The Importance of Time

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In space, it matters because there's a fixed ground against which we're moving. In time, you only go in one direction. A lot of cultures do go in circles. So they linguistically talk about it that way. Well, certainly people draw diagrams of time that are circular or at least imply a spiral. There are definitely cycles in nature. But in general, I have described a lot of things that sound linear. And part of that might be an artifact of the measurement,. so when you're measuring how people think about time, you give them some cards to lay out and they give you a line. It's possible that what you're looking at is a small part of a

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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