London, Jan 22 (Inditop.com) Thinking about the past or future can move us backward or forward physically. Researchers have looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensory systems that regulate human movement.
Accordingly, University of Aberdeen psychology scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a lab study to test the idea.
They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. They found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us.
Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (future-forward, past-backward) to our systems of perception and action, said an Aberdeen release.
“The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioural marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation,” explains Miles and colleagues.
These findings were reported online in Psychological Science.
