Do different cultures experience time differently?

The answer

The Aymara people of the Andes are among the few known cultures where spatial metaphors for time are reversed: they gesture forward when referring to the past and backward when referring to the future, reasoning that the past is known and therefore visible ahead, while the unknown future lies unseen behind. Research in cognitive science has shown that speakers of Mandarin tend to think of time vertically (earlier events are 'up'), while English speakers conceptualize it horizontally. The Hopi language was once controversially claimed to lack tense entirely, though this has been disputed. These findings reveal that our experience of time is not universal but profoundly shaped by language and cultural frameworks.