bobulate:

Professor Philip Zimbardo reveals the secret powers of time:

What we have discovered in 30 years of research is that there are six main time zones that people live in: two focus on the past, two focus on the present, two focus on the future.

He goes on to segment them into:

- Past positive: focus is on the “good old days”, past successes, nostalgia, etc.
- Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
- Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
- Present fatalism: life is governed by outside forces, “it doesn’t pay to plan”
- Future: focus is on learning to work rather than play
- Transcendental Future: life begins after the death of the mortal body

He notes that we all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. When you’re speaking with someone he or she might be thinking about past experiences, and ignoring the present. You might be doing a cost-benefit analysis and thinking about the future. Are you Past-Positive or a “Transcendental” Future-oriented person? Find out by taking his Time Perspective Inventory, then watch last year’s TED talk on the secret power of time.

[via]

Drawn by Andrew Park of Cognitive Media. Think we’ll be seeing a bunch of these floating around the internet in the future. (I should note, I swapped Liz’s listing of the 7 time zones with Jason Kottke’s.