The Effect of Language on Time

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Do we know enough about how the brain works to say that these memories are in our brains, but they get reclassified as they pass the boundary? Or do we sort of have to think about, oh, that was three weeks ago? Okay, it's in this category. Well, we don't know enough about the brain to know that I can make an educated guess, which is that when you're about to tell someone about an event, you're retrieving elements. And when you're retrieving, you're adding information as well. So if your language makes a distinction between things that happened up to a week ago and other things, then you really have a separate category in your mind for

What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.

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Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.

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