Archive for Language
The Price Of Medical Fads
Posted by: | CommentsA very interesting Newsweek article on how American children are being misdiagnosed as suffering from bi-polar disorder and the dire consequences highlights the relationship between language and our health.
In his article, Stuart Kaplan, a child psychiatrist with nearly 50 years experience, talks about the fad diagnosis that launched bi-polar disorder as a juvenile disease and the subsequent 40-fold increase of outpatient office visits for children and adolescents with bipolar disorder from 20,000 in 1994–95 to 800,000 in 2002-03. “Before 1995, bipolar disorder, once known as manic-depressive illness, was rarely diagnosed in children; today nearly one third of all children and adolescents discharged from child psychiatric hospitals are diagnosed with the disorder and medicated accordingly”.
What he tags as ‘trendy thinking’ started in the 1990s, is founded on shaky scientific grounds he says (notably that the symptoms for children bi-polar disorder include behaviours that are natural in children, and that several of the studies done by some leading scholars on the disease are based entirely on reports by parents). Read More→
The Most Dangerous Weapon To Change People Minds
Posted by: | Comments“Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neuro-audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language”…
Biologist Mark Pagel shares a theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language and transformed humanity in the process.
Did you know that the European Union spends over 1 billion Euros every year just on translating between the 23 languages of its members countries? Pagel makes the point that language has been shaped by the evolution needs and that our world requires cooperation more than ever before. Is it far fetched then to think that we are heading toward a one language world? Watch the Ted video to find out.
And click here to check the schedule of courses on language and communication.
Does Your Mother Tongue Shape Your Thinking?
Posted by: | CommentsWords are just ways to express what’s in our mind. Right? Well, maybe not quite so.
In a NY Times article titled “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”, Linguist Guy Deutscher contends that our mother tongue in fact, trains our brain to think a certain way, and even alters our perception of reality.
Take words gender for example. While English speakers can equivocally evoke meeting a ‘neighbour’ for lunch or dinner without mentioning their sex, French or German speakers do not have this flexibility. Whether they like it or not, they will have to reveal the sex of their dining companion.
It gets even more subtle when you consider that many European languages assign genders on words referring to inanimate objects. As a native French speaker who has spent the past 20 years in a Chinese & English speaking environment, I can relate to how language shapes our reality. After 20 years of using mostly English as my main language, I still can’t shake off the deep and unexplainable feeling that the water in my glass is feminine and my bed is masculine. And my Chinese or English speaking friends just cannot understand how my mobile phone and my unconscious mind (this is getting weird!) are masculine, but I viscerally know that they are.
Hypnotic Language Patterns
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve just posted an article on Ericksonian Hypnotic patterns on the MasterMinds NLP Tutorial public blog.
Click here (or copy and paste http://www.mastermindsnlptutorials.com in your browser).
The Effect of “To Be” in Daily Conversation
Posted by: | CommentsAlfred Korzybski in “Science and Sanity” (1933) reflects on the verb “to be” and the process of identification. He used to train people to avoid saying “I am”, asking them “Is this all you think you are?”.
Have you noticed when we are asked “who are you”, often, we say our name, and maybe mention our occupation/job title? Is this all we are? The verb TO BE can be limiting and reflects our beliefs about ourselves.
His work was based on the view that human beings are limited in their knowledge by the structure of their perceptions and their language. Unable to experience the world directly, they resort to “abstractions” (non-verbal perceived impressions and verbal indicators expressed through language). The structure of our perceptions and our language (which determine our understanding) sometimes misleads us as to what is going on, what we must deal with. We create an abstraction and this is the reality we deal with. He called for an increased awareness in each of us of that process of abstraction.
Interestingly enough, some 800 years before Korzybski, in India, Shankaracharya, the creator of the philosophy of non-duality Advaita Vedanta, mentioned the human process of “Adhyasa”, superimposition of meaning onto the unchanging reality through our senses, and its remedy, “Apavada” deconstruction of the operation of the senses.
Expanding the structure of our language and our perceptions, we can truly achieve mind-bloggling results!
Mind-Changing Courses.
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