Hi, this is Kate from MinuteEarth.
You may have heard someone say “the following day,” “a point in time,” and “behind
schedule” - these are all phrases that represent someWHEN as if it's someWHERE.
Humans all over the world use space to represent time - we tend to agree that the passage of
time is like a line or curve through space
But where we disagree is WHICH direction time goes.
You might be saying “come on...obviously time should be represented from left to right.”
And we hear you; when we’re showing the passage of time in MinuteEarth videos, we
generally show it progressing from the left side of the screen to the right.
But that’s almost certainly because our team mostly speaks English and Spanish.
And when you ask people who speak languages that flow from left to right to arrange a
set of pictures in sequential order, they almost universally arrange the pictures from
left to right, with the earliest images on the left, and the latest on the right.
Yet people who speak Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to-left languages generally represent
time as unfolding from right to left - earlier images go here, and later ones here.
And native speakers of Mandarin, a language that traditionally flows downwards on the
page, are likely to lay out the pictures from top to bottom, bucking the horizontal trend
altogether.
Writing direction is so critical to how people represent time that when bilingual speakers
take the picture-organizing test in languages written in different directions, they often
organize the pictures differently depending on the language they’re being tested in.
But it’s not JUST about writing direction; lots of cultures have no history of written
language, yet still represent time spatially.
For the Yupno tribe in mountainous Papua New Guinea, the past lies downhill and the future
uphill.
For the Australian Kuuk Thaayorre, time flows from east to west.
In these systems, time’s direction depends on a person’s current orientation.
For instance, a member of the Kuuk Thaayorre facing North would organize those sequential
pictures from their right - where East is - to their left, where West is.
If they turned around to face South, East would be on their left, so they would organize
the pictures from left to right.
Facing east, they would actually organize time as going from front to back, and facing
west, from back to front.
You may also sometimes represent time on a front-back dimension, especially for events
you’re involved in, like gesturing backwards when talking about things that have already
happened; you literally put your past behind you.
And that totally makes sense, if you think about yourself moving forwards into the future.
But the Aymara people of the Andes represent the past as being ahead of them and the future
behind; after all, just like you can see what’s in front of you, you know what happened in
the past...and just as what’s behind you is a mystery, you don't know what the future
holds.
That’s something that I’m going to have to keep mulling over tomorrow, which is...which
way again?
I came up with the idea for this video after falling down a fascinating Twitter rabbithole;
we’re so lucky at MinuteEarth that we can tell the kinds of stories that we’re super-curious
about.
One place where we can push the boundaries even further is Nebula, a platform built by
independent education-y creators like us as a way to try out new ideas - like our own
MinuteBody series, all about the weird workings of you.
Like all the other creative content on Nebula, MinuteBody is brought to you with the help
of CuriosityStream, a documentary streaming service that we love, and that has helped
open up our minds to tons of new ideas.
If you’re into the science of time, you might love “Genius by Stephen Hawking”,
which challenges ordinary people to do awesome experiments, like testing whether time travel
is possible.
When you sign up at curiositystream.com/minuteearth, for less than fifteen bucks you’ll not only
get access to CuriosityStream for an entire year...you’ll also get to experience the
rabbithole of cool content on Nebula: stuff from the folks behind TierZoo, Polyphonic,
Wendover - and all-new episodes of MinuteBody.
Seems like it’s *time* to sign up.