Not A Thing: Temporal Spatialization

All right, this breaks with the blog structure/content because it isn't a thing that needs to exist, but it's just too cool to ignore.  

From Labspaces (emphasis mine):

In their time study with the Yupno, now in press at the journal Cognition, Nunez and colleagues find that the Yupno don't use their bodies as reference points for time – but rather their valley's slope and terrain. Analysis of their gestures suggests they co-locate the present with themselves, as do all previously studied groups. (Picture for a moment how you probably point down at the ground when you talk about "now.") But, regardless of which way they are facing at the moment, the Yupno point uphill when talking about the future and downhill when talking about the past. 

Interestingly and also very unusually, Nunez said, the Yupno seem to think of past and future not as being arranged on a line, such as the familiar "time line" we have in many Western cultures, but as having a three-dimensional bent shape that reflects the valley's terrain.

This is phenomenally cool--a natural extension of the better-known Polynesian spatial reference system with geographically-based reference systems, like the Hawaiian "mauka" (towards the mountain) and "makai" (towards the sea).  If that's your spatial reference system, of course the way you conceptualize time spatially will fit into that.  I wonder how universal spatialization of time is--do all groups do it?  Obviously they don't all do it the same. . .