The Relationship Between Spatial Metaphors and Our Use of Time

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If you ask people next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it's been rescheduled? People often have a very strong intuition about what the answer is. And so if you're thinking of yourself as moving in time, then the meeting moves forward in your direction of motion from Wednesday to Friday. If you're thinking about time moving towards you, then forward is in the direction of motion of time from Wednesday to Monday.

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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