Every language is an old growth forest of the mind
Language is a window into culture, but also it forms our understanding of reality.
What if human potential — literally what skills and talents our body is capable of, all of our bodies are capable of — is only limited by our version of reality?
Talents and skills that we assign to animals — extraordinarily keen sense of smell, ability to navigate across vast spaces with little visual information, distinguishing among enormous variety of plants with very minor differences — are talents that people living on the earth today possess. And not just individuals, entire peoples.
Consider the scientific evidence, particularly from indigenous peoples.
At Duocon 2022, Duolingo hosted a talk by Lera Boroditsky, a professor of cognitive science at University of California, San Diego. In her talk, she describes a people living in Australia who have constant absolute awareness of their cardinal position and direction (north-south-east-west). They even represent change over time (in her example, a series of pictures showing a man aging) by the path of the sun.
Watch her 10 minute talk here or below>>
As Wade Davis delivers so compellingly (shout out to maestras Jen and Paula for the connection), indigenous cultures show us that people today can perform these skills. He begins a 2003 TED talk discussing how language shapes reality, creates versions of reality. I am also quoting him quoting Margaret Mead in the idea that “every language is an old growth forest of the mind.”
Sit with that for a moment.
I am gratified to see writers and phenomenologists (another aspiration) that I admire grab on to these same words, such as Robert MacFarlane (read his brilliant book Underland for a glimpse into wild huge spaces we barely perceive and discuss). Wade Davis himself wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow, which connects inexplicable events and ethnobotany (yes!) to provide a possible origin of zombie-ism.
Wade Davis’s talk is here or embedded below >>
Yes, cultures understand blue and green to be divided at different points (or to be the same color). Male and female can be associated with different objects to eye-opening social effects. But we already understand color and gender to be cultural constructs. While it is intriguing to see the evidence, for most people these concepts were never absolute ideas to begin with.
The profound idea to me is that the boundary of what our minds and bodies can do — what you and I conceive of as our biological limitations, rooted in medicine and other established disciplines, and fairly absolute — may simply be a cultural construct.
The reason this is doubly compelling: other life forms in nature can routinely perform phenomena we can observe and theorize about but not really understand, at a fundamental level. (Forget replicate.)
Imagine looking deep into those talents and biological capabilities, what would we find? What could we unlock for ourselves?
Credit to the incredible masterwork, Whitman Illuminated: A Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman and illustrated by Allen Crawford. Buy online at its publisher, Tin House >>
