Panos Athanasopoulos’ research programmes seek to understand how people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds communicate and perceive the world around them, focusing on how we see colours and objects, and how we experience motion and time. It is often said that language is our species-defining characteristic, what makes us human. At the same time, it is intuitive to think that as humans our understanding and interpretation of reality and the world is fundamentally the same, regardless of the language we speak. But in the early 20th century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed the very opposite: We do not all think the same, but rather we think along the lines laid out by our native language. If each language presents its own version of reality, its own perspective on the world, how are we ever going to understand human nature and get to the one true core of it?

Panos Athanasopoulos is the Director of the Perception and Learning Laboratory (PERLL) at Lancaster University, where he holds a Chair in Applied Linguistics. His research programmes seek to understand how people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds communicate and perceive the world around them, focusing on how we see colours and objects, and how we experience motion and time.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx