Lost in Translation

Boroditsky, 34, blends intellec­tual gravitas with an unmistakable love of whimsy. Photographs show her driving a banana-like vehicle around the Burning Man festival. She has dubbed her lab “Cognation,” and her tongue-in-cheek website includes funny profiles of her graduate students and an invitation to sing along to the “Cognation national anthem,” a music clip of Groucho Marx singing “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

She had to be fearless to pursue her research fascination. “Language influencing thought was extremely controversial for decades,” explains Dedre Gentner, a Northwestern psychology professor who became a mentor to Boroditsky. “If you talked about language’s impact on cognition, you were considered an idiot or a lunatic. We talked about it in my lab, but I used to warn the students not to talk about it outside the lab. Lera,” she adds with a chuckle, “was bold enough to ignore that warning. It’s now a fully researched and discussed issue.”

Boroditsky’s results are attracting more and more researchers to the field and producing additional evidence for measured acceptance of Whorfian arguments. “I’m not sure I would have gone into this if I’d known it was so controversial,” she says. But an emotional and intense response from psychologists who previously rejected the idea that language affects thinking is not surprising, she says.

“This work is at the center of some of the biggest debates in the study of the mind—nature versus nurture; is the mind divided into modular regions; is there a special encapsulated language ‘organ’ in the brain. It’s pretty bothersome for someone to come along and say that perhaps many of the phenomena that we in psychology have been studying could differ from language to language. It would be much easier if we could just study American college sophomores and assume that our observations would be the same everywhere.”

Excerpted from Stanford (May-June 2010), which distinguishes itself from the alumni magazine pack with insightful in-depth features that are relevant far beyond the campus grounds. www.stanfordmag.org