Talk about serendipity. Today, I've been reminiscing about a long-dead podcast I used to participate in where my good friend Ryan and I would wax endlessly about, well, everything and nothing, honestly. Most of the time we spent arguing back and forth about what was real. Having those flashbacks, made me remember I had a queue of articles about experience and the brain that I have been meaning to post about.

While reading through these articles again, I am watching a television drama called Taboo. Tom Hardy’s character James Keziah Delaney, the protagonist of the story, is fighting the East India Company and the Americans for a tract of land in the Nootka Sound area (reasonably close to the area of Canada that I grew up in and a place I spent a lot of time in visiting relatives, for those keeping score). That's when I read this mind-expanding description of how the Nootka language shapes their perception of reality:

Some languages are structured around quite different basic word-categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. … The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see.

What a strange series of coincidences.