This rewiring has a deeply personal impact on Banks. In Arrival we see Banks’s brain getting rewired to an absurd extreme. Sure, this happens especially in bilingual speakers switching between languages. If you learn a new language, your brain gets rewired, we are told.
Arrival linguist review movie#
The movie takes this idea and runs with it. It seems that words can prime parts of the brain to work better. For example, in Russian there are two words for different shades of blue, and Russian speakers are faster at discriminating between the shades than are English speakers ( PNAS, doi.org/bms49k). The theory has been controversial, but there is now some support for it. In the 1940s, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf proposed that the structure of a language determines, or at least influences, how we perceive and experience the world. This is our introduction to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a language shapes the way we think. “They use non-linear orthography,” says Banks. Chinese speakers tend to think of time running from top to bottom, as opposed to English speakers, who think of time running left to right.
This is not so odd – on Earth there are cultures that conceive of time differently to how we do it in English. Their written language is circular, and doesn’t seem progress from cause to effect – to the aliens, time does not have a direction. In attempting to communicate with the aliens, Adams’s character, Louise Banks, learns that they use non-linear orthography.
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