Moving Through Time

Thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) results in physical movement corresponding to the direction of time. Volunteers who thought about past events swayed backwards while volunteers imagining future events swayed forward. These findings suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past=backward) to our systems of perception and action.

Lynden K. Miles, Louise K. Nind, and C. Neil Macrae
Psychological Science
Moving Through Time — PDF.

PLoS ONE: Aging Affects the Mental Rotation of Left and Right Hands

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006714

Methodology/Principal Findings
Twenty young (mean age: 23.9±2.8 years) and nineteen elderly (mean age: 78.3±4.5 years) subjects, all right-handed, were required to determine the laterality of hands presented in various positions. To do so, they mentally rotated their hands to match them with the hand-stimuli.

We showed that: (1) elderly subjects were affected in their ability to implicitly simulate movements of the upper limbs, especially those requiring the largest amplitude of displacement and/or with strong biomechanical constraints; (2) this decline was greater for movements of the non-dominant arm than of the dominant arm.