If you had four pictures of a person at different ages, how would you lay them out in chronological order? As an English speaker, you would almost certainly put childhood scenes on the left and pictures from old age on the right. But if you spoke another language, you might arrange the photos in a column or even from east to west.
Almost every culture in the world uses space to think about time, but the visualizations vary widely. A November paper in Psychological Science describes the first culture known to tie time’s march to the cardinal directions.
The Pompuraawan, a remote tribe in Australia, do not have terms for spatial relationships such as “left” or “in front of.” Instead they use the directions as descriptors, such as “my south arm.” They think of time the same way, the new study found. When asked to arrange four pictures showing a person’s life, Pompuraawans laid the photos in a line from east to west.
Three main factors affect how people imagine time, says Stanford University psychologist Lera Boroditsky, an author of the study. One influence is how the culture thinks spatially; for instance, the Pompuraawans often gesture to the sun to indicate the time of day, Boroditsky says.
The layout of the written word also plays a role. Israelis tend to think of time as flowing from right to left, Boroditsky concluded in a study last year—the same direction Hebrew is written.
Last, a language’s metaphors can have an effect. Mandarin Chinese associates “up” with the past and “down” with the future. And research shows Mandarin speakers often put photos in a column with the earliest at the top.
Visualizing the passage of time may be a human universal, but these studies show just how differently that can play out. Whereas we look forward to the future, the Pompuraawans say that the west is yet to come.
This article was originally published with the title Which Way Is the Future?.
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10 Comments
Add CommentThe future is not what it used to be...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVerlaine
Sorry - I meant Paul Valery
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe grounds for mis-understanding seem countless. The more complex the subject the more he say/we said. When you go to another country be careful who you ask directions from you could end up where you started from.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWether you speaking English or Mandrain the arrow of time IS flows from your starting point no matter which direction you travel.
While our perception of time is of the present moving from past to future, the physical reality is that the changing configuration of what exists, ie, is present, turns the future into the past. The earth doesn't travel the fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth rotates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe irony is that while we relate time to our own motion through space, this creates a rigidly deterministic paradigm, as we cannot change the past, or affect the future. On the other hand, if we understand that we are fully integrated in our context, then our own actions are part of the overall input. We affect our situation, as it affects us.
There is no need for multiworlds to explain probabilities, as it is the collapse of probabilities into events which creates the effect of the passage of time.
While I can't read the rest of the article due to the pay wall, I'm curious about how this relates to space-time synesthesia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248589.stm
My entry, 'The chip in the brain', to the current FQXi essay contest addresses this question, the 'minion' structure determining both the sense of time and its direction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI see two elements to this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne is that it is not verbal, how the language is spoken, but visual, how language is written, most horizontally, English from left to right, Hebrew from right to left and back to front, many Asian languages vertically. That is consistent with the brain evolving for millions of years when almost all it had to process were images, until speech evolved about 200,000ya.
The other is contextual. Cognitive science tells us that the thinking style of people from western cultures is low context, while most other cultures are higher context, to varying degrees.
People from western cultures look at the content on which they focus as independent of surroundings. Asian cultures are lower context, but may still arrange information as their language is written.
Pompuraawans perceptions are extremely high context, in which content cannot be conceived as independent of context. They describe the position of one item (part of the focal content of a western brain) by its location relative to context that is external to that content.
They even define their own orientation in relation to the orientation of the surrounding landscape. When two people are talking face to face, the south arm of one will be on what we call left, the other on the right.
If we use this as an insight, we might ask how western perspectives affect interpretation of data. Anyone who has seen my comments on other blogs will groan and say "oh no, he is doing it again!!"
Darwin's explanation of evolution is the classic case. Darwin's starting point was his decision that external conditions had no direct effect. He attributed change to internal qualities that favoured individuals in struggle. A Pompuraawan hearing that would ask how anyone could believe that context could be ignored in this way, and would be shocked that generations of supposedly intelligent scientists have not challenged it, but instead have based the assumptions of their science on it.
The Pompuraawan would shake his head from north to south in disbelief that so many people could believe such nonsense. He would be stunned when he was told that biologists cling to their cultural belief, Natural Selection, even though genetics proves that all the assumptions that are a necessary part of it are wrong. He would think "Gee, this Darwin fellah must have had powerful magic". And he would be right.
http://ideasintuitionandthinking.com
In Hindi language there is no word for tomorrow.people use KAL for yesterday as well as for tomorrow.You to understand meaning of word with reference to sentences.That means Hindi people have no sense of future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's strictly in context? I can't believe there's no sense of future. Maybe just in speech?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHindu have no sense of past or future.They did not wrote the history and not concern with future.Their ultimate aim is liberation from this mundane life.They believed passionately only on meditation, fasting man can free from mundane life.Mundane life, sciences,all they blindly believed is MAYA [ illusion.]
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