The Relationship Between Causation and Deep Time

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Hinduism has a cyclic sort of cosmology that is like way longer than most Western cosmologies. And so it's a relationship to deep time, whether it's the past or the future, is really different from place to place. I'll give you two examples. One is just how many steps of causation do you think are relevant to a current outcome? So if I set up a pool table and I say, here's the location of all the balls, I'm going to make a shot. How important is this shot for all of the next shots that I're going to make? American students fall off after basically like the second or third shot. But students in Korea

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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