Lost In Words: How language distracts us

We've all seen them. People walking down the street apparently talking to themselves, oblivious to their surroundings, gesticulating and grimacing as they go. They may look mad, but they're simply on the phone: and though we can see them, they usually can't see us -- in their conscious minds they're somewhere else, lost in an imaginary space with their memories or impressions of the person they're talking to, though they may not even know where that person is. It's a stark and powerful demonstration of just how effective language is at isolating us from reality.   

It happens all the time of course. It's happening to you now. As you read these words you're no longer at your desk, in the tube, on the loo, or wherever else you may find yourself as you access social media. You're with me in your mind -- even though you may have never met me -- because there's something about my words that has attracted you. That's what language does -- it gives us another voice to listen to, someone else to share the burden of having to decide everything for ourselves, a chance to believe that perhaps they have the answer we're struggling to find.

Which means we live most of our lives in a meta space, dislocated from the physical world our body actually occupies. And that meta space can connect, through words, to the mental worlds of everyone we share a language with. That's a vast and seductive pool of knowledge and experience, a huge mental prothesis that immediately explains why we humans are so very different: just being able to talk connects us in ways that other animals cannot even dream of. Which makes it all the more extraordinary we don't seem to know how we are able to do it: the very reason I wrote my book... 

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