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Did you know babies cry with their mother’s accent? Neat tidbit, but it has important implications. It means that babies hear and absorb language before they emerge from the womb. Here’s another neat fact: languages that lack a future tense give native speakers huge advantages. For more on those, read the full article. Here’s another neat tidbit in full:

Thinking in a Foreign Language Forces You to Make Better Decisions
Most of us don’t think entirely in words. Thoughts tend to be a flurry of notions, images, and ideas that crackle their way across our synapses. For this reason, it’s easy for our inner monologues to slip into irrational concepts, stereotypes, and MacGyver quotes (just us?). But University of Chicago researchers have found a simple antidote: If you’re not sure if bias may be coloring an important decision you have to make — say you can’t decide between paying your rent this month or buying every single engine on Train Simulator — making the most logical choice is easy. Just try thinking about it in a foreign language.

In a series of studies, the researchers tested a bunch of English speakers who knew Japanese as a second language. They gave the participants an ethical puzzle: Say there was a disease that would kill 600,000 lives. Is it better to develop an antidote that would save a guaranteed 200,000 lives, or one that had a 1/3 chance of saving everybody but a 2/3 chance of doing nothing? Most people chose the first option — there’s less risk involved.

But then they were asked another question: Was it better to develop an antidote that would kill a guaranteed 400,000 people, or one that had a 2/3 chance of killing everyone but a 1/3 chance of killing nobody? In this case, most people chose the only logical option: Kill the Batman.

Wait, no — they chose to save everybody.

If you stop and really think about it, those were both the exact same question. The difference was in the way they were framed — instinctively, we’re less inclined to take risks when it comes to saving people than when it comes to killing people. Emotion and instinct get in the way of thinking about the question rationally.

But then the researchers gave the problem a second time — in Japanese. The result? The number of people who went for the “safe option” dropped to around 40 percent. Just because this time they had to think about it in a foreign language.

What researchers think is happening here is that translating your thought process into a second language basically forces you to rely on cold, analytical cognition rather than whiny, emotional cogitation. Well, either that, or there’s some kind of code hidden in the Japanese language that nixes all emotional response. Probably not, but hey — it would explain the robots.

Full story at Cracked.

More cool facts about your brain.

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