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How language warps the way you perceive time and space

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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20221...-and-space

EXCERPTS: . . . In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.

The relationship between language and our perception of these two important dimensions is at the heart of a long-debated question: is thinking something universal and independent of language, or are our thoughts instead determined by it? Few researchers today believe that our thoughts are entirely shaped by language – we know, after all, that babies and toddlers think before they speak. But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops. "It actually goes both ways," argues Thora Tenbrink, a linguist at Bangor University, in the UK.

It is hard to ignore the evidence that language influences thinking, argues Daniel Casasanto, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell University in the US. For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour...

[...] getting scientific results isn't easy. If we just compare the thinking and behaviour of people who speak different languages, it's hard to be sure that any differences aren't down to culture, personality or something else entirely...

[...] Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, one of the pioneers of research into how language manipulates our thoughts, has shown that English speakers typically view time as a horizontal line. [...] They also tend to view time as travelling from left to right, most likely in line with how you are reading the text on this page or the way the English language is written.

This relationship to the direction text is written and time appears to apply in other languages too. Hebrew speakers, for example, who read and write from right to left, picture time as following the same path as their text...

[...] Mandarin speakers, meanwhile, often envision time as a vertical line, where up represents the past and down the future...

[...] In English and many other European languages, we typically view the past as being behind us and the future in front of us. In Swedish, for example, the word for future, framtid, literally means "front time". But in Aymara, spoken by the Aymara people who live in the Andes in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Argentina, the word for future means "behind time". They reason that, because we can't see the future, it must be to our rear.

In fact, when the Aymara talk about the future they tend to make backwards gestures, whereas people who speak Spanish, for example, who view the future as being ahead of them, make forwards gestures. Similarly, like the Aymara, Mandarin speakers also imagine the future being behind them and the past ahead of them, calling the day before yesterday "front day" and the day after tomorrow "back day". Those that speak both Mandarin and English tend to switch between a forward and backward conception of the future, at times in ways that can clash with each other. 

[...] Physicists long imagined time as having an arrow, and ticking reliably from the past into the future. But modern theories are more complicated. In Einstein's theory of general relativity, for example, time doesn't seem to flow at all on the grandest scale of the universe – which is a weird idea even to physicists. Instead, the past, present and future all seem to exist simultaneously ... So perhaps the time as a line metaphor has been – and still is – holding back physics.

"That would be a pretty remarkable effect of language on thought," says Casasanto.

Languages also encode time in their grammar. In English, for example, the future is one of three simple tenses, along with the past and the present – we say "it rained", "it rains" and "it will rain". But in German, you can say Morgen regent, which means "it rains tomorrow" – you don't need to build the future into the grammar...

[...] But does this affect how we think? In 2013, Keith Chen [...] set out to test whether people who speak languages that are "futureless" might feel closer to the future than those who speak other languages. For example, German, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages have no linguistic barrier between the present and the future, while "futured languages", such as English, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek, encourage speakers to view the future as something separate from the present.

He discovered that speakers of futureless languages were more likely to engage in future-focused activities. They were 31% more likely to have put money into savings in any given year and had accumulated 39% more wealth by retirement. They were also 24% less likely to smoke, 29% more likely to be physically active, and 13% less likely to be medically obese. This result held even when controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status and religion. In fact, OECD countries (the group of industrialised nations) with futureless languages save on average 5% more of their GDP per year.

This correlation may sound like a fluke, with complex historical and political reasons perhaps being the real drivers. But Chen has since investigated whether variables such as culture or how languages are related could be influencing the results. When he accounted for these factors, the correlation was weaker – but nevertheless held in most cases. "The hypothesis still seems surprisingly robust to me," argues Chen... (MORE - missing details)
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