Time Bender

Notions about number and time learned rather than innate. Time lines and number lines -so familiar, so basic, they're taken for granted. But if you think that the way you think about these fundamental concepts is hardwired, you might want to think again, says UC San Diego cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez. In recently published research that caught the attention of the self-identified nerds at Slashdot, a news website owned by Geeknet, Inc., and io9, a Gawker blog for fans of science and sci-fi-as well as the more august outlets of Science and New Scientist -Núñez and colleagues document that both of these "straightforward" notions about number and time are more likely culturally shaped than innate. Through experiments with the indigenous Yupno people of the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, the research team shows for the first time that a culture can have precise numbers beyond 20 without any linear representation. In a separate paper, the team shows that the Yupno seem to conceive of time as having a three-dimensional bent shape reflecting their valley's terrain. For them, what's still to come is not ahead and what has passed is not behind (or even the other way around).