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How experience shapes the mind: Roles of language, culture, and body

People are not all the same. There is astonishing diversity among human cultures, languages, and bodies. Ordinary customs in one culture may appear fantastic to someone across the globe. Sounds that come naturally to speakers of one language may seem alien to speakers of another. Actions that one person performs easily may be impossible for someone with a different kind of body.

How is the diversity of the human experience reflected in the mind? What is universal about the concepts we form, and what depends on the particulars of our physical and social experiences?

People's experiences vary, so it would seem natural that many of the concepts they form vary, accordingly. Perhaps surprisingly, this has not been the dominant view in the cognitive sciences. From Plato to Chomsky and beyond, influential thinkers have argued that despite superficial variations, most concepts are universal across languages, cultures, and individuals.

In testing the universality of concepts, my lab is discovering new frontiers in the experiential relativity of the mind. People with different patterns of physical and social experience form correspondingly different mental representations, across many conceptual domains. This essay describes a research program investigating the mechanisms and the consequences of linguistic relativity, cultural relativity, and what I have called by analogy bodily relativity.

So far, we have learned that subtle contrasts between languages and cultures can influence our most basic perceptual and conceptual representations. We find effects of linguistic and cultural relativity even when we probe people's thoughts using low-level psychophysical tasks with non‐linguistic stimuli and responses.

Differences between people's bodies predict differences in their neural and mental representations, in domains including language, mental imagery, and emotion. Experimental interventions show that bodily differences are not merely correlated with cognitive differences; bodily experience plays a causal role in shaping the mind. Even our most abstract thoughts depend in part on the particulars of our bodies. Experience molds the mind both in developmental time and in real time, online, as we interact with each other and the world around us. It is an ongoing challenge for this research program to determine why certain streams of experience shape particular mental capacities, and how influences of language, culture, and body combine.

From one perspective, effects of experiential relativity demonstrate the diversity of the human conceptual repertoire. But at the same time, they reveal universals in the processes by which knowledge is acquired and represented. If changing someone's linguistic, cultural, or bodily experience changes their thoughts accordingly, we can infer that thinking must depend in part on these aspects of experience.

The malleability of the mind that we are discovering has implications for theories of cognition, suggesting refinements to the concept of 'concepts'. The experimental techniques we are developing provide new answers to ancient questions.

Explorations of experiential relativity may also have practical implications, beyond the laboratory. By studying how language, culture, and body shape the mind, we can better understand how different individuals and groups tend to think, feel, communicate, and make decisions.