洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 4d ago

Fascinating paper: Your Morals Depend on Language (Costa et al., 2014). People make significantly more utilitarian choices in moral dilemmas when the dilemma is presented in a foreign language, apparently because a foreign language dulls emotional responses and shifts the balance toward deliberative thinking.

It matches my own experience. Thinking in a foreign language feels like rendering graphics without GPU acceleration: everything runs on raw CPU, slower and more laborious. After a full day of conversations in English or Japanese, I'm physically exhausted in a way that Korean never does to me. What I didn't quite register until reading this paper is that the “GPU” doing all that fast, effortless processing is largely the emotional system. When it steps back, you end up doing more of the reasoning yourself. Whether that's a feature or a bug probably depends on what you're deciding.

Show threadmarius

> that the “GPU” doing all that fast, effortless processing is largely the emotional system

@hongminhee I don't think so... to me it sounds more plausible that the neural pathways that are used for native language are a lot more used than the ones for foreign languages so they trigger with less energy expenditure.

Speaking your native language is basically "muscle memory", speaking in a different language is like navigating a maze: you have to plan your route, change direction often, sometimes backtrack all together, and as such is requiring a lot more brain power.

Caveat emptor: these are non scientific musings, I have no citation for anything. :D

Mar 18 at 12:46pmWeb
Show threadmarius4d ago
@hongminhee but then again, perhaps the reason why those neural pathways are so well tuned to work together for the native language is indeed that limbic system. :D
Show threadmarius4d ago

@hongminhee and perhaps something which is not entirely related to the discussion.

A check failure in the game Disco Elysium brings the "Limbic system" character to the forefront to give one of the most "emotional" renditions of a song I've heard in a game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn2x9CSSvhs

If this does not make sense to anyone, but has you intrigued, you should go and play the game, it's really good.

Disco Elysium: Karaoke Failure/Fail - Harry sings The Smallest Church In Saint-Saëns (Limbic System)

YouTube
Show threadmarius4d ago
@hongminhee for contrast the successful check song rendition (courtesy of the Reptilian Brain): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcsZsLLuUhQ
Disco Elysium: Karaoke Success - Harry sings The Smallest Church In Saint-Saëns (Reptilian Brain)

YouTube
Show thread洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 4d ago
@mariusor Oh, I actually tried Disco Elysium once but gave up partway through. There was just so much to read, and I hit it on a low-energy stretch. It's on my list to return to someday. That clip is a good reminder.
Show threadmarius4d ago

@hongminhee if you own the game, there were some updates where more of the dialogue is fully voiced in amazing fashion.

The only pet peeve I've had with the voicing was that they didn't coach the American English speakers how to pronounce the French sounding names, assumedly in world they would have been able to do it right... :D

Show thread洪 民憙 (Hong Minhee) 4d ago
@mariusor That's a fair point, and your caveat at the end might actually reconcile the two: the pathways got so well-worn partly because the limbic system kept reinforcing them.