If you’re reading this, you speak (or can understand) English. So 17 or 23, that doesn’t seem to be possible without having words in your language.” “It’s having number words themselves that allow us to think exact large quantities. “The way that your language expresses numbers influences how you think about them,” says Majid. And as a result, they don’t perform well in arithmetic experiments compared to, say, speakers of languages like English, with a vocabulary that encapsulates large cardinal numbers-20, 50, 100. They count by approximation-what scientists call a “one-two-many” system. Take, for example, the Pirahã, an indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon. “We can’t take for granted that what happens in English is representative of the world,” she says. In a study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science, Asifa Majid, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford, has outlined the deficit in understanding that has stemmed from ignoring languages other than English. Generalizations we make about the mind might, in fact, be wrong.

Now, a growing body of work suggests that there are subtle cognitive differences between populations who speak different languages-differences in areas like perception, memory, mathematics, and decision-making.

Yet their conclusions have been branded as universal. For decades, studies into how the mind works have been carried out primarily by English-speaking scientists on English-speaking participants. The world of brain research has a secret flaw.

Steven universe head shapes