The passing of time is a force that is as inevitable and familiar to us as any. Oftentimes we are all too cognizant of the ticking of the seconds, of the passing of birthday after birthday, and of the patter of ever-approaching deadlines that incessantly marches along our calendars. But the concept of time and its unique role in our lives is something we hardly ever stop to think about. What is time, after all? Clearly it is not an object. It is not something that, in an instant, we can touch or see. The non-object-ness of time intuitively seems like a very simple thing. Time does not have width, depth, or height. Time does not have spatial direction at all. In fact, you will probably agree with me when I make the overarching generalization that time has absolutely no accurate spatial analogue.
I, however, have only come to realize this and grasp its implications recently. I was shocked. Throughout my life, I have occasionally paused to consider time. And it is difficult to introspectively consider anything without visualizing it. For whatever reason, my default visualization for time has allows been a horizontal line. As time passed, I’d imagine this line stretching out to the right and further from the origin, the point of my birth, and closer toward a point of unknown location that would be my death. It wasn’t that I was always actively thinking about this image, but even when I wasn’t, it resided in the background of my ability to grasp what time is.
I thought that this conception of time was pretty ubiquitous. After a brief discussion with my dad, however, I wasn’t so sure. He strongly disagreed and insisted that time had no relationship, imagined or otherwise, with spatiality to him at all.
I decided to test my ideas against those of the general population by putting out a short survey and asking friends and family to answer a few simple questions. As you read along, try them for yourself:
1. Say that "Orange," "Purple," and "Green" are all discrete events.
Orange occurs before Purple.
Green occurs after Purple.
Describe in the box below how you would visually represent your perception of these events on a piece of paper.
2. Say that another event, "Red," occurs at the same time as Purple. How does Red fit into your visual representation?
3. When you think of the concept of time, do any spatial connotations come to mind? If so, what are they?
I tried to frame the questions in a way that left the logical structuring of chronology as ambiguous as possible; orange, purple, and green are not usually ordered in this way, and the temporal relationship between these events was not introduced linearly (“Orange occurs before Purple which occurs before Green.)
I received 24 responses. Not as much as I would’ve liked, but respectable given that this was a random survey with really no purpose other than my curiosity. Below is the breakdown of each questions’ results.
The first question: there were four very strange answers which I will list verbatim, mostly for lulz: circles of color, i would imagine fruit, i would draw a rainbow, Chemical rxn involving metal complexes. One result described a complex “black hole type thing” where colored swirls morph into colored circles...very creative stuff. But of the remaining nineteen results, every single one either listed out the colors in order from left to right or described a visual scheme with boxes or circles for events arranged left to right. 6 results explicitly stated their schematic would include arrows.
The second question: twelve responses involved placing some sort of representation of the “red” event either directly above or below the purple one. Because red was described as simultaneously, it’s not a far stretch to extrapolate that timing of events was therefore being associated with horizontal placement for these twelve schematics.
The third question: twelve people made reference to lines, left/right ordering, or axes. Five people said something like “no.” Interestingly enough, of these same five, four answered the first question by ordering the words orange, purple, and green from left to right.
Conclusion: many, many people think about time in a spatial and/or linear way. Even those who deny that time has spatial connotations to them practically ascribe a linearity to the chronology of events.*
Another less dramatic example of the pervasive conflation between the spatial and the temporal is directionality. “Forward” and “future,” “backward” and “past.” These terms just make sense together, even though they really shouldn’t. The same amount of time passes if a man walks from point A to point B than if he stayed absolutely still at A (at least, close enough to the same amount of time so that we may say it is), so why is it that words regarding physical movement and dimensionality seem so comfortable in the arena of the temporal?
These phenomena seem to be a question more of convenience than rationality. Certainly, left/right or forward/backward seems as good as any for a visual representation of time. But, conceivably, anything representing change can also represent the passing over time. You could imagine other analogies that might do the job just as well: warm/cold or light/darker, for example. WOAHZ! But for whatever reason, differences in position is the default analogy we use. I’m not sure where that comes from. Perhaps all of those graphs in math class have mightily conditioned us.
*A slight aside: how might results be affected by a default method of ordering that the structure of our language provides? The survey was taken by only English speakers. I only can wonder how the survey results might have been different if given to Hebrew or Arabic speakers who write (and maybe then also think?) right to left...would the order of events have written out as Green Purple Orange? How about results of Chinese speakers? Would the passing of time be then associated with vertical displacement instead of horizontal?
