The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Words Are Eating Your Brain

There can’t be any doubt that the language we speak contributes to the way we perceive and judge the world. The words we use are defined by other words, all of which have connotations and associations unique not just to the language but to particular subsets of language users. This we call culture and feel justified in making the distinction between, say, European and Asian cultures in which attitudes toward and the meanings of things like trust, guilt, loyalty and rationality (not to mention the rather broader topics of law, morality, science, god, etc.) vary enormously.

This cultural variability is nothing new to science or popular knowledge. Nor is the contribution that language makes in preserving cultural distinctions and practices. What is new though, at least to me, is that language practices - particularly that of reading - have a marked effect on human physiology. Reading actually changes the structure of the brain. For example, among those populations that read “… verbal memories are expanding, face processing is shifting [to the] right [hemisphere of the brain] , and corpus callosa are thickening—in the aggregate—over centuries.”

Therefore, as literacy rates have increased in certain countries (mainly in the Northern hemisphere) over the last 500 years, language “has jury-rigged aspects of our genetically evolved neurological systems to create new mental abilities.” It is very much as if language itself has a life of its own and has infected the human species for use as the vector of its development.

So much for those AI theorists who put the conquest of technology over humanity some time in the future. The fundamental technology we have is language. And in a sense it has controlled human development from its arrival in the species. We have quite literally been its tool as it carries out its neurological transformation. Our brains are being re-wired constantly every time we open a book or read a billboard.

Like a parasite that promotes self-serving behaviours in its host, language encourages “the value of ‘formal education’ or institutions such as ‘schools’—as well as technologies like alphabets, syllabaries, and printing presses.” Those with greater language-facility are more likely to ‘get ahead’ and rise to social roles of high repute. Taking Henrich seriously, it becomes difficult not to think of language as an alien race come to enthral us for unknown ends.

For me, these observations by Henrich, are wonderfully interesting, evocative, and stimulating. But he goes on to bury them in mountains of rather passé and more than exceptionally boring details from hundreds of anthropological and ethnographic studies that do nothing but distract from the book’s key point - that language is physically reshaping us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend. His paean to Western culture conveniently omits mention of its racism, misogyny, and violence. Oh well, I suppose he has he academic reputation as well as popular street cred to consider. Fortunately I do not.

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