Caleb Everett Bücher

Carved into our past, woven into our present, numbers shape our perceptions of the world and of ourselves much more than we commonly think. Numbers and the Making of Us is a sweeping account of how numbers radically enhanced our species cognitive capabilities and sparked a revolution in human culture. Caleb Everett brings new insights in psychology, anthropology, primatology, linguistics, and other disciplines to bear in explaining the myriad human behaviors and modes of thought numbers have made possible, from enabling us to conceptualize time in new ways to facilitating the development of writing, agriculture, and other advances of civilization.

Exploring the vibrant tapestry of Manchester, this memoir offers a unique glimpse into suburban life through diary entries. It captures the essence of Northern culture, featuring the wisdom of older locals and the dynamic queer art scene, infused with humor and candid observations. The narrative blurs traditional storytelling, presenting a modern take on the diary format as it celebrates the complexities of identity and community. Through its vivid imagery and playful tone, it becomes a love letter to the everyday experiences that shape our lives.

Exploring breakthroughs in language and cognition research, Caleb Everett finds that fundamentals of human perception are culturally encoded by the words and sentences we use. The experience of time, space, color, odor, and taste is substantially influenced by language, so that basic interactions with the world vary greatly across peoples.

The claim that crosslinguistic disparities foster differences in nonlinguistic thought, often referred to as 'linguistic relativity', has for some time been the subject of intense debate. For much of that time the debate was not informed by much experimental work. Recently, however, there has been an explosion of research on linguistic relativity, carried out by numerous scholars interested in the interaction between language and nonlinguistic cognition. This book surveys the rapidly accruing research on this topic, much of it carried out in the last decade. Structured so as to be accessible to students and scholars in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, it first introduces crucial concepts in the study of language and cognition. It then explores the relevant experimentally oriented research, focusing independently on the evidence for relativistic effects in spatial orientation, temporal perception, number recognition, color discrimination, object/substance categorization, gender construal, as well as other facets of cognition. This is the only book to extensively survey the recent work on linguistic relativity, and should serve as a critical resource for those concerned with the topic.