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thenewgreen  ·  3749 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 5 insane ways words can control your mind

Personally, I would find anyone named Peewee Nipplepuss to be intimidating. Sort of the Boy named Sue philosophy that a name like that could only make you tough in life. Jack Savage, not so much.

    Experiments have found that whether or not you can register a color depends on whether or not you have a name for it in your language. You can see the color, it just doesn't register in your mind.

    One study compared some young children from England with kids from a tribe in Nambia. In the English language, young kids usually learn 11 basic colors (black, white, gray, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple and brown) but in Himba it's only five. For instance, they lump red, orange and pink together and call it "serandu."

    If you showed the Himba toddler a pink card and then later showed him a red one and ask if they're the same card, the kid would often mistakenly say yes -- because they're both "serandu." Same as if you showed you "Eggshell" and an hour later showed you "Bone" and asked if it was the same card from before. Now, again, they can see the colors; if you hold up a pink card and a red card next to each other, the English kid and Himba kid both would say they're different. But not when they see them one at a time.

-This is interesting to me, especially as someone that is apparently bordering on color blindness. Does this mean that if I were introduced to more words for more nuanced colors I would literally see the world differently? That's amazing.

Makes me think of how the eskimo's apparently have hundreds of words to describe snow. They must also see the world differently, no?

I often think musicians must hear music differently and that painters must see art differently etc.

knowledge is power.