How we understand the location of our own body in space is culturally dependent.

    我們感受自己的身體在空間的位置與文化有關。

    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.

    我們的身體，我們的文化

    這是Beyonce在唱她的成名曲"不可取代"（ Irreplacable）.歌曲中伴隨著舞蹈，你也許注意到，這些舞蹈都向左動。

    不過對于這種情形，Beyonce以及我們中的大多數人可能沒有意識到：有些人可能根本不知道"向左"與他們身體在空間的位置有何關系。

    直到目前為止，我們可能會想，知道我們移動手腳的方向在不同的文化中都是一樣的。這意味著這種感覺是"以自我為中心的，"另外我們以自身為參照，來描述我們的腳向左 移動，而以指南針為參照，則描述為不是向右。

    不過一項新的研究發現，兒童感受他們身體運動的方式實際上取決于他們文化。這項研究將發表在《當代生物學》（Current Biology）雜志上。

    在舞蹈中，教一些德國兒童按照"右-左-右-右"的方向移動他們的手，這些兒童即使在改變身體方向180度之后仍然保持這樣的運動。

    但是對于來自Akhoe Hai||om（來自納米比亞的一個狩獵部族）的兒童來說，當他們改變身體方向180度之后，他們把"右-左-右-右"的方向順序正好掉了過來（左-右-左-左）.

    這意味著，這些兒童按照他們所處環境中的一些外部參照（意味著東西南北）來移動他們的肢體。

    該項研究的作者注意到，這項研究提醒我們人類的心理可塑性是多么強，同時也提醒我們在不同文化中，人類認知的千差萬別。

    我們要提醒Beyonce,對于不同的人來說，"向左，向左"是絕對可以替換的。

    Vocabulary:

    Irreplacable:不可取代的

    Egocentric:以自我為中心的

    Compass:指南針

    Choreography:編排舞蹈

    Orientation:方向

    Hunter-gatherer:狩獵者

    Tribe:部落

    Namibia:（一個非洲國家）納米比亞

    Sequence:順序

    Limb:肢體

    External:肢體

    Plastic:可塑的

    Diversity:多樣性

    Cognition:認知