Some people can tell what direction they're facing by sensing the earth's magnetic field.

The Gurindji people of Australia use cardinal directions to describe position, like "It's in my east hand." That requires a constant sense of geographical orientation — what direction are you facing at any given time. It turns out that human brains actually sense the earth's magnetic field and react to changes in ambient magnetic fields. "We are all, in a sense, compasses." While most people are completely oblivious to this, researchers have found that Gurindji people can reliably detect changes in magnetic fields — and perhaps use that sense to tell what direction they're facing.

In this essay for Aeon, James McElvenny raises the question: how can we understand how language influences experience?

We start with a feeling, an ineffable je ne sais quoi, that our language shapes our world. But to assess the truth of this claim, the scientist wants a hypothesis – a rigorous, experimentally testable statement of precisely how language shapes our world. Quasi-mystical meditations on my life in language are not the stuff of modern scientific journals. But any properly formulated hypothesis will necessarily be reductive and deflationary – devising empirical tests of the supposed differences in our worldviews inevitably means transforming our innermost feelings into detached, foreign objects that we can observe and analyse from the outside. Such tests can arguably never capture the totality and primordiality of the original feeling.