Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind

Let’s say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we’ve closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box?

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind – our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it’s different from what we know ourselves. We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven’t heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

This month’s bonus episode is about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we’ve been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant’s perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin’s classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.

Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 53 other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can discuss your favourite linguistically interesting fiction with other language nerds!

Here are links mentioned in this episode:

• Wikipedia entry for Theory of Mind
• Wikipedia entry for the Sally-Anne Theory of Mind test
• Various Theory of Mind tests you can do with children
• Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?
• Theory of Mind in ravens
• Theory of Mind in chimps
• Wikipedia entry for Dunbar’s number
• Evidentiality in Yolmo - Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality
• Definitions and Examples of Psychological Verbs
• xkcd Lucky 10,000 comic

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).