One thing I have learned from reading authors like Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez over the last year is the power of language to shape our world view. Both authors believe that the words we use directly affect the way we see the world, and that the current evolution of our language, away from specialized and specific words for natural occurrences and towards modernization and technology, has moved us further from nature at the very time we need to be deepening those connections. Macfarlane’s Lost Words and Lopez’s (along with Debra Gwartney’s) Home Ground: A guide to the American Landscape are wonderful examples of how these authors are pushing back.

The former is ostensibly an oversized children’s book, but I think more accurately should be called a book of poetry. Each page features a word that was recently dropped from a children’s dictionary that compiles the most common words used by children. Words recently lost from the dictionary include oak, heron, and kingfisher, while those added are along the lines of blogger, youtube and cell phone. Macfarlane describes the book as a spell book, where each of the poems, along with gorgeous illustrations by Jackie Morris, is meant to summon the word within

Lopez’s “Home Ground” is very different but equally satisfying. Its is a glossary of landscape terms written with the help of a couple dozen different contributors. Each entry uses artistic yet precise prose to describe a word and often references uses in other works of literature. It is the perfect night stand book and I sometimes like to read an entry or two before bed.

The “language changes the way you think” argument is nice from a philosophical standpoint but what really got me thinking about the neurological underpinnings was an old episode of Radio Lab which explores language. One of the segments features a study on a lab rats’ ability to use a find food. The basic setup is that the rat is in an enclosure where there are 4 walls, and there’s food in the corner left of the blue wall. The rat should be able to find the food based on context clues right away but instead guesses right only about 50% of the time. It seems the rats are unable to put together the logic of “left of” and “the blue wall”.

Rats are one thing but where it gets really interesting is that this experiment has been replicated on young children and they also fail the test! Kids don’t reliably pass until the age of 5 or 6 which is when they are developing the language skills necessary to say and use phrases like “left of the blue wall.” The implication is that that the ability to express something in language fundamentally changes the wiring of the brain.

We need to be careful here. Correlation is not causation and I have not reviewed the studies myself, but this does all make me wonder if Macfarlane and Lopez might really be onto something.