Our Bodies, Our Culture

That's Beyonce singing her hit Irreplacable. And it goes with dance moves that involve—you guessed it—moving to the left.
But what Beyonce, and many of us for that matter, might not realize is that some people may not have any idea what “to the left” means with respect to the location of their own bodies in space.
Now one would think knowing the position of where we move our feet and hands is pretty much the same across cultures. Meaning it’s “egocentric,” and we’d describe moving our feet to the left relative to us, and not to the east relative to a compass.
But a new study finds that the way children understand their own body movement actually depends on their culture. The research will appear in the journal Current Biology.
When German children were taught to move their hands in a right-left-right-right motion, as part of a dance choreography, they maintained this movement even after changing their body orientation by 180 degrees.
But children from the Akhoe Hai||om, a hunter-gatherer tribe from Namibia, changed the right-left-right-right sequence to the exact opposite (left-right-left-left) when they turned their bodies 180 degrees.
This means that they were referencing the movement of their own limbs based on some external reference in their environment…meaning east, west, north, south.
The study author notes that this finding is a reminder of just how plastic the human mind is, and of the wide diversity in human cognition across cultures.
And a reminder to Beyonce that "to the left, to the left" is absolutely replaceable, depending on who you are talking to.