The Method of Loci, or ‘Mind Palace’—and the Gruesome Story Behind It
The Mind Palace is simple—and fun too.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.
Before autocues, slides, and even paper, an orator had to be able to stand before an audience and deliver an elaborate speech from memory. The Romans accorded such importance to memorisation that memoria became one of the five canons of rhetoric, alongside invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.
Fortunately, they had a simple and effective technique for remembering almost anything in sequence. More than two thousand years later, the same technique is still used by actors, public speakers, memory champions—and anyone who would rather connect with an audience than read out a script.
Simonides of Ceos and the Banqueting Hall
Although mnemonic devices far predate the written word, both Cicero and Quintilian name Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE) as the first teacher of an art of memory.
Simonides is perhaps best known for composing the epitaph for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae:
Go tell the Spartans, passerby That here, by Spartan law, we lie.
According to Plutarch, Simonides once dismissed the northern Thessalians as ‘too ignorant’ to be moved by poetry. But after the assassination of the tyrant Hipparchus in Athens, he had to swallow his words and work for the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.
One day, at a banquet, Simonides sang a lyric poem in honour of Scopas. But the poem contained so many references to the gods Castor and Pollux (the Dioskouroi, or Gemini) that Scopas told Simonides that he would only pay him half the agreed fee, adding, “You can go and claim the other half from Castor and Pollux.”
A little later, Simonides was called out of the banqueting hall to meet two young men who had just arrived and were asking for him. When he went out, he saw no one, but as he turned around the banqueting hall collapsed, killing Scopas and everyone within it.
Their bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. But because Simonides remembered everyone’s position around the table, he was able to identify their remains. This gruesome experience led him to develop a system of mnemonics based on images and places called the method of loci.
The Method of Loci, or Mind Palace
The method of loci, also called the memory palace or ‘mind palace’ (as popularised by Sherlock Holmes), involves placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a defined point along an imaginary route.
First, choose a very familiar environment, for example, your house or garden or favourite walk. This is your backdrop: it is fixed, and you can reuse it for talk after talk.
Within this setting, there will be a number of distinct locations, or loci, such as your front door, the doormat, the entrance hall, the stairway, your study to the left and the snug to the right… You do not have to have a mansion with many rooms, like Jesus’ father. Instead, you can think of the snug as, say, three separate loci: the fireplace, the sofa, and the alcove. But you must always make the same journey through your memory palace and come to the loci in the same sequence.
Then, in each locus, place a mnemonic image that represents the thing to be remembered at that point in your talk, for example, a goose, to trigger your story about visiting a goose farm in Extremadura. The more striking the image, the easier it will be to remember. If your next point is about inflation, don’t picture a graph or a number: picture an enormous loaf of bread swelling until it bursts through your kitchen ceiling.
Once you’ve furnished your memory palace, just keep on running through it until you’ve memorised your talk.
The method works because it turns an abstract sequence into a journey through familiar space. Instead of trying to remember one thought after another, you simply walk through your house, garden, or favourite street and ‘see’ each thought waiting for you in its appointed place.
Because the images represent ideas rather than sentences, the method encourages you to speak rather than recite. You remember the structure and substance of your speech while remaining free to tailor your words to the moment.
Try it out on something small, and see how well it works.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.
Three is an oddly persuasive number. If I tell you that I have one reason for believing something, you may think I’m impressionable. If I have two reasons, you may suspect that I couldn’t think of a third. But if I tell you, ‘Here are my three reasons,’ the argument feels intelligent and complete.
The same pattern crops up everywhere. Genies grant three wishes, the newborn Jesus was visited by three magi, and Goldilocks had to contend with three bears. Not one, nor two, nor four, but exactly three.
For all D’Artagnan’s heroism, Alexandre Dumas did not entitle his novel The Four Musketeers. If asked, ‘How many ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge?’ most people will answer, ‘Three’—completely overlooking the fourth ghost, that of Scrooge’s partner, Jacob Marley.
Trilogies and trinities are a lot more common, and popular, than tetralogies and quaternities (I had to check this word even exists).
The Rule of Three in Rhetoric
Writers and speakers have long understood the peculiar power of three. In rhetoric, three parallel words, clauses, or lines make up a tricolon, a particularly effective type of isocolon, or parallel construction.
Some of the most memorable lines in history are tricolons:
I came, I saw, I conquered. —Julius Caesar upon crossing the Rubicon
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. —Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. —The United States Declaration of Independence
Similar to tricolon is hendiatris, which involves the juxtaposition of three words to express a single idea or total concept, for example, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (the national motto of France) and ‘wine, women, and song’ (or, nowadays, ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’).
Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister is remembered as Blood, Sweat, and Tears, even though he said, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ As prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair did not make his top priority ‘education’ or even ‘education, education’, but ‘education, education, education’.
When asked a question, Joe Biden often responded by making just two points (“Number 1… Number 2…”), leaving everyone wondering what happened to Number 3.
Number 3 does something that Number 2 cannot: establish a pattern. Once the first two beats have created an expectation, the third fulfils it, giving a tricolon both rhythm and a sense of completion.
Sometimes the third element is also the longest or strongest of the three, creating a rising effect traditionally called a tricolon crescens.
Three is a Pattern
Why is three so much more engaging, satisfying, and memorable than one or two or four? ‘Here are my three reasons.’ ‘I’ll give you three examples.’ ‘These are the three lessons I learnt.’
One is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Four is one too many—to the extent that if you must have four, it may be better to present them as two linked pairs, and then maybe add a third pair.
Three, however, is the smallest number required to create a pattern and rhythm.
Triple goddesses or deities in groups of three are common in world myth: the Holy Trinity, the Tridevi, Hecate, Artemis, the Fates, the Furies, the Graces, the Graeae, the Morrígan, the Norns… and, I believe, originally stood for fate and the passage of time—the past, the present, and the future.
In Greek myth, when Demeter discovered that her daughter Persephone had been kidnapped by her brother Hades, she abandoned her divine duties and wandered from city to city, bringing by her absence a blight onto the land. Arriving in Eleusis in Attica, she took the form of a crone by the name of Doso and fell upon the good King Celeus for sanctuary.
Persephone, Demeter, and Doso may be regarded as the three aspects of a triple goddess—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—that stand for the phases of the moon and the stages of life.
No wonder, then, that the number three is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche.
Alexander the Great before Diogenes the Cynic: power to truth.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.
Free speech is not merely a political right, but a condition of freedom of thought—and of becoming fully human. Read what happens to the mind when it is denied.
Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Greek means something like ‘free speech’ or ‘full expression’. In his ethical treatise, the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) presents parrhesia as a trait of the ‘great-souled’ man, or megalopsychos.
The Greeks did not conceive of parrhesia as a right or privilege, but as a virtue or perfection, as well as a moral and social obligation. When Alexander the Great approached Diogenes in Athens and asked whether there was anything he might do for him, Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, stand out of my sunlight.’
Living in a much more oral society, and having but one word, logos, for both speech and reason, the Greeks understood the close connexion between freedom of speech and freedom of thought.
The connexion runs deeper than might first appear. Speech is not merely the expression of existing thoughts. It is also one of the principal means by which thoughts are formed in the first place. By putting an idea into words, we give it shape and solidity; by submitting it to public scrutiny, we expose it to verification and contradiction; and by defending, modifying, or abandoning it, we teach ourselves what we think. Rhetoric, at its best, is not merely the art of persuading other people, but part of the process by which we reason with them, and with ourselves—hence the tradition of sometimes writing two speeches, one in favour of a position, and the other against.
In Athens, parrhesia underpinned the democracy. For a democracy to flourish, or even merit the name, citizens must be free, able, and willing to speak their mind. Free speech not only enables democracy, but also legitimises its laws and protects it from aspiring tyrants. Undermine free speech, and you undermine democracy—which is why free speech is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Undermine free speech, and you undermine human dignity, which is why free speech is enshrined in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
‘Free speech’ is something of a misnomer. It includes not only speech but also forms of expression, such as writing a book, drawing a cartoon, or burning a flag. Taking inspiration from the French libre expression, we might more accurately and comprehensively refer to ‘free speech’ as ‘freedom of expression’.
Today, many people, especially younger people, believe that freedom of expression can conflict with minority rights, and ought to be curbed to promote a more inclusive society. Is this argument worth entertaining?
The Freedom to Think
Let’s begin by looking more closely at the benefits of free speech. Often, it is by articulating it to others that we work out our position on a particular issue. And in arriving at our opinion, it helps if we are being encouraged, assisted, and challenged—which is why tutorials and a common table are (or ought to be) an important part of university life.
The same principle operates on the scale of entire societies. Intellectual cultures become sophisticated not simply by accumulating information, but by permitting disagreement. An argument produces a counterargument, the counterargument exposes a weakness, and the original argument either collapses or becomes stronger and more subtle. Socrates made a method of this dialectical process, asking awkward questions in gymnasia and marketplaces until received but misguided ideas about courage, justice, and virtue began to unravel.
Even if an opinion is untrue, it may still serve to clarify or reinforce the truth. Moreover, many misguided opinions contain aspects of the truth. Plato himself doubted his Theory of Forms, which nonetheless remains of immense value. Rousseau, who pushed back against the Enlightenment, may have been wrong to idealise the state of nature, but was right to point out that progress also has downsides. Even when securely established, a living truth risks stultifying into a dead dogma if it is not regularly challenged.
This is one reason censorship can have consequences far beyond the particular opinions it suppresses. When certain things cannot safely be said, people learn to avoid not only certain statements, but also certain questions, associations, and lines of enquiry, corrupting the processes that make complex, sophisticated thought possible. That would be why Nazi ideology could take off without ever being grounded, and why Soviet art criticism under Stalin was seldom very enlightening.
Censorship, in other words, does not merely prevent us from saying what we think. In time, it can prevent us from thinking what we might otherwise have thought. We become, as it were, lame human beings, something less than fully human.
Censorship, No-Platforming, and Cancel Culture
So far, we have been talking about the kind of constructive, co-operative discourse that graces academia. But are resentful bigots also entitled to freedom of expression? Or to put it more neutrally, do the intolerant also warrant tolerance?
If bigots were unable to air their opinions, or simply denied a platform, these and they would go unchallenged. Feeling vindicated and persecuted, the bigots would recast themselves as tellers of uncomfortable truths, and, in time, recruit followers. Feeling unheard and unrepresented, this growing mass may resort to violence and destruction, including sabotage of the political system.
Censoring bigots also risks giving their opinions greater appeal and publicity. Prosecuting David Irving for Holocaust denial put him onto the front pages, and turned him from obscure and discredited historian into a free speech martyr. Banning The Satanic Verses and issuing a fatwa to kill the book’s author and publishers turned the book into a cultural icon.
Conversely, those who engage in ‘cancel culture’ are likely to invite resentment and, in so doing, undermine their cause—to say nothing of the extra-judicial and often disproportionate damage done to the reputations and careers of their targets. In such a climate of fear, self-censorship, even by well-meaning academics and liberals, makes it difficult to calmly and rationally discuss sensitive topics such as immigration and transgender rights.
And here the distinction between free speech and free thought begins to break down. If an academic has an idea but dare not voice it, the idea cannot be tested against the opinions and objections of colleagues. If a student has a doubt but dare not express it, the doubt remains inchoate. If an entire culture learns to avoid certain questions, it may eventually lose not only the answers but even the questions themselves. This is, of course, what some people would like. But to forbid a question is to forbid whatever truths might lie around and beyond it.
Policing Free Speech
Of course, we do already police free speech. In Schenck v. United States (1919), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously argued that free speech does not extend to falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre. John Stuart Mill (d. 1873) drew the line at incitement to physical violence.
But beyond this (and a few other cases such as libel, threats, and false advertising), where might we redraw the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable? Socrates, Christ, and Giordano Bruno all lost their lives expressing what came to be regarded as seminal ideas.
Once we had redrawn the line, would the temptation not be to keep redrawing it? The Spanish Inquisition began as one thing and slid into quite another. And it mattered little if some of the inquisitors were well-intentioned.
There is a deeper difficulty. The people empowered to decide which opinions are too dangerous, offensive, or mistaken to be expressed must themselves hold opinions, and their opinions are no more guaranteed to be correct than anybody else’s. To censor an opinion is therefore not to remove judgement from public discourse, but to privilege one judgement over another—and, in many cases, to protect it from the very criticism that might correct it.
Today, the public square has moved online, and it is unaccountable tech giants, rather than the church and state, that are being expected to police free speech—when they might simply begin by ensuring that each individual user is genuine and accountable.
As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant. The best response to a bad opinion is not censorship, but good argument and rhetoric. And yes, this might sometimes include mockery and derision and causing offence—although we should not go out of our way to cause offence, as with ‘hate speech’. Our focus ought to be on the facts, and not on the characteristics (although maybe the character) of our opponent.
This brings us back to parrhesia. To the Greeks, speaking freely required more than permission. It required courage: the willingness to say what one believed to be true despite the possibility of ridicule, retribution, or mere umbrage. Socrates exercised that freedom in the face of death; Diogenes before a bloodthirsty king.
In a society in which suffering is medicalised, there is a tendency to conflate psychological offence with physical violence, with the implication that retaliatory physical violence might be justified. But ‘free speech’ includes the right not to listen. Taking offence, as the Stoics insisted, is always a choice. Offence exists not in the insult but in our reaction to it, and our reactions are completely within our control. It is unreasonable to expect a boor to be anything but a boor; if we take offence at his bad behaviour, we have only ourself to blame.
Diogenes called parrhesia the most beautiful thing in the world because freedom of speech is more than the freedom to make a noise. It is the freedom to question, to contradict, to make mistakes, to change our minds, and to find out who we are and who we might be. Without it, rhetoric falls into propaganda, truth into dogma, and thought itself is strangled.
Does Language Merely Express Our Thoughts—or Does It Help to Create Them?
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 22 August 2026.
Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Punting in Oxford on a late summer evening. Can you hear it?
Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits, such as philosophy, art, and science, that define us as human beings.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ Monks, too, are the same.
If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought, as claimed by Sapir and Whorf?
Does Language Determine Thought?
Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over seven thousand languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, quite successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.
How Does Language Interact with Thought?
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship, sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.
Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialised jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime… This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.
More than a century before Sapir and Whorf, Humboldt (Wilhelm, not Alexander) arrived at a similar insight: every language embodies a particular Weltansicht, or view of the world. Language is not simply a system of labels for an already divided reality, but a way of dividing and organising reality.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).
Built-in Bias and Prejudice
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that—or, at least, subconsciously.
Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasise the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.
Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. Unlike Spanish and Italian, French has lost many of the spoken distinctions between its verb endings, making the personal pronoun necessary: je parle, tu parles, il parle… all sound essentially the same. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon allez, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. Because je is obligatory, French calls for the additional moi to place special emphasis on the speaker. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasise or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.
In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasises modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of Jakobson, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Language may not prevent us from thinking certain thoughts, but it may make those thoughts more unlikely, and compel us, every time we speak, to notice certain features of the world.
In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [der Tod, la mort, la muerte] or victory [der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria] as a man—though all artists, or at least all Western artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.
It is often said that, by de-emphasising them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If a hundred women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, ‘they have arrived’.
Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it. It’s quite a thought: many of the words in our mouths are thousands of years old, or built from shorter words that are. They are by far the oldest thing about us.
Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.
But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use sixteen words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.
Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.
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By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 23 August 2026.
It can come as a surprise to many people in the UK and US that speaking more than one language is the norm rather than the exception. In prehistoric times, most people belonged to small linguistic communities, and had to speak several languages to trade with, and marry into, neighbouring communities.
Still today, remaining populations of hunter-gatherers are almost all multilingual. Papua New Guinea, a country smaller than Spain, counts some 850 languages, or about one language per 10,000 inhabitants. In countries such as India, Malaysia, and South Africa, most people are bilingual or better. Even in the world at large, polyglots outnumber monoglots. And with the advent of the internet, contact with foreign languages has become increasingly frequent, even for the most linguistically isolated of monoglots.
In sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth I could speak at least nine languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish. A few days after her death in 1603, the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli wrote back to his Doge and Senate:
She possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her, English, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, for that part of her possessions where they are still savage [lo scozzese per quella parte de’ suoi possessi dove sono ancora selvaggi], and Irish. All of them are so different, that it is impossible for those who speak the one to understand any of the others. Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian extremely well.
No wonder the ‘Virgin Queen’ didn’t want to get married.
Cognitive and Economic Benefits
To speak a language competently implies knowledge of the culture associated with the language. Multilingualism is closely linked to multiculturalism, and, historically, both came under attack with the rise of the nation state. In the aftermath of the 2016 Brexit referendum, the British Prime Minister Theresa May stated: ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’—as though that were somehow deviant or problematic. Human beings, and their tongues, are far older than any nation state.
Still today, some people believe that teaching a child more than one language can impair the child’s linguistic and cognitive development. But what’s the evidence? According to several studies, people who learn another language do significantly better on standardised tests. Language management calls upon executive functions such as attention control, cognitive inhibition, and working memory, and it appears that bi- and multilingual people are better at observing, multitasking, and problem solving. They also have a larger working memory, including for tasks that do not involve language.
Being multilingual can also improve judgement. According to one study, people who think through a moral dilemma in a foreign language come to much more rational, or utilitarian, conclusions—perhaps because certain words lose some of their emotional weight, or because the problem is seen from a different cultural perspective or processed through different neural channels. So, if you have a second language, you can use it, like a good friend, to check yourself.
The cognitive benefits of bilingualism, disputed though they are, also extend to health. A study of hospital records in Toronto, Canada, found that bilingual people were diagnosed with dementia on average three to four years later than their monolingual counterparts from a similar educational and occupational background. Another study in Northern Italy looking at people at the same stage of Alzheimer’s disease found that the bilingual people were on average five years older, and had stronger connections between the brain areas involved in executive function. Over in India, a study of 600 stroke survivors found that the bilingual ones had a much better outcome. Specifically, 40.5% of the bilingual patients had normal cognition compared to just 19.6% of the monolingual ones. Of course, multilingualism is entangled with education, occupation, and other confounding factors, but the direction of the effect is difficult to doubt.
And then there are the undisputed economic benefits. High-level bilingualism has been linked to higher income, even after controlling for confounding factors such as educational attainment and parental socio-economic status. Over the course of a forty-year career, this additional income might add up to a pension fund. Of course, the overall economic impact of multilingualism is much greater than the sum of the higher earnings of multilingual speakers. Switzerland’s multilingual heritage has been estimated to contribute as much as 10% of GDP, whereas lack of language skills in the UK could be costing the British economy around 3.5% of GDP in lost output.
Personal, Social, and Cultural Benefits
Being bilingual may have important cognitive and economic benefits, but it is usually the personal, social, and cultural benefits that multilingual people are keenest to emphasise.
Many bilingual people feel that the way they are, and the way they see the world—and even the way they laugh and love—changes according to the language that they are speaking. In the 1960s, Susan Ervin-Tripp asked Japanese-English bilingual women to finish sentences in each language, and found that the women came up with very different endings depending on whether they were speaking English or Japanese. For example, they completed ‘Real friends should…’ with ‘…help each other’ in Japanese, but ‘…be frank’ in English. ‘Who’s your favourite writer?’ ‘What do you want to eat for dinner?’ ‘Shall we break all the rules?’ Ask a question in one language, and you get one answer; ask the same question in another language, and you might get a different one. ‘To have another language,’ said Charlemagne, ‘is to have another soul.’
Translation dictionaries seem to assume that languages are made up of corresponding words, but even when that is more or less the case, the equivalencies have different connotations. Compared to ‘I like you’ in English, je t’aime in French is a far more serious proposition. George Carlin once joked that ‘meow’ means ‘woof’ in cat—but, of course, it doesn’t. Owing to a certain je ne sais quoi, some things are more readily expressed in one language than in another. By code-switching, multilingual speakers can increase their range of expression and perhaps even their range of thought. In the words of Wittgenstein: ‘A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’
Certain languages are better suited to certain purposes, for example, English is great for science and technology, French is better for cooking and complaining, and Latin is best for praying and formal rites of passage. Multilingual people are free to pick and choose, maybe along the lines of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor: ‘I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.’ Charles V did not get on with the German lords and preferred to live in Spain, sitting on the newly created Spanish throne by right of his incarcerated mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca)—things I know because I speak Spanish. And after a few glasses of fino, I’m almost fluent.
The more languages we learn, the easier it becomes to learn languages. But learning a language also strengthens our first language. For instance, one study found that Spanish immersion significantly improved children’s native English vocabulary. More broadly, learning a language casts light upon our first language and language in general, increasing our appreciation of language and ability to communicate. ‘You speak English beautifully,’ wrote Robert Aickman in The Wine-Dark Sea (1966), ‘which means you can’t be English.’
Just before writing this article, I asked my social media followers the following question: ‘If you are bi- or multilingual, what do you most value about that fact?’
And here are some of their responses:
The freedom to access different cultures plus the possibility to read many authors in original version!
Being fluent in a couple of other languages has given me insight into other ways of seeing the world. That helps empathy, and openness.
I appreciate the cognitive advantages being multilingual has offered. Also the connections with culture, history, and the knowledge acquired.
Language is knowledge. Always useful to be a little less ignorant.
It feels as if I can switch into two different modes and think from different perspectives.
I’m more outgoing in one language than another. It’s not just that I speak differently—I feel like a slightly different person.
My voice, gestures, and even sense of humour change when I switch languages.
Difficult or intimate things can be easier to say in my second language. There’s a little more distance between the words and me.
Being more tolerant—new language = new culture, new and different perspectives/access to more information.
That I can talk wine with twice as many ppl.
It gives me patience and understanding for those who want to articulate, but have difficulty conveying what they really mean.
The fact that I can fully understand and communicate in another language (Afrikaans) makes me feel good.
It gave me an understanding that ‘thoughts’ don’t come into my head in a language at all. Thoughts come as ‘ideas’. Only when I have to verbalise my ideas, I have to use a language.
I’m bilingual in India. There’s nothing special about it here. Know a ton of people who are trilingual. In India, multilingualism starts becoming impressive if the language count’s above like five or something.
Obviously, being able to speak about people in elevators without them knowing what’s said. 😉
Having a variety of options when cussing.
Every language on this earth has its own rules and conventions, its own sounds and rhythms, its own beauty and poetry, its own history and philosophy. Every language on this earth is another way of being human, another way of being alive.
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