Page 46 - NyghtVision Boot Camp One Fill Edition
P. 46
eryone. way. While some are kindred - derived from the
In the end, how the visual clues we see shapes our same linguisitic source - and therefore see the
view of the world is far more important than the world similarly, there are still significant differ-
relationship of the structures of the brain to the ences. What I can say in English, must be said
world. very differently in Spanish for example. Outside
a common linguistic family, those differences
Experience also is shaped by our education, our become even more profound. The absence of the
language, and our culture. Language, culture, verb “to be” in Hebrew means that saying some-
and education frame how we experince the world thing as simple in English as “the sky is blue” isn’t
- inlcuing what we see and don’t see, our percep- possible. Without the verb to be, the world looks
tion of what is real and what is not. Even our ex- very different.
perience of color - as we have noted. So, we can talk about two very different types of
Ludwig Wittgenstein, writing about the rela- interpolation:
tionship between language and the world, wrote
that language is the scaffold we place around the (a) the way the “wiring” of the brain “fixes” the
world - it is the fabric or lens we use to join or world so that our perception matches our expec-
bring together our collective experiences of the tations and
world. Language joins our indiosyncratic, solip- (b) how language and culture shape how the brain
cistic views of the world and establishes or con- communicates and understands what it sees.
structs our understanding of how the world is to
be understood.
No two languages “see” the world in the same
46 Boot Camp, Part 1
