The conclusion belongs to a new study

Jan 30, 2010 10:58 GMT  ·  By

One of the ever-diminishing set of traits that are believed to be uniquely human is called chronesthesia. The concept refers to the ability each of us has of traveling through time subjectively, inside our own heads. This is something that has not yet been proven in any other animal, though admittedly devising an experiment to test for this would be rather difficult. Now, researchers announce that chronesthesia not only enables you to think of the past and future, but it also quite literally moves you, LiveScience reports.

The study has demonstrated that people tend to lean forward when thinking of the future, and backwards when recalling events in their past. The conclusion to be drawn from this, the team says, is that our perception of time is directly connected to the concept of space. “This is the first demonstration that when we think about time we physically move though space, whether that's engaged though areas of the brain or manifested throughout the whole body is an open question,” says University of Aberdeen in Scotland researcher Lynden Miles.

The UA team, which also included experts Louise Nind and Neil Macrae, asked 20 volunteers to wear motion sensors while recalling things from their past, or pondering the future. The research group was amazed to discover that participants began swaying forth and back just 15 seconds after the task began. On average, test subjects thinking of the past leaned back by about 0.07 inches (1.5 to 2 millimeters), whereas those thinking of the future moved about 0.1 inches (3 mm) in the opposite direction. All the 20 participants were blindfolded, the team reveals.

“There is no reason that posture in a lab should be any different from posture in the real world. My guess is we sway just as much in the real world as we do in the lab. We have a lot of language to suggest the future is in front of us and the past behind us,” Miles says. In the paper accompanying the findings, which appears in the latest online issue of the journal Psychological Science, the researchers say that they plan to conduct similar investigations on other cultures as well. Particularly those that think the past is in front of them, and the future in the back, are of most interest.