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Can Time Slow Down?
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Does time slow down when you are in a traffic accident or other life threatening crisis like Neo dodging bullets in slow-motion in The Matrix? To find out, researchers developed a perceptual chronometer where numbers flickered on the screen of a watch-like unit. The scientists adjusted the speed at which the numbers flickered until it was too fast for the subjects to see. Then subjects were put in a Suspended Catch Air Device, a controlled free-fall system in which 'divers' are dropped backwards off a platform 150 feet up and land safely in a net. Subjects were asked to read the numbers on the perceptual chronometer as they fell [video]. The bottom line: While subjects could read numbers presented at normal speeds during the free-fall, they could not read them at faster-than-normal speeds. 'We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix,' Eagleman said. 'The answer to the paradox is that time estimation and memory are intertwined: the volunteers merely thought the fall took a longer time in retrospect'."
damn you agent smith, no wait, damn you oracle...no wait....damn you all!
*shakes* fist
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
First on today's news: Time doesn't slow down for non-relativistic cases.
And in other news: Water is wet.
Film reel at 11.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo
I remember reading this here a year or 2 back.
What a stupid question. Of course it can. Ever had to sit through 3 meetings in a row?
Turns a matter of hours into a matter of weeks.
Skiffy is Spiffy, but Ort is tort.
Sounds a bit weak to me. Though such an event can be frightening or exhilarating, you KNOW that it's coming, and you KNOW that it's perfectly safe. To me, the experience of going over a roller coaster hill is different than the experience of being involved in an auto accident. I say more research is required.
...if I believe that conclusion. When I was browsing on Slashdot one April, and everything turned pink and ponyish, I swear that day lasted several months, at least.
This just in: Perception is Reality! This seems like another rehash of the fact that our concept of "time" is determined by the rate our minds are working at (whatever analogy would be closest to clockspeed that actually fits...). It only make sense that the processes involved in an emergency situation would clock up as much as safely possible to increase the likelyhood of determining a solution before the "Dead"line.
Ice Cream has no bones.
What would be the problem with metric time for example?
About the true meaning of "retrospect". Since all the signals our body produce take time to register in the brain, wouldn't all events by some strange definition always be "in retrospect"?
I have been in a few car accidents in my time, and I can say that time really does seem to slow down in that moment. I don't know if it's just the way I'm remembering those moments in time or if, at that exact moment, I really did feel like time slowed.
I wonder if the experiment mentioned was skewed by the fact that the subjects were never in any actual danger. They knew that they were in an experiment and there was little chance of harm. In a real-world situation, the potential for danger is real.
I think this was a flawed experiment from day one. Where did they get the notion that perception wasn't linked with time? This reminds me of some of the goofy experiments from MythBusters.
Their experiment belongs more in the realm of parapsychology than science. It seems they were really testing for the presence of a 6th sense that perceives the speed of time and not truly whether time slows down. If time slows down, so would anything metered by time, like perception. This experiment really proves nothing and gave them an excuse to jump into a big net for fun. Gotta love junk science.
I think our perception of the passage of time in the past is purely based on our memories. Thus, certain things that are very memorable will probably mess around with our perception of the flow of time during that moment. For example, if you remember nothing after passing out from drinking and wake up the next day, you probably wouldn't feel like you actually spent all that time lying on the floor.
I question the testing method. It should include subjects sitting in a cubicle after 4:30pm on a Friday.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but as far as I know it special relativity says: elapsed time depends on your velocity. In fact, more than time being relative and slowing down, the only reference frame when time is constant is when all objects being considered are moving at the same relative speed.
.... Oh wait, you meant, can our perception of time speed up during accidents.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Don't spend that much money on studies to verify if time slows down, just look at a big-boobed-girl running down the road, I'm pretty sure you'll notice that slowdown...
The whole experiment seems misguided. I mean, to the extent that such an effect has been suggested to exist at all, it seems to be described as being tied to attention focussed on a stressing event that produces an adrenaline rush and which concentrates attention on that event. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect that you'd be able to detect the effect by seeing how fast people can read off numbers unrelated to the stressing event; sure, you might see an increase in the speed there if the effect was real, you might also see no effect, or see a decrease if the effect on focussing attention on specific events outweighed the perceptual "slowdown".
While, of course, the slowdown being an artifact of memory rather than a change in perception that actually happens in real time is a reasonable speculation, the experiment described doesn't seem to be one that would reliably differentiate between the two cases.
"We discovered that people are not like [a fictional character] in [a fictional science fiction movie]". What will those brilliant scientists discover next?
Seek and ye shall find.
Heck, at 42, time is moving forward faster than it ever has. Days, weeks, and months are going by quicker than I ever remember, and I see NO sign of it slowing.
Seriously, though, I see it as a matter of perspective. When I was younger, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" seemed to be the mantra because it seemed to take forever for things to happen. Maybe it's because I have adopted more patience over the years, so the waiting isn't as noticeable.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Clearly, I'm writing grants for the wrong kind of research. This would be one hell of a lot more fun than playing with infectious diseases.
I wonder if the short-term memory effects of MJ might explain the time dialation effect of a good buzz.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it seems like you're kinda taking a jump to get to this conclusion from this experiment. Even though your senses may still be going "at the normal rate", it doesn't take into account any sort of internal speedup that may occur...
Sendou Wave Kick!!
You'd think this was something from Mythbusters.
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Wow, good to hear that things like world hunger, oil dependence, and disease have been solved and there is time for experiments of this caliber. Now that the question of if we are in fact all Neos in Matrices is also settled, the world can live in peace!
It is a measure of distance or degradation in an timeless universe.
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"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours that's relativity."
they just forget to take the red pill before running the experiment
To use a computer analogy (which seems appropriate in this case):
IMHO they're only testing the visual preprocessor speed, in a situation where the expected effect is bringing online more processing power and/or modifying the task scheduling and priorities for better response time on normally background tasks that have become life-critical.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
a waste of time.
"I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability."-Oscar Wilde
I guarantee I'll see every # and recite them two at a time starting from the middle of the set!
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
There is an old joke, "If you want to live forever then go live in a small town because every day is like a freak'n eternity."
I personally can attest that time slows down in business meetings, lines, traffic, and at chick flicks I'm forced to watch.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Of course, they didn't give them the red pill first. Or even do a red pill/blue pill double blind.
What kind of research is that?
In any case none of them made the jump the first time anyway...
I remember hearing a story way back when about perceptions slowing down for atheletes, which was referred to as "being in the zone."
I experienced that as well a few times as a kid playing sports. I just figured that at certain points, for some unknown reason, my perceptions slowed things down.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Only in a Math class or when your Mother-In-Law is visiting.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
That's why I can type all this and then hit
And then I get this message!
Slow Down Cowboy!
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I think I'm going to do a study on the human perception of jumping into a net versus jumping into a net while trying to read a clock. In a follow up experiment I will study the human perception of jumping into a net versus being shot.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I expected that the adrenaline would improve the ability to recognize the numbers. But the experiment shows that adrenaline doesn't unlock extra abilities (regarding perception at least) that couldn't be achieved by just concentrating on the task.
They suggested the logical thing, that in time of panic/crisis, our perception/thought processes speed up to make it possible to contemplate the situation and take possible action, therefore things that are normally too fast for our normal eyes/mind to process, might be capable of being processed when those systems 'overclock'. Like an adrenaline rush gives us more than typical use of our muscles, something similar may happen to the mind and associated sensory organs.
Their results suggest that during such an event, our minds/eyes don't actually speed up to perceive time more slowly, but rather the mind burns that memory in such that it feels longer.
To quantify with fresh-from-my-ass numbers focusing on visual experience only, presume the normal perception of a given person is about 30 frames per second. The thought was that just *maybe*, the systems boosted enough to perceive 45 frames per second, in the name of gleaning every possible usable detail of the environment before it's too late. The outcome suggests that is not the case. Rather, say we do perceive 30 frames per second, but in the medium/long term our brain records, say, 3 frames per second worth of low detail, as most of that information is useless to us (we just remember the Cliff's Notes version of our lives, and our brain doesn't even process more than that nominally beyond very basic stuff). However, after surviving a situation that felt like it could have been fatal, our brain retains, say, 15 frames per second at a more vivid level into a longer memory term, to remind us of everything that went wrong leading to that so that it may be avoided.
I wouldn't be surprised if a future study proved this one to be lacking and that some perceptual speed up at the moment of panic does happen, but I'm also not surprised if such a perceptual speedup simply does not exist. In the cases where this 'slow-mo' memory occurs, there would have been nothing you could have physically done with your body to leverage anything you normally would not perceive at all.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When I was a kid, I wrecked my bicycle while traveling around 20 mph (top speed baby!) on a downhill stretch of pavement near Battery Russel on the Oregon Coast. Not a huge life threatening event, but at the time it seemed quite serious. I remember thinking I had stopped rolling, putting my hand out to get up, and spraining my wrist as I rolled over it. At the ripe old age of 12 I was wondering if perhaps I could figure out how to get my brain to work like that all the time so I could be a superhero.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
I think your brain does a lot really fast if you think you are about to die. I don't think that means you suddenly get super eyes or vastly improved functionality from motor control and/or visual processing parts of the brain.
It's more than remembering it different because the person almost died. I should probably go RTFA now...
I always thought this phenomenon was a survival reaction. You body basically pumps out an enormous amount of adrenaline which clears your head, keeps you from panic, and increases your maximum physical capabilities (Even though you can injure yourself due to over exertion when it wears off).
I don't think that time slows down I think that you temporarily speed up and your perception of time is skewed.
God saw "The Matrix" as well, and has since corrected the universe. Before the movie came out, you -could- run up the wall, if you wanted to (and were convinced enough that it would work). Now you can't. Same thing for time slowing down.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
This study confirms my experience. Time slows down for me, but not for most of you. This so similar to the movie, it's freaking me out.
Time doesn't (of course) slow down in such situations. Your perception speeds up, which is to say, you start processing more information, probably much of it in parallel.
They should repeat the experiment, this time with the chronometers calibrated to legible speed, but give the subject a half-dozen or more of them to read the numbers off of at once.
Although I rather suspect that this phenomenon may be more geared toward processing and reacting to data relevant to the situation (ie, that which will help you survive) than to some arbitrary task like reading numbers off a dial (unless those numbers are relevant - airspeed, for example).
-- Alastair
No
The human perception of Time is a subjective experience. With training, one can either speed up or slow down how fast things seem to be going.
What usually happens is that the boring minutes seem to drag, and the pleasurable moments pass too quickly. One can use hypnosis/etc to switch this around, so that boring hours can seem to pass in minutes, and the good times seem to last forever. Bandler addresses this in his Design Human Engineering system. Milton Erickson, M.D. (psychiatrist who specialized in fixing people with hypnosis) also used time distortion in his work, iirc (and was the original inspiration for much of the NLP founders' developments). Any good book on hypnotic phenomena should cover time distortion too...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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'Cause when I'm with you, baby, time stands still!
I have been through something scary before.....well lots of things but the most scary one was when a masked man with a gun was chasing me !! And I can tell you , Time did NOT slow down !!!
> 'We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix,'
Therefore humans are not being used as living batteries for a race of mad robots. Come on, isn't that what they REALLY wanted to learn from the study?
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
time is only there, as it is, because we measure it. one event in relation to another. a car crash, time may feel like its slowed down because of your seeing that few seconds as a major event, so it seems longer, and grander. where, for someone on the outside, who it doesnt directly affect, it only lasts for a second or two.
portfolio
But I wasn't in danger... I was playing a game of street hockey back in grade school and doing the face off on a play. But concentrating intently on trying to make the first shot. I hit it and everything went into "slo-mo" as the puck shot across the gym floor, past several people and almost directly into the net where I saw the guard slowly maneuver to block it.
I didn't "recall" it slower, it was happening slower AS I experienced it.
I don't think the story is done on this. Time is perception and it seems to me that our wetwork bioclocks could experience "overclocking" given the right conditions. (I'm still holding onto the hypothesis that our clocks "slow" down as we age which is why time seems to go faster when you're older...)
To my layman's understanding of the brain, this experiment is just measuring the rate at which the visual cortex is seeing things. It does not account for the fact that the brain may actually be working quicker behind the scenes.
Does time slow down when you are in a traffic accident or other life threatening crisis
Yes, if you hit a tree while moving at 290000 km/s or if the other life threatening crisis is an approaching black hole, then yes, time does slow down. Otherwise -- no.
Slow news day, Taco? Or just not enough editorial savvy?
I think it is more just that your reaction rate increased while you are in danger. When in danger, the fight-or-flight respond trigger in your body, and your body goes into this hype-up state. The reaction rate is slightly higher so your body can react faster - making it feel like time is slower. The few thing I remember from biology and psychology class (Sry, I am a Chemical Engineer, so I am not that well verse in biology) is that it doesn't matter how fast your reaction rate is, it take a certain amount of time for the signal to be send from your eyes to your brain; thus, there is a limit to which how fast the brain can react. Also, the eyes can only perceive so much information at any given time, and that is why it only require 24 pictures per second to produce a continuous motion in the human brain. I remember reading an article on memory similar to this before (need to find it again and reread it). But I remember it stating that traumatizing memory are perceive to be longer ONLY in retrospect. In reality, the event took place at the same rate, but the memory stick to the brain much easier and better than other memory; thus, in contrast to other memory, the memory of the dreadful event seems to be longer cause you remember more/clearer of it. Now, about whether or not time slow down. That really depend on which frame of reference you are looking at. That goes into Einstein's theory of relativity and large massive celestial object that distort the space-time fabric. And no, I don't think free-fall will ever achieve a state where a discernible differences can be observed. On another note, what's with the statement 'We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix,'? Is the original concept that people are LIKE Neo? That people can fly? Throw other people hundreds of feet into the air? or fight a hundred clones at the same time?
can we speed it up to get past this story already?
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People in emergency situations don't report that "time slows down" in general. What they say is that they are able to focus intently on the details that are relevant to survival. For example, a cop in a firefight is acutely aware of someone reaching for a gun, pulling it out, aiming it, and firing. This allows the cop to react in time to shoot first.
Since reading numbers in free-fall is not relevant to survival, this study doesn't seem to be providing any useful insight.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
And here's proof that time perception is a completely subjective matter...
"Dude, that fall took like 3 seconds! ... What? ... It took 1.85 seconds?! Awww, man. No way! Hey, does anyone have any Funyuns?"
You know what?
I think the test is flawed. I've been in situations where time felt like it was slowing down, but in hindsight it was my attention was focus 100% on the task at hand. All my attention focused on one thing my brain had extra cycles to look around, think about what is coming next. That gives the sensation of slowing time.
Like musicians that are great sightreaders, they are playing a measure of music, but they are reading ahead three or four bars ahead of what they are playing. Years of practice making playing second nature, and total focus when playing give their brain time to look ahead to process what is coming and look for things unfamiliar before they get to it. So time does not slow, but you have more brain cycles dedicated to the task at hand.
i SAID nt!
It's obvious that whoever designed this experiment has no experience with elite athletes. All of them will tell you that the "slow down" phenomenon requires intense focus, and usually some unusual circumstance that kicks you into overdrive. Really good athletes can do it a lot. Ted Williams used to say that he could actually see the seams on a pitched baseball.
I have experienced the phenomenon a couple of times during hockey games, and it felt exactly as though everything was moving in slow motion while I continued at regular speed.
One time I saw it in action, and confirmed with the guy afterward that he had indeed experienced it. An open, condensation-soaked bottle of beer slipped out of his hand as he stood talking at a party. His other hand flashed out and he stuck his ring finger squarely into the mouth of the bottle as it dropped toward the floor. I questioned him closely because I wondered whether his experience was similar to mine. He confirmed that he felt as though he had all day to catch the bottle, and chose to catch it by sticking his ring finger into the neck because he was holding a cigarette between his index and middle fingers.
I know these experiences are anecdotal and without scientific value, but I think they point toward the need for a better-designed experiment. The "Zen state" that seems associated with it might be detectable on an EEG, for example, and a lot of repetition would probably help.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Can you make a time loop? like the movie groundhog day?
Time won't slow down, and those people knew they weren't in any danger. It would have not been the same. They might have gotten scared, but I don't think that their perception would actually have changed because mentally, you know there's no immediate peril.
What I think actually happens is that the mind starts working faster. Sort of like increasing the sampling rate. But your perception of time doesn't change, so things appear to happen more slowly. But until they remove that element of safety, it won't be a reasonably valid study. At least not ethically anyway.
Greeks knew the world was round.
The Church declared that it was flat. Despite the obvious fact that it was round.
Doesn't the... err... refresh rate... of our eyes play a part in this. Isn't there a physical limitation involved. Possibly other brain functions are 'slowing in time'.
Personally, I think they should have used sound. The few close calls I've gotten into, I distinctively remember the sound slowing down. It even seems (in my memories at least) that it dropped in pitch as well.
The subjects knew they weren't dying. The only way that this experiment could work as designed would be to actually kill the subjects.
Time does indeed slow down, just like in the movies. I've experienced it, and you can do all the bedly designed experiments you want to prove that salt is sweet, but it doesn't alter the fact that salt is salty and I know it.
I wrote about the experience at K5 a few years ago, if you want more details.
If you put a bullet in your brain, you will be in intense, searing, unimaginably horrible pain for the rest of your life. Nike's ad agency is full of morons; Just don't do it.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it's the test scenario, but from my own experience, I disagree.
My take has always been in certain situations, your brain works faster, causing everything else to seem slower in comparison. I can think of a few times this happened to me.
As a for instance, I am not a speedy or graceful creature, but one time, I was operating a fork lift, a girl I knew stopped to talk to me. When she started to walk to the left in front of me (and she was less than a foot to the right of the forks), I realized she forgot they were there, and that she was going to fall face first onto the concrete, before her first step was over. Quicker than I could speak, I grabbed the top of the cage, swung out and ALMOST caught her. LOL, luckily, outside of some horrid bruised on her shins (OW!), she was ok, but my feet hit the ground before she did. How long does it take to fall?
I know normally, there is no way, within a partial step, that I could see this, realize it and take action at normal reaction speed (I spent more time just then trying to remember how to figure out how to spell normal).
I use that example as it wasn't just perception, but I've also had experiences like that in other situations, car accidents, etc.
Outside of
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
In some drug states you can get time dialation for hours at a time. It happend to me once on 2C-T-2, doing a normal action that you do normally without thinking, like walking seemed very slow. At one point it felt like time nearly stopped. Though, when someone spoke it sounded like it was said at the normal speed. Pity I didn't get a chance to play some games, it would seemingly have been a good way to test out this studies' conclusions.
The clock says WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHhhhhhhh-HOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I agree that some kind of life-or-death situation needs to be involved. I have experienced time-slowdown (or rather, perceptual speed-up) twice in my life, both in very threatening situations. Both times the feeling was coupled with a deep sense of calmness.
The first time, I was attacked by a soccer hooligan, who smashed a bottle on my head with no warning, from behind. I remember turning round and seeing the thug waving the broken bottle - but everything had gone into slow motion. I could literally read every move he was going to make and counter it, with no apparent effort on my part, matrix-style. After I'd disposed of his bottle, I threw him around, then I played with him a bit without hurting him (much). I had the sense that I was far back, watching it all.
Afterwards, I was quite shocked at what had happened - I am not a fighter, I am really quite a wimp. Thinking about it later, it made sense to me, that some kind of fight-or-flight instinct had kicked in, allowing me to react instinctually much faster than normal, with my normal consciousness somewhat suspended.
The second time it happened, I was in a car that went into a 360 spin down a hill, eventually crashing into a lamp-post, totalling the car. Again, I felt calm, I could see everything that was happening as if in slow motion, but there wasn't anything I could do, so unlike the fight situation, I can't judge whether this perception had any practical effect.
I find it interesting that you can't count numbers any faster in threatening situations - but I would wager that only certain, survival oriented abilities are accelerated in threatening situations. I wouldn't have been surprised if the ability to read numbers was actually worse in those situations! More research is clearly needed...
... what if they do the same test at both sides of the bathroom door? There for sure time happens at different rate.
This seemed so obvious as to not be worth the effort to test it, but many times (insert citation here-I'm too busy trying to look busy to look it up) scientists have studied many of these types of "things that are so obvious it isn't worth the time and expense to test" experiments only to be quite surprised when the results show something quite different from what was expected. So yeah, pretty obvious this time but what if it the results had been different? oooh! (cue spooky music)
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
Or maybe this proves that people aren't capable of focusing on the requirements of a science experiment while falling?
...only try to realize the truth: There is no net.
Spork.
P.S. Spork.
Many of the great players in any sports say that the play looks as if its in slow motion. I play mens hockey in a beer league, its pretty competitive, and this time slow down happens to me when I score a goal. In my perception, everything happens in extreme slow motion, the movement of the puck, the movement of the players. This only happens when I'm about to score. Shots that don't go in, don't have this effect. weird...
When I'm on a coaster or a slingshot style ride, I'm expecting things to happen.
The (few) times I've been in an accident, it came up on me very quickly and shocked the hell out of me.
I also consider a ride a positive thing where an accident is a negative thing.
The problem is that it will be very hard to come up with an ethical experiment that surprises and shocks the hell out of your subjects to the degree of a car crash without royally pissing them off.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Perception is a perceived experience. Time goes forward at an undetermined rate. These are fundamental. What isn't is the eye's ability to see fast-changing light patterns. Nothing presumes that even if perception of time changes, the eye has the ability to speed up and see something which is otherwise a blur.
This isn't a measurement of perception, but of the characteristics of eye refresh rates under stress.
I would have loved to have been on the IRB Board that oversaw this study, and read the protocol...
Seems like a pretty weak test. Or at least not what I was thinking of from the question and lead in reference to Neo.
Experts and extraordinarily talented people in a specific domain do often report the feeling of everything else moving in slow motion. When you're so good at something or have practiced it so many times, you can read the nuances of a situation and react to them so quickly that it's comparable to if everything else had actually slowed down. I've experienced it in a limited way a few times, enough to know what people are talking about when they refer to it.
Obviously my post isn't scientific...... I was involved in a very terrible car accident. A woman with 2 small children pulled out in front of me while I was traveling about 45 MPH. I had about 20 feet to stop. I didn't stop but did manage to not hit the back of the car, I hit the front. I know my perception was it took a long time for impact. I remember seeing the kids face in the rear window screaming as I closed on the other car. I wondered, after the fact, in situations like this if your brain doesn't go into some hyper processing mode. Kind of like a filming with a high speed video camera. The act of remembering is kinda like playing the high speed film back at normal speed..... slo-mo. or maybe I'm just crazy...
Now if they were watching a pot boil the fall would have seemed like years.
... an anti-nobel prize.
Though it's good to know I can trust my quartz watch read while falling from a clif or being aimed at with a gun.
Danger is what it's all about, or perception of danger. The adrenaline rush of the free-fall experience is only there because subconsciously you're still somewhat afraid, but the whole mind isn't involved in the fear.
This would be like saying "Can people exhibit super-human strength under extreme stress?" (eg the "mom lifts car off of baby" stories) and testing it by saying "ok so pretend that your baby is under the car and lift the car up ok". Sure buddy.
Next waste of time and money....
I don't know how you'd run such an experiment accurately. I don't think dropping people from a chair is quite the same and, my understanding has always been that not everyone percieves this "time distortion".
I am one of those people that do however, and it usually accompanies a state of extreme mental focus.
I (sort of) recall a particularly extreme case. I was in a tournament bout....it was very intense. Time was slowing down as it usually does. Usually, the sensation of time slowing down calms me down, However, this case was different. At one point, I completely lost awareness of my surroundings. I don't know any more accurate way to put it then that. I remember when that bout ended. I was at the edge of the circle when I became aware of the crowd screaming. I knew the match was over, and I knew I won, but I had no recollection of what I did....I still don't recall.
I remember walking back to my team, and they're all staring at me in astonsishment. I actually had to ask one of them what happened. The only explanation I ever got was, "You went f-ing Jedi on his A$$!". A more experienced fighter would eventually explain what I experienced and even tried to teach me a "chi-word" so that I could induce that mental state at will. It's sort of akin to a post-hypnotic suggestion. However, I never mastered that and this bought would be the only time I experienced something like that.
There was no video taken of that fight, to this day I don't know what I did.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Even though the universe is constantly expanding, which might make you think that time stretches, Einstein has accounted for this. If you take a snapshot of the speed of light 1000 years ago and compare it to a snapshot of the speed of light now, they are exactly the same. It's like no matter how fast you run and chase something, you are still 3x10^8m/s away from the speed of light. That's Special Relativity in a nutshell.
... And there's still no cure for cancer...
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
I think it's based on level of involvement. When something goes down, you're not going to have that song in the back of your head, worries about your appointment tomorrow, or be trying to figure out what the hell happened in The Fountain. Your whole brain is engaged.
My "time slowed down" experience was this: I was biking home from work along a road with a sidewalk only on one side, traffic whizzing by, no bike lanes. I was on the left hand side, which meant oncoming traffic was in the nearby lane. I wasn't going particularly fast; I know the consequences of not playing it safe. Suddenly a shoelace got into my gears and yanked the bike to the right, and off the sidewalk I went, and was headed straight for an oncoming car that had to be going at least 40 miles per hour.
There wasn't any time or place for panic. Instead, every part of my brain had to figure out what to do, stat. The bike was unpredictable with my shoelace and the chain trying to eat each other. In a split second I concluded that if I didn't make it wipe out right away, I would roll into the car's path, and it could be game over.
And that's what I did. The bike went on its side and me on top of it. The car missed by inches.
I got up and hurried home, and only when I had a chance to stop did it hit me. But, in the state of mind I had during the incident, that was the longest second and change of my life thus far.
The results of this research can now be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001295
That is not true. Time doesn't always travel forward. Time is statistically more likely (like on the order of 99.9999999999 (a million more 9's)%) to travel forward, but that does not mean it MUST ALWAYS travel forward. Even with that sort of propability, it SOMETIMES goes backwards.
Say you're burning a log in a fire. The wood turns into vapor, that vapor comes into contact with heat+oxygen, and a cemical reaction ensues. Carbon, water, light, heat, and other things are released. Well, acording to the statistical model of time, every once in a while, a little bit of carbon, water, light, heat, and other stuff gets turned back into the vapor. Now it's instantly burned again, but it does happen.
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
People experience the passage of time in terms of new and unfamiliar experiences. That's why the second leg of an out-and-back trip seems to take less time. That's why time seems to drag when you're bored. That's why "Time flies when you're having fun."
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Two monks did, though. Very convenient that they did, because it gave a man with an axe to grind (whether it was against religion in general or the Vatican in particular) a way to discredit the Catholic Church.
Read Late Birth of a Flat Earth, one of the essays in Stephen Jay Gould's book Dinosaur in a Haystack. I'll not spoil the story for you by quoting any more than this: the supposed Dark and Medieval consensus for a flat earth - is entirely mythological.
(One thing missing from the article. No seafaring nation could ever have believed that the world was flat. Ships fall below the horizon. Distant lands fall below the horizon. Any sailor afraid of "falling off" would be ... well ... a farmer.(
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
At least this was not about time dilation.
FAQs are evil.
I think we might be able to process somethings quicker for a short period of time. Reading flashing numbers may or may not be one of those things however. I would suspect if you can't see it you simply can't see it. Can they read more numbers flashed slower, maybe they could add them together quicker..that type of thing. Much more likely tho is process something related to the action taking place quicker. Reading flashing numbers seems pretty far from reactions one might expect to improve. Perhaps if you throw great big flashing numbers AT them...
;)
;)))
So totally not applicable and lame but...
Even just playing a race game. If i really focus i can see and hit most every spot and have plenty of time to plot my course. But i can only do a couple races like that and i start to slip. Someone teasing or challenging me beforehand can pump me up enough to easily kick their butt the next run. Sometimes it feels like i am just cruising along when it is really barely under control skipping from one bump to the next. I don't see why a serious event couldn't do the same to more serious reactions. And i would bet different people could well respond in varying degrees.
The ATV incident mentioned by someone. The fact you saw the other guy slip and can feel the ATV going over gives a second to pump you up before the reaction was required. Your system probably cuts out unneeded stimuli/thoughts so you can focus. Were you thinking of whats for lunch or whether to mount your trophy or such things during the fall
There may need to be a relationship. Not sure you could race faster while falling down a hill or i could avoid a object coming at me while i was racing....
A little better...
Hmm now that i think about it i can remember the whole maneuver one time i avoided a major wreck. The fact the tires squealled on all 3 points of the turn, where the other car stopped, how far i went into the other lane. Must have been a whole 2 seconds of my life. I can't think of any other 2 second period where i recall several details....
The guy behind me pulling over and asking where i learned to drive like that i'll remember too but probably for other reasons
As many have noted, this test only looked at the outside in unstressed occasions. It also fails to look at neurotransmitter levels--which I think they would have wanted to evaluate in an effort, at least, to gain more funding.
I'm so happy someone here understands probability distributions. I was beginning to worry...
[Ego]out
Your perception of the passage of time is calibrated, among other things, by your peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is designed to detect movement. Natural selection most likely gave it to us to detect predators that are moving at us fast. What happens is your emotions will change your focus of your eyes which then change how quickly you detect movements. Then your calibration for time is off because how sensitive you are to detecting movements is off. Hence the saying "Time flies when you're having fun". Most likely something to do with the nervous system. When you're frightened your focus sharpens, and so does your peripheral vision, and therefore time will slow down.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
The problem is the controlled environment, in a car accident, you have time to slow down your thoughts per say to induce a boost of speed based on the fact that the danger is real, and you release adrenaline, which is directly associated with movement and speed of your neurons firing in the brain. The problem to do this test properly would require placing people in real danger and see if this sort of thing works. Also you would next have to control what it is you are doing, someone who almost never bothers to be AWARE of their environment would not be good subjects, you would have to use a group which are used to using those senses to see if there is an improvement.
Someone who is blind will still be blind, someone who never trains their eyes to catch
motion will not be as good as someone who does it regularly...like a detective noticing the evidence in a room would be a better subject then someone who lives in front of a computer all day long....guaranteed!
Hmm, let me kick your butt off a 150 foot building and then see if you react a certain way. Yup, that is "science".
"It is strange that when a human was falling to their death, they could only read at a certain rate. Strange!" Now what would happen if we gave that same person falling to their death a comfy pillow and a teddy? Could they read a bunch of words flashing before them faster?
Yeah, let us make a big statement with zero real scientific evidence.
I have an "experiment". I could kick Eagleman in the face with steel-toe boots, at the time of the kick in the face, I will ask him to read the "Pledge of Allegiance" in a certain time frame. If he cannot do it, well, than that certainly means that human perception of pain is directly related to human perception of time. Right????
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
Just because they could not get this ability working, it's NOT a proof that it doesn't exist!
;) and when I looked up from the book the bus just arrived to the stop. It frightened me a bit because the moment i looked up it was just heading exactly my direction while maneuvering. That moment I just had about two seconds of time in maybe a half second to realize that it is not hitting me - the time started to flow fast again. It's not my memory telling me it was slow, but i can remember all the thoughts i had in that slice of time. It makes difference.
:) ;)
Anyway, some years ago i was reading The Chapterhouse of Dune (you know, interesting scifi
Nice to be Neo, folks
(just joking
However, never happened again since that time.
From the article's description, it sounds like they sped up the chronometer until the numbers were changing faster than the human persistence of vision is able to differentiate distinct images. All they showed with the experiment is that the fundamental biochemistry of the retina doesn't change under stress (that the rods and cones can't recover between sensations any more rapidly under stress than they do under unstressed circumstances). I would expect that, if our sense of time were to mean anything real (as opposed to just being a subjective illusion based on memory) then the speed of response to stimulii would decrease under stress or excitement, which should be easy to measure (did you ever take a braking response test in Driver's Ed. class? That's the kind of test they should have been doing). It is possible (even probable) that your overall response time decreases when you are stressed, because of all the extra neuro-transmitters in your system, which would certainly make things seem to happen subjectively more slowly.
just a ghost in the machine.
Being an adrenaline junkie, I've been in many high risk, very tense situations. Many with perceived and calculated risks and enough that took me by surprise. And in my experience its not so much that time slows down, its more that a person's senses sharpen; memories within a period of time become more important... suddenly. Whether its long term or short term memory seems to depend on the person or the nature of the stimulation. I think its the fact that you go from a lower importance of retaining / analyzing memories to maxing out in a very short period of time which brings you to feel like time has slowed down. It has not. Nor have you sped up. Largely beyond whatever reaction time your muscles have gained in the adrenal spike, your rate of perception has not changed, you just retain more vivid memories of that instant.
Similar, when people say time takes forever at a meeting (particularly ones they dislike), the importance of retaining memories of the event focus on either; 1) your inner monologue complaining about the issue, each repetition of those thoughts, and the perception of significant time passing between something seemingly-important happening to you, or 2) sweating each and every detail if you're in a pinch and have to contribute which makes you nervous, hence why each and every detail is important, and seems to drag on.
If I could relate it to anything, it would be like variable bitrate in mp3 compression; the parts determined as unique get the most importance and therefor most 'memory', while everything else gets loosely tied together, even if they all have the same baseline.
Next time I go to a soccer game, I'm definitely inviting you along. However, I'll be the one doing the driving.
They tested it wrong didn't they?
Extraordinary abilities in moments of stress are related to the situation and extricating oneself from it, not checking out what time it is. If, instead, they dropped a person off a cliff and tested whether the person could quickly grab a rope as it swung by at a pace they couldn't ordinarily perceive, they'd have a fun and useful test.
Here is another version of their test: I drop a big rock that you couldn't ordinarily lift on your mom. Then, I ask you what time it says on the 700 pound clock that is face down on the other side of the rock.
Time does not slow down. The reason time appears to slow down to "those involved" in an accident is due to the massive overflow of information coming into the brain thru the senses. The brain back logs these, like a buffer and a lot of it gets lost in retention. The effect? Time appears to slow down and large gaps of the event are not recallible.
/. This site is becoming more like f4rk.com.
People should have to research some of this stuff before posting on
Any athlete or even our own unfit gamers here can give you conclusive scientific (rather than anecdotal) proof that percepction of time can and does slow down on occasion. They can tell you of those rare times in which time seemed to slow down, and certains plays (or game scenes) in which one usually barely has time to react suddenly take place like in slow motion and one can easily get in position and take the shot. The objective, scientific measure that this is indeed taking place and is not just an illusion is the box score. Athletes in the zone have the game of their life, gamers break highest score records.
Personally, the couple of times I went into "the zone" as a gamer (in different games) I broke my previous highest score record by a factor of 10 over the previous one.
The study was measuring the ability to catch something below the retaining threshold of the sensors in the eye, and therefore, only succeeded in measuring visual acuity over time. It wasn't measuring how perception of time is handled in the mind, nor was it measuring the "think rate" or "clock rate" (and I use that idea only in the loosest possible way) of the mind.
We don't know how the mind works. Until we do, sensory testing isn't going to tell us a great deal about the penultimate performance limitations of the mind itself - just those of the sensory apparatus.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It seems possible that if you can have an epic dream spanning hours, days, weeks, In a single night. That the mind is capable of perception tricks with time. Most anyone who has had a full on adrenaline moment will state time seemed to slow. I know I have, though never to the bullet dodging speeds of the movies.
It's not just life threatening situations and martial arts. In any major sport, you'll hear about atheletes being in "the zone." As a goalkeeper in soccer, I can definitely tell you that there are times when the ball, even the entire game, seems to move as if in slow motion. A penalty kick that, in reality, takes mere seconds can feel, to the goalkeeper, like the ball takes 20 seconds to arrive.
It seems more a matter of focus to me, than it is a matter of time manipulation.
I think the key to bullet times is Hyperactivity and High Blood Pressure. Every time I've gotten in a fight or near death things move in slow motion. Or have I trained myself to do this through decades of sports, drifting, and skateboarding? (if it was just a memory effect later I'd be dead.)
Reading a list of numbers while in a stressful situation is like asking someone to do a sukoku during a car wreck. The ability of the mind to speed up and slow time has to do with perception during the event, not performing a specific task. A good example of slowing time arose during a discussion about hockey. Using Wayne Gretzky as an example, the reason he could make the plays he did was in addition to natural ability, the game moved slower in his mind. He was able to see plays faster and react accordingly because he had more "time" to process the events--his brain worked at a pace beyond his peers. As Gretzky aged(and other players evolved with the game via both skill, technology and the advantage of youth), the game became too fast for him to play with the same advantage he enjoyed during the bulk of his career. The evidence of this is when you take a very good player and put him in a game just beyond his optimal "time frame"--i.e. a game with better, faster players. If he can't adjust, his errors are glaring.
well, i have evidence that time can speed up. the squirrel comes to my window at least 6 times a day wanting a meal. 6 meals a day! obviously time is sped up twice as much for her.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
It isn't your time perception perse, but it is all about the recall of the event. If you're sitting in a boring meeting, your concentration fades in and out. You start thinking about what you are going to do after, or how boring the meeting is.
However, in extreme moments that get your senses honed and your concentration fine tuned, you pay precise attention to things. You notice more little things instead of broader movements. Think of it like turning up the FPS on a video game. Instead of recalling choppy movements because your attention was divided, you now notice details. I recall an accident I once had. I noticed the expression of suprise on the lady's face as she finally notices my car is in her way and she should have stopped. I remembered how the front of the car slamed into mine and how my perception was changed in an instant by shattering glass, I remember hearing (but not seeing) a loud airbag deploy and my facing hitting it. All of that was over in less than a second, but my recolection of it seems much longer because I was devoting 100% of my attention to it. In the moment however, things happen very quickly. The perceieved time in the moment doesn't change if you ask me. Reactions are still the same. But by paying more attention to it, my recolection of the event did change. The expirment in this regard is flawed. They should not have sped the nubmers up to beyond what the humans could see. If I was running the expirment I would display random images that the person should have to remember. See if they remember more images while falling or some other control. Either way if the numbers are displayed to fast for the human eye to process, there will be no recolection.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
I understood that insects, mice and small animals with high heart rates, metabolism etc saw the world moving slower than we did, is this still the case?
I have been in the situation where I have seen a stone flying at me, I saw it in flight and it was travelling bloody fast, but it didn`t matter how hard I tried to move my head out of the way, I couldn`t do it, then the stone hit the windsreen and chipped it badly. It seemed like ages, but I was not able to react in time.
When you are bored and there is nothing going on around you, you look around more and take more data in about your surroundings; you take in more detail. When you recall the memory there are more details to remember so the memory seems more vivid. If memories re like movies, the frame rate will be related to how many details you remember. The less details you have about a memory the less frames per second, so when "time passes by quickly" it is because your brain is not actively remembering many details about what you are doing.
When watching a interesting movie for example, you are paying attention to the movie and what is happening in the movie. You are not paying attention to anything else in the room and are not remembering details such as what time it is, what the weather is like, how many times the person 5 rows ahead of you picked their nose.
If you are in a boring movie though or you lose interest in the movie it seems to draw out and you complain that the movie was too long. This is because you become disinterested in the movie and your brain starts picking up details about your surroundings, and you have a more vivid memory about your experience at the movie theater (not necessarily more vivid memory about the movie.)
This is also why time passes faster when you have something to do, you remember less about your surroundings and the overall detail of the memory of the experience is lessened. (Note: there is a bold line defining the memory of the experience and the memory of a task. For example I may be sitting in class writing a paper: There will be the memory of me sitting in class writing the paper -- the experience -- and there will be the memory of what I wrote -- the task)
When your brain registers something as extremely important, such as falling off a cliff or other events which can determine your possible death or the death of a loved one, your brain starts recording the event into memory at a higher frame rate than usual because your survival depends on remembering this information and using it for the future. When you recall the memory things seem more vivid than typical memories because there are WAY more details.
You remember such events in slow motion BECAUSE there are more details. Analogy: If your brain is recording the event at 120 frames per second and your memory plays it back at 60 frames per second then you are going perceive the event as lasting twice as long. If you perceive something as happening over the course of 10 seconds but the logical part of your brain KNOWS it only lasted 5 seconds then you perceive it as slow motion.
Another reason it may seem to be in slow motion is becaue although the event may have lasted 5 seconds it takes you much longer to play back the event since you take time to focus and hang onto on details that you remember.
A dream may seem like it lasts hours but in fact may have only lasted 10 seconds. The reason it is perceived it lasted so long is because you don't remember any of the other 7 hours you were asleep so you are going to focus on those 10 seconds and all of the detail (even if not very vivid) it contained. 10 seconds is an infinite amount of time compared to zero.
http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=38709
More entertaining than meetings though probably even less productive; and you wouldn't want to do it twice in a day.
I believe the perception of time slowdown has to do with the fact that while performing actions subconsciously, you are processing information at a higher rate. Many of us have experianced subconscious actions. Video gaming, touch typing, and to a lesser extent on /. athletics ;)
Personally, I know this feeling from performance driving and racing. With a bit of practice, driving fast occurs at a subconscious level. Consciously, you're looking ahead, thinking about track conditions, strategy, opponents, whatever. Subconsciously you're processing visual, tactile, and auditory inputs at a very high bandwidth while outputting control actions on the steering wheel, pedals, and shifter. A similar thing happens during a car emergency on the road. Consciously you're thinking "OH S*$&", and subconsciously you are making control inputs to get out of the situation or brake like crazy. When I recall memories about racing, they seem to happen is slow motion.
The perception of slowdown occurs during the recall. Here's my theory. Since you're processing all that extra information during the event, some of it is probably getting stored in memory. When you remember it, you're processing that information at the conscious level, and since you consciously can't process all that information in real time, you percieve it slower than it actually happened. I think for this to work, the conscious thoughts have to be tightly liked to the subconscious stimuli and actions.
Here's a geeky analogy. Say you have a video encoded at 10mbps, however your player can only decode at 1mpbs. Ignoring the obvious technical problems with this analogy, the video would appear to be playing in "slow motion"
i remember seeing a show on PBS or Discovery and i can't remember the name. Anyway, at one point they discussed how pigeons can seem to wait until the last second to fly away when getting run down by a car. The reason, they explained, was that that the bird had essentially a higher sampling rate than we do. As a result it was like having a high-speed camera for eyes. A second still took a second to pass, but for the pigeon it SEEMED much longer giving them more time to react. Now i'm no expert, but i could certainly see where in an adrenaline fueled moment, things might kick into overdrive in our own bodies.
i'll throw out one of my own personal experiences here. 11 yrs old or so. riding my bike. i take a corner waaaaaay too fast. the entire process of crashing: losing control, sliding out, impact, sliding some more, bike going one way and me another, sliding some more obviously happened in a brief amount of time. However like someone else mentioned earlier, i EXPERIENCED it in slo-mo, not after the fact. If these people are really testing whether time ACTUALLY SLOWS DOWN then it sounds like they have too much time on their hands to me...
You aren't talking about the flow of time, you're talking about entropy.
The events you describe may be statistically highly unusual, but the events still possess an order in time relative to one another. The products of the "time going backward" reaction don't appear before the reaction started. Time is still going forward.
If you're not too scared to remember to read the digits, you're not scared enough to experience time dilation?
What a waste of an experiment. They should have really put people in life-threatening danger and seen if any of them could jaunte...
So the researcher is showing off the equipment in the first half of the video and trying to talk about some blaring music. Couldn't they turn the music off so we could hear what he's saying?
it only proves that Neo is the chosen one
Obviously time doesn't slow down in these cases, as many have already said. As with high speed cameras, perhaps our memories actually retain more information during times of danger / whatever, thus when we remember them, time being a "concrete" thing to our mind, we see the extra information and "feel" like time slowed down.
If time is relative and perception is relative, what meaning does "time" really have? What if they performed these tests with a giant screen flashing the numbers and the person traveling near the speed of light?
This may have been an artifact of the camera used to shoot the video or the encoding process, but it looks like another possibility is that when they speed up the changing of the numbers, it gets to be higher than the LEDs can turn on and off distinctly, so it would not be possible to distinguish numbers, even with a high speed camera.
In an accident in which a motorcycle slammed into the right rear of my car. The motorcycle driver did keep a bit of control and got around to my right but sudden deceleration had launched the passenger. I watched them get thrown from the bike in slow motion. I've never considered that time slowed down, just that I'd revved up to the point it all looked slow. I've had similar experiences but none were as pronounced as that one.
This is a trivial implementation of a well know phenomenon, that *perception* of time changes with environment. TIME DOES NOT CHANGE, only the perception. It changes with such things as age. The tests for this are so simplistic that I've used many different ones in one-day set ups in undergrad cognitive psych labs. There is absolutely nothing about this article that warrants its inclusion in /. except for the bullshit title it was given. I think a more relevant article would be that peoples' perception of time changes if others around them claim that the rate of time was other than what the person perceived. They will ignore their own senses and 'go with the crowd'. Same for perception of distance and of angular separation. All of these are intertwined.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I think the methodologyy of this test is completely wrong.
So they have proven that the image recognition part of the brain, along with the eyes, nerves and such, can not see more images in stress situation than in normal situations. Of course. It's still the same eye!
What most people experience, like I did myself a few years ago in an accident, is that the brain PROCESSES the available information faster and makes quicker decisions. This makes sense, because that's the role of adrenaline.
The test should have measured how fast someone could resolve an equation, or identify the directionality of the fall, or of something that has hit them, etc. In effect, they had to measure how our body has evolved over a few million years into helping us save our ass when our life is in danger.
There's absolutely no evolutionary advantage to reading flip-cards faster when one falls. Calculating a way to place your arms to break the fall, or grab onto something in the way, those are decisions that would be at an advantage to save your life, thus, adrenaline requests that our brain make those decisions faster.
So yes, in a sense, time slows down because you can make more decisions during the time of the event.
Conclusion: bad science.
The press release is fine, but the article itself is free for you to read: http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001295 It is not mired in deifficult scienc-y language and every educated person can read it understand the details of the study better than from just the media coverage.
Can someone give me back the 68 seconds it took for me to barely comprehend that interminable summary?
I mean, if we're going to use movies as an example, what if they were just ordinary people, while Neo and Anakin Skywalker went untested?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I'm with you on that.
Watch a car accident happen in real time. It's over almost instantly and if it's a violent rollover like yours you wonder the people inside ever perceive anything at all with all the quick changes going on.
But for someone in the middle of that accident the experience doesn't seem quite so harsh.
My experience was being cut off coming down a steep hill on my bicycle so I couldn't stop before hitting the back of the line of parked cars in front of me. Someone watching would have seen me brake hard, fly over my handlebars, smack onto the road then almost instantly smash into the back of a car: "Screech-thump-crash".
My experience of it was: "Damn, nowhere to go, gotta brake." "Damn, back brakes not enough, gotta go full on the front" although I knew this meant I would fly over the front which, sure enough, I did in what seemed to be a very graceful fashion. I hit the ground and rolled once which for some reason didn't hurt at all but I could see as I was rolling that I was about to impact the back of the last car with my head. I had enough time to clearly think to myself "shit, this is going to hurt" and then right after the impact: "Hey, that wasn't so bad."
I think what separates our experiences from this experiment is the presence of true mortal danger. Either of us could have died under the circumstances and that is what defines the perception of changed time. Being dropped off a tower in a glorified amusement park ride which you know to be perfectly safe is, although scary, just not in the same league as far as what your brain thinks in the middle of an unexpected potentially fatal incident.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Hi,
:)
Was reading along, and saw this post of yours because I added you as a 'friend' after I saw your habanero vodka post.
Anyways, I now have a jar in the closet half-filled with Vodka and 8 or so Habanero peppers (I'd forgotten how many you suggested when I was at the store) - it's labeled 10-24-07. After a month or so I poured half the tincture back into the vodka bottle, and left the other half in the closet to sit for the rest of the 4-6 months you recommended. I put the vodka bottle in the freezer, as directed.
I thought when I saw your post today that I'd tell you I made the drink. Then I figured that I might as well take my first shot. It went down alright - I wonder what 15 habaneros would be like!
Cross-posted your post (with credit) to a story on K5 on this record-breaking pepper, and shared some pepper stories of my own. Some weeks later I found a little ziplock bag filled with the little red peppers I mentioned in that post. The seeds sprouted, and I now have seven seedlings about to put out their first true leaves. I've got someplace heated to keep them for the winter, so hopefully I'll have my own crop of fresh peppers for my next batch of vodka.
Thanks for sharing your capsicum consumption method.
This is a neat story too - I don't have any experience with time distortion myself, but I know an 'old' (65?) martial artist who has very good control over his perception of time. He moves much faster than my eyes can track...
-james
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Perhaps if they send the subjects backwards at a velocity 0.9 of the speed of light, the results can be measurable...
There is absolutely no doubt the mind accelerates its thinking in times of extreme danger. There have definitely been life threatening situations that I would not have escaped so well from if I didn't think, and move so quickly.
Proof if this is sometimes I have come off slightly injured due to my reaction, torn muscles, bruises.
After an extremely dangerous situation has passed and I look back on it, I never think that time might have slowed down throughout the ordeal rather think about how I thought and moved to avert injury or death so 'quickly'.
I do not believe that being thrown off a platform with a net to catch the subjects is an acceptable experiment it is a controlled situation and the subjects know they are going to land in a net where as in a car accident the outcomes are totally unpredictable. Surely this has a different affect on ones thinking at the time of the ordeal.
IANAS(cientist), but this experiment, just by its description, seems highly flawed. They're basing it on the assumption that they can recreate a 100% accurate life or death situation with the subject by pushing them off of a platform into a safety net. They've already failed there, as the subject knows what will happen and has employed the necessary cognitive functions to prepare himself. Furthermore, they're assuming that the perception of time slowing can somehow be measured by reading numbers back aloud. Both of these are huge assumptions and leave much to be desired when seeking a definitive answer for a complex, metaphysical phenomenon. I don't buy it.
How can it be??? Reading numbers during a free fall is not gonna save your life. Brain will definitely be working on means to save your life. As someone said roller coaster rides are different than an accidents.
If you split the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds, each metric second equals eight tenths of an analog second. Close enough for government work, I say.
Your day on Metric Time: You get up in the morning around half-past 2 (that's 2:50, 50 minutes after the hour of 2, or 6AM analog time). You start work at a quarter hour before 4 (3:75 metric, or 9AM analog), You break for lunch at the stroke of 5 (your old analog lunch hour now lasts 42 minutes). You leave work around 7, and sit down to watch Leno around a quarter hour before 10 (79 minutes after 9 to be precise).
That's all Eastern Americas Timezone, of course. In the U.S., that's east of the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean. What, you didn't think the old analog timezones would stay in place, did you?
Oh, today at 11PM analog would be written in metric as December 12.958, 2007.
I don't know what's scarier, the fact that I knew all those numbers, or that I had them at my fingertips.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Ever try to watch a soccer match? My god that's the longest 90+ minutes ever. No wonder the "fans" have to drink and riot, it's the only activity they'll see in a afternoon.
This test tested the rate of external sensory perception in relation to discrete events. Unfortunately, perceptual systems have, you might say, hardwired hardware limitations. As I understand it in synapses there is a reuptake reaction that takes at least 1/50th of a second to complete. So perceptual systems should not be expected to form distinct impressions any faster than some relative threshold.
Now, instead of testing perceptual systems that lie far from the region of synthetic awareness, they should have used tests that engage deeper systems of interpretation and physical response time.
It seems to me that what most likely happens in crisis situations is that the brain modulates the routes of high-order thinking. You would expect some higher brain functions to be augmented. while others would be impeded. For example, strategic assessment or spatial awareness should tend to improve. The senses normally passive - like hearing and smell - should perk up. And your subject should be able to report that their experience of time seemed expanded, that they were surprised only a few seconds had passed.
I myself would be happy to design - and volunteer for - tests utilizing pure LSD 25 in order to test time dilation and expansion, as I can vividly recall several occasions where this has happened to me. I believe tests involving speed chess would be very fruitful. Also, there should be comprehensive tests of musical ability while under the influence of these substances, or others that target key areas, because of the similar but distinct high order brain functions involved, and its wonderful dynamic synthesis of perception, interpretation, decision-making, and execution in a well-defined domain.
Just some thoughts as I take another bong hit.
-- thinkyhead software and media
....it was a lame experiment...
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
this effect can be experienced with substantial doses of LSD.
Here is possible explanation I have considered. Maybe in times of stress our mind holds onto more information. So, when we think about it, even moments after, it seems like time slowed down simply because of the sheer volume of information that we can recall from during the event.
Time slowed down for me when I watched "Perfect Storm"
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I agree with everyone above it definitely seems as though time slows down in these sort of situations but it's interesting to think whether you are actually percieving things on a slower than normal time frame or you're just processing much more information than normal so when you rationalise it afterwards you assume time must have been slower in order for you to work through the options you did.
I've had two moments in my life like this, once quite recently on a dual carriageway where I was in the outside lane going around a fairly blind corner when I saw a builders truck coming the towards me also in my lane going the wrong way. Very luckily I had been just about to pull in to the inside lane and so had already checked my options before I saw the truck. However there was a period where I rechecked them, looked for signs the moronic truck driver was also thinking of changing lanes and made the manuever. All this could have taken no more than a second before I changed lanes and the truck flashed past me but I crammed in far more observation and thought than I'd normally have fitted in to that time frame.
The first one was when I was a young teenager climbing up some cliffs off a beach in Devon. I'd got to the top of the rock and there was another 5 or 6 metres of loose sand and dune grass to negotiate which I started up and because I was going in a diagonal line moved away from the point I'd climbed up the rocks. Around half way up the sand just gave way like a landslide and taking me with it was headed towards the top of the rock which was now a sheer 100M drop. At that point I thought to myself "oh no, I could well die here if I get carried down over that drop" and it seemed to me I first of all considered every possible course of action to help my chances if I did fall over the edge - try and grab onto a drainpipe I could see half way down, push myself off and jump and hope the rockpool underneath was pretty deep etc etc. I came to the conclusion none of that was very likely to work so just jumped and ran upwards and hope to outpace the sand coming down. Luckily this is what I was able to do and it can only have been 1 or 2 seconds before I made that decision but an incrediable amount of thinking had obviously taken place in those seconds.
i read this article tomorrow while bungee jumping.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
If the number thingie (that's a technical term, don't whine) is in the same space as they are, and this slowing down of time is a physical phenomenon (due to speed or whatever), then wouldn't time for it slow down at the same rate, so they don't see any difference ?
Maybe a better test would be to have independent observation which doesn't move at the same speed - say, a remote high-zoom camera on a pivot, tuned to swivel down at a speed calculated to match the falling object's trajectory.
Either that, or it's a latent time control brainpower thingie that only manifests when we're in *real* danger, not a controlled free-fall environment. Someone get researching how to unlock this, I urgently need the ability to fast-forward through meetings.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
The tests prove we do not in fact think faster under stress. But there is an interesting, and real perception effect, one I've experienced playing squash. The brain sweeps twice as fast for updating conscious perceptions as it does for activating motor responses, something like 40 hz perception vs. 20 hz. motor. So it sometimes feels like I'm moving slowly towards the ball. I get two clicks of thinking for every click of movement.
Are these people stupid? Talk about a frakking waste of money.
Truth, Just Us, And Hatred For All Mankind!
basically the whole thing just says that if your brain needs to work harder it can overclock for abit then drop down to normal speed
while sleep is basically a your brain doing re-indexing your files
and people in acomo just have a sever case of a windows vista install where all function has slowed down or crashed
You're welcome.
Bwahahaha!
i know the feeling, i swear to god that i spent an eternity in hell..eerrr married to my first wife.
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
how about i give you the finger, and you give me my phone call ;-)
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
As my maternal grandfather noted "Life is like roll of toilet paper, the closer you get to the end the faster it goes" At age 51 now I can see he was dead-on.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
It would also explain why time seems to go by faster as we get older - our higher-level filtering mechanisms get more and more experienced and classify a greater and greater percentage of sensory input as not remarkable enough to record in detail.
Ever driven somewhere you've gone a zillion times before and had absolutely no memory of being on particular roads or what you passed on the way? Same thing.
The phenomenon of being in the 'zone' (usually while being completely absorbed in a concentration-heavy task like creating art/code or playing a video game) may also be related, as people don't seem to record memories of the sense of time passing while in this mental mode.