Can learning a new language actually change the way you think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky at the University of California, San Diego explains that finding that out is no simple task, as one needs to know whether it’s the language that’s influencing cognition or the other way around – and how do cultural differences enter into the equation?

"One way to disentangle this is to do experiments that specifically test whether language can have a causal power. And the way you can do that is by changing the way people talk and seeing if that changes how they think. So, one way you do that is by teaching people a new way of talking. So, we might bring English speakers into the lab and teach them new metaphors or other folks might bring in English speakers and teach them a new distinction in the color space and so on. And when people have done that, they’ve shown that that changes the way people think. So, just changing how people talk has power to change how people think. We used to think that there’s talking and then there’s thinking and they’re kind of separate, but it turns out that we’re using language a whole lot inside our minds without even knowing it."