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Russian has two basic words for blue: goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue. In a 2007 experiment, Russian speakers told two blues apart faster when the shades had different names, and the advantage vanished when their verbal memory was kept busy.

Winawer et al., PNAS, 2007

LanguageMindScience

The story behind the card

The study, led by Jonathan Winawer and published in PNAS, showed volunteers three blue squares and asked which of the lower two matched the top one. Russian speakers were faster when the two blues fell on opposite sides of the goluboy/siniy line; English speakers, who call both 'blue', showed no such effect. When the Russians silently rehearsed a string of digits, which ties up verbal memory, the advantage disappeared, but a spatial memory task left it intact. This supports a modest form of linguistic relativity, the idea that language can influence thought: words can speed up a judgement, but they do not change what the eyes can see.

Türkçe oku
Rusçada mavi için iki temel sözcük vardır: açık mavi için goluboy, koyu mavi için siniy. 2007'deki bir deneyde Rusça konuşanlar, iki mavi ton farklı adlar taşıdığında onları daha hızlı ayırt etti; sözel bellekleri başka bir işle meşgul edildiğinde bu üstünlük kayboldu.
Winawer ve arkadaşları, PNAS, 2007

Jonathan Winawer'in yürüttüğü ve PNAS dergisinde yayımlanan çalışmada gönüllülere üç mavi kare gösterildi ve alttaki iki kareden hangisinin üsttekiyle aynı olduğu soruldu. Rusça konuşanlar, iki mavi goluboy ile siniy sınırının farklı taraflarına düştüğünde daha hızlıydı; ikisine de “blue” diyen İngilizce konuşanlarda böyle bir fark görülmedi. Ruslar içlerinden bir rakam dizisini tekrarlayıp sözel belleklerini meşgul ettiğinde üstünlük ortadan kalktı; uzamsal belleği meşgul eden bir görev ise onu etkilemedi. Bulgu, dilin düşünceyi etkileyebileceğini söyleyen dilsel görecelik fikrinin ılımlı bir biçimini destekler: Sözcükler bir kararı hızlandırabilir, ama gözün gördüğünü değiştirmez.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Linguistic relativity
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In a 1966 study of the tip-of-the-tongue feeling, Roger Brown and David McNeill read people definitions of rare words, such as a small boat used in East Asian harbours. Those who got stuck often still knew the word's first letter and number of syllables, though the word itself would not come.

The boat was a sampan, and people who could not find the word came up with near misses such as 'Saipan', 'Siam' and 'sarong'. Psychologists think a word's meaning and its sound are stored in linked but separate parts of memory: in a tip-of-the-tongue state the meaning is active, but the signal does not fully reach the sound, so only fragments such as the first letter get through. The feeling becomes more common with age, and names are especially prone to it, since a name carries little meaning that could lead back to it. It seems to be universal: one survey found that 45 of 51 languages have an expression for it, like the Turkish 'dilimin ucunda'.

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People differ in how finely they tell their feelings apart: one person separates anxiety, irritation, disappointment and loneliness, while another simply feels 'bad'. Psychologists call this emotional granularity, and people with more of it tend to handle difficult feelings more flexibly.

Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett first reported these differences in 1995 under the name emotion differentiation, and coined 'emotional granularity' in 2004. It is usually measured with experience sampling: people rate their feelings several times a day for weeks, and researchers check whether they use words like 'angry', 'sad' and 'nervous' for distinct states or for one general bad mood. Studies have linked higher granularity to using more ways of calming strong negative feelings, and some have found less heavy drinking and aggression under stress. A precise label helps because 'this is disappointment, not anger' points to a different response. Barrett's wider theory, that the brain constructs emotions from bodily signals and past experience, is influential but debated.

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Deliberately smiling can make people feel slightly happier. In 2022 a study of nearly 4,000 people in 19 countries found that posing a smile, or copying a smiling face, raised reported happiness a little; a subtler method, holding a pen between the teeth, gave less clear results.

The idea that the face can feed back into feelings, called the facial feedback hypothesis, goes back to Charles Darwin and William James. In a famous 1988 experiment, Fritz Strack and colleagues had people hold a pen in their teeth, which forces a smile, or between their lips, which prevents one, and those in the first group rated cartoons as funnier. In 2016, seventeen laboratories repeated that experiment exactly and found no effect. A 2019 review of 138 studies concluded that the effect is real but small and varies from study to study. The 2022 Many Smiles Collaboration, led by Nicholas Coles and designed jointly by supporters and sceptics of the idea, found that deliberate smiling could both strengthen and start feelings of happiness, while the pen method remained inconclusive.

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Your gut and brain communicate through nerves, hormones, immune signals and microbes, which is why stress and digestion can affect each other.

Scientists call this link the gut–brain axis. The gut has its own network of about 500 million nerve cells, the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the “second brain”, which can run digestion largely by itself. It is connected to the brain mainly through the vagus nerve, a long nerve running from the brainstem down to the abdomen, and most of its fibres carry messages upwards, from the gut to the brain. More than 90 per cent of the body's serotonin, a chemical messenger, is found in the gut. Gut bacteria play a part too: in a 2004 Japanese study, mice raised entirely free of germs overreacted to stress. Stress can speed up or slow down the gut, one reason it often worsens irritable bowel syndrome, a common gut disorder. Most research on the microbes' role has been in animals, and human evidence is still limited.

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A placebo is a dummy treatment, such as a sugar pill. In pain studies, placebos can reduce the pain people report and also dampen activity in the brain areas that process pain, even though they contain no active drug.

The word placebo is Latin for “I shall please”. One of the first clues that the effect is physical came in 1978, when Jon Levine and colleagues studied patients recovering from wisdom tooth removal. They gave them a placebo and naloxone, a drug that blocks the effect of endorphins, the body's own painkilling chemicals. In patients who had responded to the placebo, naloxone increased the pain, which suggested that the placebo relief came from endorphins. In 2004 Tor Wager and colleagues used brain scans to show that a placebo painkiller reduced activity in pain-processing regions during a painful stimulus. Expectation works the other way too: in the nocebo effect, from the Latin for “I shall harm”, expecting harm makes symptoms worse. None of this means the pain was imaginary, or that placebos can replace effective treatment.

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