The west wants its data dressed up, ironed out, reduced to simplistic and fantastically other worlds where impossibilities are illustrated in snappy, easy-to-read aphorisms, second generation Oliver Sacks seeking out yonder kindles. In Sunday's NY Times pop-psych article called "Does your language shape how you think?" Guy Deutscher tries to convince the audience through blind leads as loaded as "SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything" that language is as unrestricted as a fish that can swim every drop of the ocean. He offers innovative thinker Benjamin Lee Whorf as a sacrifice, then singles out an aboriginal language that obsessively locates directions (their cardinal-ness, whether they ever operate effectively, is clearly up for debate, since its effectiveness is illustrated merely by a mythistory only verifiable through its repetition). Deutscher's article is so positivist about language, we can be sure he's simplifying into incredulity. While he offers up Whorf for beheading, he neglects Sapir, Casirrer, Boas and many other descendants of lingual studies who explore and comprehend the evolutionary aspects of individual languages, who would have a field day with Deutscher's lazy claims. The article and its messy appropriations re-ignores vast data that contours and counters his bizarre 19th century approach. Languages clearly don't forbid thoughts, but they control measurements and values (gender is simply one of MANY layers of identity); the abilities of nouns to code themselves, travel, transform, become verbs (or vice versa) is at the core of how the brain really operates and clearly, we have many value systems in play across the spectrum of language (even the definition of language is not what we began with in 1900), and the war of domination among humans is as about language as it is about race, gender, class, border. More proof news can neither examine the past nor the present until it examines how it constructs its world while it falsely perceives it is reconstructing.

Above, the 4-H pledge

Did language evolve as it moved eastward and devolve as it moved westward? Final battlefield as well as the first time the fronts meet: the 'Americas.'

Bioshock's Rapture locale, soon Columbia.

An illustration and caption from A Model of Visual Motion Processing in Area MT of Primates, Sejnowski and Nowlan's remarkable paper describing basic neural organization across areas of the brain. From Gazzaniga's masterful, first The Cognitive Neurosciences

The Senoi taught children through a form of dream therapy to navigate the edge of their fears and likewise navigate their fears in the outer world. Inception requires this fear to navigate its narrative, a  curtain falling endlessly on western myths: does the dreamstate reveal our failure to conceive a life beyond fears?

"The simplest anxiety or terror dream I found among the Senoi was the falling dream. When the Senoi child reports a falling dream, the adult answers with enthusiasm, "That is a wonderful dream, one of the best dreams a man can have. Where did you fall to, and what did you discover?" He makes the same comment when the child reports a climbing, travelling, flying or soaring dream. The child at first answers, as he would in our society, that it did not seem so wonderful, and that he was so fightened that he awoke before he had fallen anywhere.

"That was a mistake," answers the adult authority. "Everything you do in a dream has a purpose, beyond your understanding while you are asleep. You must relax and enjoy yourself when you fall in a dream. Falling is the quickest way to get in contact with the powers of the spirit world, the powers laid open to you through your dreams. Soon, when you have a falling dream, you will remember what I am saying and you will feel that you are travelling to the source of the power which has caused you to fall."

"The falling spirits love you. They are attracting you to their land, and you have but to relax and remain asleep in order to come to grips with them. When you meet them, you may be frightened of their terrific power, but go on. When you think you are dying in a dream, you are only receiving the powers of the other world, your own spiritual power, which has been turned against you and which now wishes to become one with you if you will accept it."