Many cultures do not picture the future in front of them and the past behind. The Aymara people of the Andes gesture the past in front, where they can see it, and the future behind, while speakers of Moroccan Arabic and some Vietnamese show a similar pattern. Mandarin speakers sometimes place the future down and the past up. Māori speakers use the proverb 'I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past', treating known events as visible and the unknown future as unseen. Researchers think these mappings come from culture and language rather than biology.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.