Arrival is a film which delves into the concept of learning as a way to alter your mind. Here at Cornell I had the pleasure of taking an introductory linguistics course and the hypothesis that learning a language can change the way you think was brought up. It has not been well studied, but a real life example brought up was color perception. Some languages have names for colors which english does not, i.e. the hue of color between orange and yellow doesn’t have an english name (other than yellow-orange) but some cultures do have a unique name for this. The people in these cultures also see these colors “better”, that is they notice them and distinguish them easily. If you lack the vocabulary, or alternatively have a wider selection of words to choose from, the way you sense the world changes. Newspeak, the official language in Orwell’s novel 1984, is perhaps similar in this regard. By limiting vocabulary and losing your ability to express yourself, you thus lack the conceptual ability to even think for yourself. I only know one language (my Cornell transcript shows I have mastered 3 semesters of Latin but that dubious at best) so I don’t fully understand how this works in real life. I do have friends who are bilingual, and they mention all the time that “this sentence is so much better in the original French”. I have to take their word for it, but this sentiment is again more evidence that languages force you to consider the world in different ways. The traditional hypothesis of human development says that once people had brains large enough, language followed. However, scientists have learned today that its not just the size of brain, but also the way the brain is internally structured that leads to human’s greater intellect. So maybe instead of better brains creating language, language rewired our brains to change the way we viewed the world.