We often assume that language reflects thought — that we speak as we think. But what if our hands betray a different mental map?
Casasanto & Jasmin’s (2012) study, The Hands of Time, is a fascinating reminder that the mind doesn’t always follow the mouth. While English speakers talk about time using sagittal metaphors — the past is “behind us”, the future “ahead” — their gestures tell a different story: the future is overwhelmingly to the right, not in front.
I recently revisited this study & couldn’t help but consider its implications for how we teach abstract concepts like time in ELT classrooms.
What did they do?
Two experiments compared deliberate gestures (when participants were explicitly asked to gesture about time) with spontaneous gestures that occurred naturally during storytelling. In both cases, one axis dominated:
Left = past, right = future. English speakers overwhelmingly gestured laterally — even when the language they used contained sagittal metaphors like “way back in the past”, or “looking forward to the weekend”.
In spontaneous speech, lateral gestures outnumbered sagittal ones 3:1.
These gestures reflected spatial conventions found in cultural artefacts — like graphs, calendars & school timelines — rather than linguistic metaphors.
The authors argue that people often use a “Moving Attention” perspective — as if viewing a timeline from outside — rather than imagining themselves moving through time or time moving toward them.
In other words, we may gesture the way we read, not the way we speak.
This aligns with earlier work by Tversky (1991), Casasanto & Bottini (2010), & Fuhrman & Boroditsky (2010), who found that reading direction can actually flip mental timelines, even temporarily.
Teacher Takeaways?
- Timelines aren’t just visual aids — they mirror how learners mentally represent time. Using left-to-right timelines to teach tenses (e.g., Past ↔ Present ↔ Future) likely taps into learners’ intuitive spatial schemas — especially those literate in left-to-right scripts. This can help anchor abstract tense structures in concrete mental space.
- Notice the hands. Students’ gestures when talking about past & future events might reveal how they’re conceptualising a tense — especially if they come from L1s with different metaphors or orthographies. The vertical axis (up = future, down = past) does exist in some languages (e.g. Mandarin), but English doesn’t systematically use vertical time metaphors, and the study found no natural tendency for vertical gestures either.
- Adapt timelines for different literacy backgrounds. Speakers of right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi) may default to past-on-the-right timelines. It’s worth explicitly discussing this — both for clarity & to raise intercultural/metalinguistic awareness.
This research invites us to think more carefully about how language, thought, culture & gesture intersect — especially when dealing with something as abstract as tense.
Have you ever changed the orientation of a timeline to respond to your students’ conceptualisation of time?
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