What was the key to Harney’s, Napangati’s, and so many others’ phenomenal memories? It is, I think, a matter of intimacy. We seek to know what we love. The journalist Arati Kumar-Rao writes of her time traveling with nomads of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India, whose memory of the land is passed on through words, place-names, songs, and symbols, that because they travel on foot, they map in inches, not kilometers. Aristotle thought that memories are imprinted on us like a seal in wax. According to him, sensory perceptions are initially received by the heart and then delivered to the brain, where they are stored. Later, the Latin verb for recollection was recordari, an amalgam of revocare (“to call back”) and cor (“heart”). In the twelfth century, one of the meanings of the Middle English word herte was “memory.” When you have memorized something completely, you know it by heart.
YOU SAY LEFT, I SAY NORTH
Does the language we speak and the words we use to describe space influence our perception of reality? The psychologist James Gibson describes knowing as an extension of perceiving. Children become aware by looking around, listening, feeling, smelling, and tasting, and others step in along the way to make them aware through instruments and tools, toys, pictures, and words. Yet all of these things—especially words—are different depending on what culture you are born into. Do people raised in different cultures see the same world?
Around the same time Gibson was studying psychology at Princeton, the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf was at Yale University trying to understand how the human mind might organize experience and phenomena differently depending on the linguistic system people used. Whorf studied Native American languages under his mentor Edward Sapir, and their body of work resulted in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—the idea that language determines and limits thought and knowledge. This theory was influenced by the work of Franz Boas, the German-American anthropologist who had lived on Baffin Island in the 1880s and who had noted the diversity of words the Inuit possessed to describe snow. (Sapir later became Boas’s student.) While Sapir proposed that language influences how people think, Whorf went further, asserting that language reflects entirely different concepts about the world, including fundamental notions of time.
Sapir passed away in 1939 and Whorf died just two years later. Over the subsequent decades the majority of linguists, largely led by Noam Chomsky, adopted a different theory of language, that of universal grammar. The universalists believed that different languages each describe basic, innate concepts and that we are born with an a priori knowledge about things like space and time that are informed by our shared biology, the boundaries of our physical bodies, and our cognitive structure.
It was decades before the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was revived, in part due to the work of an American linguistic anthropologist by the name of John Haviland, who lived with an Aboriginal community of about eight hundred people on the Cape York Peninsula in northeastern Australia. Haviland had gone there in the early 1970s to do postdoctoral research, and the first thing he did was begin to learn their language, called Guugu Yimithirr, from an old man called Billy “Muunduu” Jack. Eventually Jack gave Haviland a room in his home and adopted him as a son. As he learned the language, Haviland realized that while many European languages rely on phrases like “in front of” and “behind,” these didn’t exist in the Guugu Yimithirr speakers’ grammar. Such phrases depend on an egocentric frame of reference—they use the position of the speaker or subject as the point of orientation. Sentences like “She is to the left of the tree” or “The tree is to the left of the rock” utilize a relative conception of space that depends on the perspective of the speaker to the tree or the rock. Guugu Yimithirr speakers did not have words for “right,” “left,” or “back.” They exclusively used cardinal directions to describe space, which for them were four quadrants, skewed about seventeen degrees clockwise from magnetic compass directions. The use of these four root terms pervaded their speech and storytelling. If instructing someone to turn off a camping stove, they would say, “Turn the knob west.” If they wanted someone to move over, they would say, “Move a bit east.”
In 1982, a British linguistic anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, Stephen Levinson, went to Australia to do a research fellowship at Australian National University. His interests were in psycholinguistics—the relationship between cognition and language—and in particular exploring the boundaries of language’s power on human thinking. Haviland’s findings fascinated him. Whorf thought that the human mind might organize phenomena uniquely depending on the linguistic system used, but his caveat to the idea was space. “Probably the apprehension of space is given in substantially the same form by experience irrespective of language,” Whorf wrote. Now Levinson thought the Guugu Yimithirr community might prove otherwise, that those who use different languages to describe space might actually perceive the world differently.
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In 1992, Levinson returned to Queensland to continue his studies and found that cardinal directions were so entrenched in the Guugu Yimithirr’s perception of their surroundings that they even read books and watched television differently from Indo-European speakers. As he would write later, “[J]ust as we think of a picture as containing virtual space, so that we describe an elephant as behind a tree in a children’s book (based on apparent occlusion), so GY speakers think about it as an oriented virtual space: if I am looking at the book facing north, then the elephant is north of the tree, and if I want you to skip ahead in the book, I’ll ask you to go further east (because pages are flipped from east to west).” Levinson recalled an instance in which he showed ten men a six-minute film and then asked each of them to describe the events of the film to another person. He saw that if the men had been facing south while watching the film, they would describe people on the screen coming toward them as moving northward. “You always know which way the old people been watching the TV when they tell the story,” one man told him.
Guugu Yimithirr speakers used what Levinson deemed an absolute frame of reference for spatial cognition: their perspective was from a fixed point of reference, rather than changing as they moved through space. In this scheme, their own bodies were sometimes treated as irrelevant. Guugu Yimithirr speakers would sometimes point at their chest, not to indicate they were referencing themselves but to point in the direction of something behind them. Levinson guessed that this kind of linguistic system could have far-reaching cognitive consequences. Perhaps Guugu Yimithirr speakers encode their memories with the cardinal directions. They would have to do this constantly, because people never know in advance what they will need to recall later. The result, he thought, was that Guugu Yimithirr speakers must have uniquely developed memory faculties from people who use egocentric frameworks for describing space—one difference being that Guugu Yimithirr speakers have to know the cardinal directions all the time. And this, he guessed, meant they could probably dead reckon with great precision. “Speakers of languages that utilize cardinal directions (like ‘north’), where we would use coordinates based on our body schema (like ‘left’ or ‘front’), would have to be not only good at knowing where (e.g.) north is,” Levinson surmised, “but would also have to maintain accurate mental maps and constantly update their position and orientation on them.”
To test this idea, Levinson turned to David Lewis’s experiments in the Western Desert two decades before. He began traveling with Guugu Yimithirr men, ten in all, on journeys through the bush by foot or vehicle. He asked the men to indicate the direction of places like islands, cattle stations, and mountains from where they were standing, places that could range anywhere from a couple of miles to hundreds of miles away. As they were asked the men would point, often immediately, to the location requested of them and Levinson would then take a reading with his compass and record their position. He then compared the directions he was given to survey maps. All together Levinson gathered 160 readings, and the results were astounding. On average, the error in degrees from the men’s dead reck
oning and that of Levinson’s compass was 13.5 degrees. “Nothing like this can be obtained from European populations,” Levinson wrote in his book Space and Language.
Could it be that people who spoke languages that demanded constant dead reckoning were empirically better navigators than speakers of Indo-European languages? Based on his experience in Queensland, Levinson believed the answer was yes. But to prove it, there needed to be research beyond Australia to places where similar “absolute” spatial languages were spoken. Levinson organized a group of students whose goal was to research the domain of cognition, action, and space among different language groups around the globe, and in the following years, several studies emerged that reenacted these dead reckoning experiments.
In the Chiapas Mountains of Mexico, Levinson and his wife, Penelope Brown, an American psycholinguist, did field research among the Tzeltal Maya Indians, an indigenous group who live in a subalpine and agricultural setting of Tenejapa. The Tzeltal’s language contains both absolute and relative terms. But the region the Tzeltal people inhabited was fairly small and they used well-maintained trails to travel through the mountains. When tested, their dead reckoning skills didn’t match the Guugu Yimithirr’s level. Those who relied on absolute language systems alone, it seemed, were indeed much better at orienting and therefore navigating.
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One of the people who set out to re-create Levinson’s experiments was a German anthropology student by the name of Thomas Widlok. Widlok’s interest was in the San—the hunter-gatherer group previously known as the “Bushmen” spread across Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Zambia—and in 1993 he went to northern Namibia to undertake an orientation study with the Hai||om San (the “||” represents a click sound used in San language, in this case made with the tongue placed on and then drawn away from the teeth.) The Hai||om, a group of about fifteen thousand people living in the Kalahari Basin, and other San groups had a reputation for nearly mythical powers of navigation. Widlok had read the literature documenting these skills. One hunter claimed that his San guide’s sense of direction was better than his handheld GPS device. Widlok also knew that during the border war in Angola and northern Namibia in the mid-twentieth century, the South African Army had created what was an elaborate ideology around these skills and exploited them to track down their enemies in the bush. The depiction of “Bushmen,” Widlok has written, was that they were skilled superhumans, or rather super beastly beings. Indeed, white army officials, much like nineteenth-century anthropologists, projected animality onto the San. To outsiders, they were not people “partaking of nature, it is nature that has not yet completely released its grip on them.”
Widlok knew from his experience that the Hai||om could accomplish orientation tasks that seemed impossible to him, such as easily locating places they had never been before. But how much did the language of the Hai||om play a role in these skills? Widlok took a GPS to the Mangetti-West region and began a study, accompanying six men, three women, and a twelve-year-old boy into the savanna, walking anywhere from nine to twenty-five miles. Widlok asked them to point to twenty different places ranging from a mile to over a hundred miles away. The visibility across the bush was around twenty yards, and there were no landmarks to be seen. Show me where X is from here, Widlok would ask, and then he noted the direction they pointed in and compared their estimates to his GPS reading. Again and again, Widlok found that the Hai||om’s dead reckoning skills were statistically barely different from the Guugu Yimithirr study group.
Widlok’s data revealed something else. Unlike Levinson, he had included women in his study. In Hai||om culture, it is the men who often attain expert levels of hunting and tracking skills, and yet he found that the women demonstrated even better dead reckoning than the male participants. Widlok guessed that this difference in gender might even out with a larger sample size. But there was an additional possibility. Western researchers long believed that gender was an important factor in spatial orientation and memory, and studies had shown that on the whole men performed better than women in wayfinding and spatial ability tasks. Indeed, as Indiana University psychologist Carol Lawton has pointed out, spatial abilities studies are often used by psychologists to show evidence of gender differences in cognition, mainly because differences are otherwise so minimal. They point to results that have shown that boys score higher than girls on mental rotation tests—judging how an object would look if turned—and other exercises like orienting in space. It’s only when psychologists test girls on their memory for locations of objects that they exceed boys. Various hypotheses for these gender differences have been presented, from hormonal differences and their effects on our hippocampus, to how our brains are hemispherically organized, to evolutionary causes. Perhaps men in our ancient past needed to travel farther to hunt, search for mates, or fight, whereas women were circumscribed by gathering food and protecting their offspring. But as Lawton points out, there’s no clear evidence that labor was divided in this way in prehistoric times. And interestingly, gender differences in navigation seem to disappear when boys and girls from lower socioeconomic groups are tested. Furthermore, when women are offered instruction and practice in spatial visualization exercises, the differences between their abilities and men’s disappears. One study by Ariane Burke of the University of Montreal tested the hunter-gatherer theory of spatial ability and found that men and women with equivalent experience perform equally well at navigation tasks once physical differences are accounted for.
The research into absolute languages seems to indicate that gender difference might be culturally dependent rather than gender dependent. Perhaps women who spoke languages with absolute spatial coordinates, thereby constantly orientating in order to communicate, were as capable as men. This hypothesis gained some traction when, in addition to the Guugu Yimithirr, Tzeltal, and Hai||om experiments, Dutch and Japanese studies were undertaken that tested dead reckoning skills. Only the Dutch study group, whose language relies almost exclusively on relative, egocentric terms and whose participants struggled to access an absolute frame of reference, showed a difference between men and women.
Like the Guugu Yimithirr, the Hai||om had no general words for “left” or “right,” though those who could speak English were perfectly capable of employing the words correctly. As it turns out, so many cultures use this absolute frame of reference rather than an egocentric perspective. Almost all Australian Aboriginal language groups, not just the Guugu Yimithirr, use an absolute linguistic frame of reference. So do Dravidian speakers in India; Totonacan speakers in Mexico; and Balinese speakers in Indonesia. And it’s not always one or the other. Some groups use both frames of reference, like Kgalagadi speakers in Botswana and Kilivila speakers in Papua New Guinea.
The reasons for the proliferation of linguistic diversity when it comes to space and orientation are not fully understood. Do the environments we inhabit shape our languages and therefore cognitive architecture as we grow and develop? There’s no proven deterministic relationship between what ecologies and cultures lead to relative or absolute frames of reference, but there are relationships. In a 2004 study in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, researchers looked at ten different communities and found an association between living in urban environments and using a relative frame of reference, and living in rural environments and using an absolute frame of reference. In some cases, however, a rural community relied on a relative frame of reference, such as the Yukatek, a rural community in Mexico. What does seem to be generally true is that hunter-gatherer societies almost all seem to use absolute systems.
What was clear to the authors of the 2004 study was that language used by different cultures to describe space proves that there are no innate spatial concepts built into human cognition. The relative frame of reference described by Immanuel Kant was not somehow more “natural” to humans. In fact, children acquiring relative languages seem to do so with greater difficulty and at a much later time than absolute language speakers. Eng
lish, Italian, and Turkish children can’t use relative descriptors like “right” and “left” confidently until eleven or twelve years of age. On the other hand, Tzeltal-speaking children can use absolute vocabulary by three and a half and have fully mastered it by eight. “Language,” wrote the researchers, “can play a central role in the restructuring of human cognition.”
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When it came to explaining the Hai||om skill for tracking and navigating, Widlok knew there were two very different, contradicting theories within his discipline of anthropology: mental map theory and practical mastery theory. The first posits that successful navigation relies on building abstract cognitive representations of the spatial relations between objects in the mind, while the second asserts that successful navigation is a matter of memorizing the perspective of moving along a route. One relies on survey or layout knowledge, while the other relies on sequential knowledge. In his 1997 paper discussing the results of his field research, Widlok seemed to place the Hai||om system of navigation in the practical mastery camp. Theirs wasn’t a system based on a map against which their movements were referenced and direction oriented. Yet Widlok also felt that the Hai||om had an extraordinary amount of diversity when it came to choosing which tools to use to both describe and orient themselves in space. These tools weren’t an automatic response to environmental stimuli, Widlok wrote; they were constituted through “prolonged social interaction.” For instance, they used what is called a “!hus” system, a way of classifying various ecological landscapes and the different people who lived in each one. There were stony-ground people, hill people, millet people, soft-sand people, and fine-sand people. These landscape terms were a way of talking, thinking, and traveling through space that took into account multiple dimensions of social history, individual memory, and ecological knowledge.
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