Tuesday, June 13, 2006

This is interesting...

South America's indigenous Aymara people consider time in a different manner than the rest of the world.

"Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind."

In other words, the future is not ahead of us, rather it is behind us. It is the past that lies ahead of us.

When you think of it, it actually makes sense. We are facing forward, and can see what is up there. We can 'remember' the past. It is behind us that we cannot see, and thus it is 'the future'.

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