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When a car skids on black ice, or when the Tiffany vase is in free fall to the marble floor, or when you watch the north tower go up in flames...time appears to go in slow motion.
We’d swear our brains perceive time differently during crisis, but is it true?
Scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine say no… perception remains the same, whether we’re lounging by the fireside or being attacked by a bison.
They had 20 volunteers free fall 150 feet into a net.
To test for visual distortion caused by slowed perception of a terrifying fall, researchers strapped chronometers onto subjects’ wrists and flashed numbers too fast to read.
They theorized, that if we actually see more, due to slowed time, in the midst of disaster, then subjects should be able to read the numbers. But alas they could not.
During a frightening event the amygdala kicks in, and it lays down an extra set of memories. The more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took.
So while we’d bet our life that time appears to expand in our immediate experience of a scary event – really we’re being tricked by the immediate memory of that event.
Wow, pretty trippy.
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5 Comments
Add CommentTime doesn't slowdown is that the brain fast replay the event in your mind at fractions of second making seem like its one slow moving picture when in fact is the same event in fracture frames.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this> The Slow Down of Time in Crisis
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime doesn't slowdown is that the brain fast replay the same event at fractions of a second making it seem like slow moving picture when it fact is replaying the same event in fracture frames.
As a trained medical personel I know this "slowed time" feeling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou are right--time is not changed but our brains go into hyper drive and emergency procedures and knowledge so dominates that it appears time has slowed since so much information is being processed.
This Baylor College of Medicine study has since been discredited. Interested parties should read http://science-community.sciam.com/blog-entry/Aet-Radals-Blog/Duration-Dilation-Flawed-Frightening-Experiment/300006227 .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAn emerging issue is the fact that both the BBC( pp 25-30 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4741340.stm ) and Discover Magazine (pp 10-12 http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/future-time ) reported in 2006 that Eagleman's volunteers were able to see the numbers during their SCAD falls, and both media reported that Eagleman was "surprised" at this result. Then in 2007 he reports, in his Baylor College of Medicine study, that people couldn't read the numbers.
This additional information smacks of some kind of deliberate manipulation of the data for an, as of yet, undetermined reason.
As it stands, per the anecdotal and experimental evidence so far, the perception of time can slow down during certain events, as responses speed up and the mental processing of information increases. There is no scientific evidence to the contrary, especially not this train wreck.
Before the blogs were canceled here on Sci Am I had a blog under the username "PHAYEZ" which dealt with, among other things, time and measurement. I put forward that time only exists as a feature of three dimensional existence. Time is the "velocity/distance of 3D matter relative to the velocity/distance of other 3D matter". Outside of three dimensions "TIME" as such does not exist and infinity is equal to zero "time". Also outside of three dimensions measurements cannot be made of anything which makes mathematics, with all due respect, irrelevant since the language of mathematics has, as a syntax, products of measurement. The existence and non-existence of time is a spatial relationship oxymoron which is difficult to grasp when you are an entity who is wholly dependent on being made up of atoms which are moving through space.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne final comment, if I may, on the speed limit of light and the fact that even information cannot exceed the speed of light. At the speed of light time is zero, in other words for the light there is no time that passes so that regardless of where it arrives, it arrives instantaneously. Nothing can move faster than instantaneously, even information...
Pierre
username: PHAYEZ (Edmonton,Alberta,Canada)