Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word "time" is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It forms the very fabric of our experience, and yet it is unperceivable: we cannot see, touch, or smell time. How do our minds create this fundamental aspect of experience? Do patterns in language and culture influence how we think about time?
Do languages merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Is there intrinsic value in human linguistic diversity?
Join us as Stanford cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky re-invigorates this long standing debate with data from experiments done around the world, from China, to Indonesia, Israel, and Aboriginal Australia.Lera Boroditsky
Lera Boroditsky is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. Professor Boroditsky does research in cognitive science with a specific focus on cognitive linguistics. She studies language and cognition, specifically focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where her thesis advisor was Gordon Bower.
Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. She has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and being named a Searle Scholar.
Her work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.
In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. For the Burning Man festival, she once built a banana vehicle.Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.
Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (01968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 01972 issue. In 01984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.
Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 01989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year.
He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting adviser to Ecotrust, Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forest from Alaska to San Francisco.
Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 01999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 01994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 01987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 01974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.Alexander Rose
As the director of the Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Rose shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.
Hired as the first employee of the foundation in February of 1997, Rose has been an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., a project manager for Shamrock Communications, and a founding partner of Inertia Labs. Rose attended the Art Center College of Design and graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 1995.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment