Psychobabble

MYTH 22

Make every second count

Attitudes towards time can tell you a lot about a society. We are so used to our own linear conception of time as a river flowing in one direction, or a neatly segmented path along which we move at a fixed rate, that it scarcely occurs to us that not everyone in the world experiences time in the same terms. In some cultures such as those in Latin America and South-east Asia, polychronic time is not a straight line at all, but more like a circle, a spiral or a series of elegant intersecting curves. In such cultures the past and present coexist alongside each other rather than displacing each other. For the Piraha Tribe, deep in the Amazonian rainforest, the past doesn’t exist at all. The tribe has no past tense ...