The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably … have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies, says Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

“Psychologists have even shown that ‘gendered languages’ imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory … and our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language….

“When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.”