A number of different tests are used to assess impulsivity. One of them is the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale: you can find an example of the test questions here. I’m afraid I derived a rather immature sort of pleasure from the advice given to those taking it: ‘Read each statement and put an X on the appropriate circle on the right side of this page. Do not spend too much time on any statement’. I can’t really stop myself thinking… hang on, you can’t tell people to be impulsive in a test about impulsivity! But I dare say that’s not the point.
      I imagine my favourite Shakespearean characters contemplating the test. King Lear himself, for example.

26. I often have extraneous thoughts when thinking – yes.
6. I have ‘racing’ thoughts – yes, remarkably so at times.
11. I ‘squirm’ at plays or lectures – well he would if he heard what I say about him.

Here’s some of that ‘racing’ in action. Shakespeare has produced a character who’d have to give himself some high scores:

Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm
Invades us to the skin: so ’tis to thee;
But where the greater malady is fix’d,
The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’ldst shun a bear;
But if thy flight lay toward the raging sea,
Thou’ldst meet the bear i’ the mouth. When the mind’s free,
The body’s delicate: the tempest in my mind
Doth from my senses take all feeling else
Save what beats there. Filial ingratitude!
Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand
For lifting food to’t? But I will punish home:
No, I will weep no more. In such a night
To shut me out! Pour on; I will endure.
In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril!
Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all, –
O, that way madness lies; let me shun that;
No more of that.

Or… How Language Enables Thought and Behaviour

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Florence Hazrat
(Florence is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of English at the University of St Andrews)

What if your native language makes you live longer? Or shorter for that matter? What if, because you are a French rather than Dutch-speaking Belgian, you are more likely to suffer from old-age poverty, a sexually transmitted disease, and obesity?
      If this sounds like a big leap of the imagination, watch the TED talk by Yale behavioural economist Keith Chen (here). Chen proposes what he calls the ‘linguistic savings hypothesis’, an astonishing correlation between grammar and future-oriented behaviour like saving, using a condom during sex, and doing sports. Speakers of ‘futureless’ languages, Chen argues (you can find more detail in ), show more concern for their future welfare precisely by talking about it in present terms and associating tomorrow with now.
      Broadly sketched, there are two groups of languages, those with weak future-time reference (WTR) like German, and those with strong future-time reference (STR) like English. In futureless German, one may say ‘it rains tomorrow’ (es regnet morgen), compared to the obligatory future tense in English, ‘it is going to rain’ or ‘it will rain’. It is true, Chen admits, that English accepts the present tense for scheduled events, but the way a language treats time overall is not dependent on such particular contexts. Through increased grammatical distinction, the future becomes another country to us, and we tend to care less what happens there.
      Chen analyses the verb usage in online weather forecasts of a number of languages and maps their WTR and STR results onto OECD savings rates between 1985 to 2010. The numbers are high, and surprisingly consistent: futureless language speakers are 39% more likely to save in any given year, 24% more likely to avoid smoking, 29% more likely to exercise regularly, and are 14% less likely to be obese. But do the Finnish save more and eat less, because their language happens to be Finnish, or because they are Finnish?
      The study tries to control cultural and other contextual factors like age, gender, education, tax systems or institutions by including multi-lingual countries like Switzerland, Nigeria and Singapore. Results support the findings: future-oriented behaviour of next-door neighbours, who share the same living conditions but not the same language, are different. Do the structures of one’s language then cause conduct? Or do they rather reflect culture? Are both, perhaps, too intricately intertwined to ask what was first, language being what it is because of culture, and vice versa?
      What Chen’s research suggests is a Whorfian economics, engaging with the eternal question whether our language determines our thought, the way we perceive and experience the world, and the way we represent it in the mind. Benjamin Whorf’s theories of language and cognition have sparked innumerable studies, as well as urban legends like the 50 different words for snow in Eskimo languages – which may actually turn out to be more, and so maybe there is a truth somewhere? It does seem that certain categories like colours, space, time, and emotions point towards linguistic relativism rather than to universal rules in all language communities. (Some of these issues are tackled in a earlier post in this blog, here).

*

Grendel, the monster from the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, has always known this, or rather the poet has, writing his epic in the Old English technique called variation. A person or a thing is being named not just once, but they are described in several ways, all clustered together.

as se hwita helm hafelan werede,
se þe meregrundas mengan scolde,
secan sundgebland since geweorðad,
befongen freawrasnum, swa hine fyrndagum
worhte waepna smið, wundrum teode,
besette swinlicum, þaet hine syðþan no
brond ne beadomecas bitan ne meahton. ()

[‘To guard [Beowulf’s] head he had a glittering helmet / That was due to be muddied on the mere bottom / And blurred in the up swirl. It was of beaten gold, / Princely headgear hooped and hasped / By a weapon-smith who had worked wonders / In days gone by and adorned it with boar-shapes; / Since then it had resisted every sword.’ From Seamus Heaney, Beowulf: A New Translation (London, 2000).]

A helmet is a helmet is a helmet, but it is more than that: variation defines and re-defines, offering at each repetition a slightly different take. Layer by layer qualities and uses of the helmet are peeled off, revealing a rich individualized history. It’s a literary kaleidscope, painting a similar but different picture at every turn, at every added element of the variation. These elements are not subordinated but syntactically equal, they are suspended in the grammatical air which holds them up to the readers’ eyes, ears, and minds. The helmet can be this, and it can be that, and both at the same time.
      Fred Robinson calls this grammatical and conceptual equality ‘‘, placing two entities next to each other on the same imagined plane. The whole poem, Robinson writes, does what it does through apposition, of concepts, syntax, and diction: the word ‘dryhten’, for example, can mean the pagan lord of the retainers as well as Lord in Christian terms, that is, God. The word expresses both concepts simultaneously, evokes both contexts, and it is up to the readers to infer towards which the poem leans, if it leans. They therefore cultivate a complex versatility of thought that can juggle two seemingly exclusive concepts, like paganism and Christianity, without necessarily settling on one. Or do the structures of language and poetry reflect, rather than create, habits of thought?
      Grendel’s grammar probably can’t help you save up for the future, but what it can do is provide test cases for debated and debatable theories, having known the human mind for far longer than they.

This is the last post before a festive break. According to WordPress it is the 100th post, and that is a notable number, but since I have done some self-congratulation quite recently, I won’t say any more about that. Next year will be action-packed, because Trends in Cognitive Sciences has been full of good stuff recently: some old-favourite themes (olfactory language, turn-taking, decision-making, consciousness), and some new ones (neuroticism, cognitive slowness, false memory, moral perception).
      As a parting gift, I will bring to your attention — perhaps you know about it already — the Mapping Metaphor project at Glasgow. It’s in progress here. This has the impressive aim of providing ‘an overall picture of metaphor within a language’; in fact, sort of, two languages, as both English and Old English are covered. The grand plan is to use the recently created Historical Thesaurus of English to show all the ways in which words are used metaphorically. The inspiration comes partly from Lakoff and Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphor, so the idea is to show not only the transferred uses of words, but also the patterns of thought in Anglophone culture.
      My brief tour suggests that the word-lists, organised chronologically, might be very suggestive in showing how different words from one domain (e.g. chemistry) have been put to work in another (e.g. emotion). For a literary critic, they might act as as ground against which to assess whether an instance in a poem is more or less innovative. It would be interesting to delve more deeply into their categories of ‘metaphor strength’, and to think more about ‘metaphor direction’, i.e. whether metaphorical uses move only from Domain A to Domain B; I wonder if some of the possible contours in the Map have been (perhaps necessarily) flattened out.
      I’m not really doing metaphor at the moment, except inasmuch as we’re all always doing metaphor, so I won’t be unfolding many of the possibilities in the near future. It’d be nice to come back to it some time, or to hear from any readers who have given it more of a try.