Living without a left or right

HostIf I asked you to pass the salt or move a glass of water on the table, I would probably tell you to move it a bit to the right. It feels like the only way to say it, like those words are just built into how our bodies work. But for a lot of people, that sentence wouldn't make any sense at all.

GuestIt really would not. There are groups of people, most famously the Guugu Yimithirr in Australia, who don't have words for left or right when they talk about where things are. If you asked someone there to move that glass, they wouldn't say move it right. They would tell you to move it a bit to the west or slightly to the south-southwest. To them, where things are isn't about your own body. It's a fixed part of the world. It's like they have a map in their heads that never turns off. If you want to speak their language correctly, you have to know which way is north every single second of the day. You could be in a room with no windows or out in the pitch black, but if you don't know which way is south, you quite literally can't speak a proper sentence about where anything is.

HostThat sounds like they must have some kind of hidden sense. Like they can feel the pull of the poles or something.

GuestPeople used to think they had a biological sixth sense for magnetism, like a bird or a sea turtle. But it's not a physical organ. It's a mental habit they start learning as soon as they can walk. They call it dead reckoning. From the time they're toddlers, their brains are trained to track every single turn they make and every step they take relative to the hills and the sun. They use the wind, the way the light hits the trees, and local landmarks to keep a background count of where they are. We don't usually have to do that because we just carry our left and right with us. But they're always doing the math. Researchers have taken these speakers to places they have never seen before and spun them around in circles to try and confuse them. Even then, they can point to north or east with a speed and a pull that's way better than the most skilled hikers from our side of the world.

HostBut how does that work if you're trying to remember something? If I remember a car driving past, I see it from my own eyes, usually going from one side to the other.

GuestThat's where it gets really strange. This language rule changes how you store your own life. In our way of thinking, if a man is standing to my left, I remember him on the left. If I turn around later, he's still on my left in my mind. But for a Guugu Yimithirr speaker, that man was simply in the east. When they pull up a memory, they don't see it through their own eyes like a movie. They see it as a fixed map. If they're telling you a story and they have turned around since the event happened, they'll actually point behind their own back to show you where something was. They're pointing to the actual spot on the earth where it happened, even if that spot was right in front of them at the time. Their memory isn't about their own view; it's a geographic record of the world.

HostSo the world stays still and they're just moving through it. Does that change how they see things that aren't even physical? Like, how do you map out something like time?

GuestIt changes time in a big way. For us, time is a line that moves from left to right. That's how we see a calendar or a timeline in a book. But for speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre, time is tied to the path of the sun. It moves from east to west. Scientists gave them photos of a person growing older and asked them to put them in the right order. We always lay them out from left to right. But these speakers laid them out from east to west. If they were facing south, the photos went from left to right. But if they turned to face north, they laid the photos out from right to left. The direction of time literally flips based on which way your body is facing so it can stay lined up with the earth.

HostThe sun rising in the east and setting in the west is the only clock that matters.

GuestIt makes time a place on the ground rather than a line in your head.

HostThis glass of water on the table feels a lot more tied to the rest of the planet than I thought.