
The surprising links between anger and time perception - kqr2
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/08/surprising-links-between-anger-and-time.html
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scott_s
_You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting
has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved
forward two days._

I had to read this sentence ten times before I realized how it can be
interpreted any different from the meeting is on Friday.

I realized I was assuming _forward_ meant to the right on a calendar, but that
means my default way of interpreting relative times is inaccurate. If they had
said "back" instead of "forward," I would have also thought Friday. Clearly,
if antonyms indicate the same thing to me, then I'm the one who's wrong, but
it's still surprising to me.

The only phrase that would make me think Monday is, I think, "push the meeting
up." But, while I would think Friday if it was "push the meeting back," the
phrase "push the meeting down" sounds nonsensical to me.

This is why natural language processing is hard.

~~~
GHFigs
I've been facinated with people's spacial associations with time since I first
realized they can vary from person to person. I like to ask people how they
visualize the arrangement of months in a year, because there doesn't appear to
be any single standard way to do so.

When I was in kindergarten, the teacher would lead the class to name off the
months by pointing to a year calendar arranged on the wall in a horseshoe
shape, starting with January in the bottom left, arcing through the summer
months at the top and returing to December in the bottom right. Having been
exposed to this particular arrangement so often at such an impressionable age,
December and January are in my mind forever separated by gap, and it never
fails to generate the feeling that those two months are more distant than any
other adjacent months, and I'm sure it has an effect on my planning during
that time.

It makes me wonder how it might feel to have learned the months arranged in a
circle, on a line, or in a grid. Or to have learned European-style Monday-
Sunday weeks, lunar months, or something exotic like months of 7 or 8 4-day
weeks, or 10 144-minute hours per day. And of course the hacker in me wants to
figure out what the optimal arrangement.

~~~
scott_s
I've had similar realizations. I tend to visualize weeks and months linearly,
but with no gaps. December and January are adjacent to each other in my mind,
as are Sunday and Monday. (I also don't _really_ consider the week to start on
Sunday. If I designed a calendar for myself, weeks would be arranged in rows
where Monday is the left-most cell, and Sunday is the right-most cell.)

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aurora72
I really didn't know that there were two kinds of people one who thought they
were moving thru time and the one who thought the time was just passing by. I
cannot decide in which category I belong to.

~~~
calcnerd256
It's almost certainly situational. Now, the question is which one applies to
you more often.

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gojomo
I suspect their test group did not contain any members of the Aymara tribe,
who metaphorically map time so that the past (which is known) is in front of
them, and the future (which is unseeable) is behind them. See:

<http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html>

[http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...](http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=5639624)

