The Whorfian mind

Whorfian Effects in Color Perception: Deep or Shallow?

This paper discusses, from the point of view of the philosophy of psychology, recent behavioral and brain studies showing effects of the diversity of language vocabulary on color perception. I examine the alternative between two different interpretations of these so-called whorfian effects, namely habitual or deep whorfianism, and shallow whorfianism. I argue that at the moment the evidence und...

Further evidence that Whorfian effects are stronger in the right visual field than the left.

The Whorf hypothesis holds that differences between languages induce differences in perception and/or cognition in their speakers. Much of the experimental work pursuing this idea has focused on the domain of color and has centered on the issue of whether linguistically coded color categories influence color discrimination. A new perspective has been cast on the debate by recent results that su...

The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis

Do the languages that people speak affect the way they think about musical pitch? Here we compared pitch representations in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as „high‟ (hoog) and „low‟ (laag), but Farsi speakers describe high-frequency pitches as „thin‟ (naazok) and low-frequency pitches as „thick‟ (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences...

The Triune Brain: Limbic Mind Mind Plastic, Emotional Mind

Problem statement: The theory discussed is revealing, as compared to studies on the human brain, the fact that he has inherited the structure and organization of three fundamental types of reptiles, ancient or primitive mammals and mammals, or recent evolved. What is very disconcerting is that nature has been able to connect with each other and establish a sort of communication between them. Ap...

“Mind the Gap” in Reporting the Outdated Statistics