You know how changing the way you speak has long been used in magic as a device of self change?

Examples include Crowley allegedly slashing his arm whenever he slipped, the evolution of e-prime and -I believe it was PJC who said- “precise words beget precise precise thoughts.”

Colour me excited by this article in the Wall Street Journal, then.

In particular, this extract:

Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

There are a number of intellectually exciting implications of this study.

Firstly: that knowledge of how language structures your reality offers you a very obvious probabilistic weak point when it comes to your general de-conditioning. Chosen carefully, it could also help your career. (Learn Mandarin.)

Secondly: this is quantifiable evidence that reordering the way you think literally rebuilds your entire universe. So rebuild one in which you are rich, hot and happy.

Thirdly: and here is where we come back to the Pormpuraawan-inspired circle, even the tools we use to carve out our universe -magical or otherwise- are essentially arbitrary. Here’s a delightful quote from a Telegraph article exploring the science behind Inception:

One of the most resilient of those parasites is that, by giving a complex phenomenon – such as “consciousness” – a convenient label, we will understand what we are talking about. In fact, this is an illusion: there’s no agreed definition, because scientists still struggle to understand this central feature of everyday life.

Must be something in the air in Journalist Dream Land.