Guillaume Thierry: Embodied Cognition and Linguistic Relativity - Same Fight!

In this talk, Guillaume Thierry will review neuroscientific evidence that show deep, entrenched, bidirectional relationships between language and perception, emotion, and cognition seemingly incompatible with a modularist view of language in the human mind. Language representations appear to shape our perception of colours, objects, and motion events. At the same time, high-level semantic representations such as that of time or perceived power seem to relate to fundamental aspects of spatial perception, such as the origin of a sound in the space around a listener. Language is thus embodied and situated, which is a strong argument for the validity of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and vice versa. Maybe it is time to accept that the human brain is a massively interconnected network of neurons operating on a hebbian basis as a Gestalt.