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

    我们感受自己的身体在空间的位置与文化有关。

    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.

    我们的身体，我们的文化

    这是Beyonce在唱她的成名曲"不可取代"（ Irreplacable）.歌曲中伴随着舞蹈，你也许注意到，这些舞蹈都向左动。

    不过对于这种情形，Beyonce以及我们中的大多数人可能没有意识到：有些人可能根本不知道"向左"与他们身体在空间的位置有何关系。

    直到目前为止，我们可能会想，知道我们移动手脚的方向在不同的文化中都是一样的。这意味着这种感觉是"以自我为中心的，"另外我们以自身为参照，来描述我们的脚向左 移动，而以指南针为参照，则描述为不是向右。

    不过一项新的研究发现，儿童感受他们身体运动的方式实际上取决于他们文化。这项研究将发表在《当代生物学》（Current Biology）杂志上。

    在舞蹈中，教一些德国儿童按照"右-左-右-右"的方向移动他们的手，这些儿童即使在改变身体方向180度之后仍然保持这样的运动。

    但是对于来自Akhoe Hai||om（来自纳米比亚的一个狩猎部族）的儿童来说，当他们改变身体方向180度之后，他们把"右-左-右-右"的方向顺序正好掉了过来（左-右-左-左）.

    这意味着，这些儿童按照他们所处环境中的一些外部参照（意味着东西南北）来移动他们的肢体。

    该项研究的作者注意到，这项研究提醒我们人类的心理可塑性是多么强，同时也提醒我们在不同文化中，人类认知的千差万别。

    我们要提醒Beyonce,对于不同的人来说，"向左，向左"是绝对可以替换的。

    Vocabulary:

    Irreplacable:不可取代的

    Egocentric:以自我为中心的

    Compass:指南针

    Choreography:编排舞蹈

    Orientation:方向

    Hunter-gatherer:狩猎者

    Tribe:部落

    Namibia:（一个非洲国家）纳米比亚

    Sequence:顺序

    Limb:肢体

    External:肢体

    Plastic:可塑的

    Diversity:多样性

    Cognition:认知