Amygdala speaks:If all you have is a hammer

" I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

-Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966

I first encountered this line in the movie Arrival. If I remember right, it was used in the context that the language you speak determines your worldview and consequently how you think. I was at the time not aware of any background, and I remember being very skeptical of this statement. Thereafter, I looked it up and found that there was something called linguistic relativity, better known as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--a theory that strongly advocated this belief.

But if I'm being honest, I should tell you that I wasn't very convinced by it. My idea was this: Language is just a medium. Regardless of the medium, what you're describing would still remain the same, right? How then, could language change the way you think? If anything, the reverse should be true--how you think would have an effect on the way you use language to articulate your thoughts. This whole theory seemed to be topsy-turvy: a sort of outside-in if you will. (I will get to "outside-in" in a subsequent article. Malcolm Gladwell brought up some interesting points on that one.)
At the same time, the broader umbrella that encompassed the analogy of hammer and nail fascinated me, and I wondered if there could be some truth to it. I still could not see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, because my mind thought in the same terms.

Recent events made me change my mind which is primarily why I'm writing this article. I'll elaborate on the how and why.

I am someone who you can conveniently label a "dabbler"--I love working on new things, and I never refrain from learning something that is outside my current area of expertise. That being said, I should also mention that I have worked at the system level for some time now. To abstract this stuff out for any non-technical readers, when I say system level, I mean things very close to the hardware, where there are not many libraries and you survive by writing things from scratch in a bare-bones fashion. Whereas in the recent past, I have been using application level languages, by which you should infer that there are loads of libraries with tons of functions and therefore nothing you do is from scratch. Now these languages, are just media. Logically, they shouldn't affect my thinking. Or at least, that's what I thought.

A couple of weeks back, in an interview, I was asked a system question. Something that should have been trivial for a system programmer, and yet the first couple of solutions I could think of were completely at the application level, heavily inspired by the language I was using. The interviewer found this funny, and although I eventually came up with the expected solution, it took a lot more effort than it should have. It was almost as if I had to rewire my neural pathways. I found myself thinking that it was stupid to have to put so much effort into writing something so trivial when there were libraries that had already implemented it--talk about re-inventing the wheel. I was aghast at my own reveries--these were the thoughts of an application programmer. How and when had I turned into one? 

The answer was right there--it was the language I had been using. You slowly start thinking in terms of the language and its constructs, because it is efficient to code this way; your thoughts are in sync with the tools you have at hand. Then, eventually, without even realizing it, you start to apply those constructs to every problem you are given. You start looking at everything in terms of those constructs. Lo and behold, your thinking is now dictated by the language.Your worldview, your cognition. It is all in the language. Weird, isn't it? And you think you are using the language. The truth is more along the lines of the language is using you.

Now, coming to linguistic relativity, the theory seems more plausible. Language is no more just a medium. It defines words,phrases and idioms for you. I think a figure of speech would help simplify this concept. Language is like a mould. Initially, your thoughts do not have form--let's compare them to molten chocolate. You vocalize your thoughts using predefined constructs--the chocolate that had no shape previously, now fits into the mould. You have to continually use the moulds because there is no other way to concretise what you think. Eventually, you only see chocolate in the shape of the mould. If you were to ask me for a second example, I would point you to the cartesian coordinate system. Language is your axes, any point you define is in terms of it. Slowly, the point loses its own definition--the only way you can get to it is using the axes.

Very abstractly put, thought is infinite---pure analog signal that can take on a gazillion values. But, you must quantize it to a previously defined digital level for it to work in the real world. These defined levels dominate your world to such a point that you start thinking in terms of them. Makes sense?

If you happen to speak more than one language natively, then you will notice this: Things are very differently expressed from one language to another. There is a chasm that sometimes even translation cannot bridge. These differences are inherent in the language itself. Also, phrases carry with them a context--emotional information, culture specific references, colloquialisms, sometimes even blatant opinions--these are again language specific. They baffle a non-native speaker who cannot easily grasp such intricacies. These could possibly trigger associations in our minds, which then become hardwired. Thus, you are back to the hammer nail paradigm. Your worldview has been changed significantly, and you aren't even aware of it.

I hope my arguments were convincing enough and that you do believe me up to this point. Having gotten here though, can we measure how much this influence is? Is it weak enough that we could overlook it or strong enough that it dictates us? Somewhere in between? What if you speak multiple languages--more generically, what if your toolbox is diverse? Which of them would shape your worldview? These are interesting questions to ask, and perhaps I shall get back to them in a subsequent article. 

The thing that never fails to freak me out is this: We think we are sentient beings, acting out of agency and free will. But how much of it is truly free? Factor in nature, nurture, biases, internal mechanisms. Now tell me, what exactly is our say in the matter? Close to nothing. 

Feel free to correct me, in case you see differently. Would love to talk it over!