Where Is the Future?

"When people talk about time, we rarely keep our hands still. We gesture backward when mentioning the past, forward when talking about the future, or sweep our hands sideways as if laying events out on an invisible timeline. These movements may feel automatic, but they reveal something profound about how the human mind understands time. Across languages and cultures, people use space to think about time. And our hands, quite literally, show us how."

"Cognitive science has long shown that when humans grapple with abstract ideas, we rely on more concrete experiences, especially bodily ones. One of the most widespread examples of this is the metaphor "time is space." We talk about deadlines "approaching," the future being "ahead of us," and the past "behind us." These expressions are not just figures of speech. They reflect how people mentally organize time using spatial layouts grounded in bodily experience."

"Research shows that people spontaneously gesture in ways that match how they conceptualize time. When describing future events, speakers tend to gesture forward. When recalling past events, they gesture backward. Even subtle body movements follow this pattern: People lean slightly forward when thinking about the future and backward when thinking about the past. These tendencies appear early in development: Children begin using time-related gestures around age six, and they occur even when no one can see them."

People spontaneously map time onto space using bodily gestures, with forward movements for future events and backward movements for past events. Spatial metaphors such as future-ahead and past-behind ground abstract temporal concepts in concrete bodily experience. Subtle posture shifts accompany temporal thinking, including slight forward leans for future and backward leans for past. Time-related gestures appear by about age six and can occur even when gestures are not visible. Cultural experiences and literacy practices influence temporal perception and the specific gestures used, producing variation across languages and societies.

Read at Psychology Today