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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'."
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.
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.
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.
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!
I'm glad you've taken a break out of your busy schedule of ending world hunger, finding a replacement for oil, and curing every disease to comment on Slashdot. It's good to have you here.
Greeks knew the world was round.
The Church declared that it was flat. Despite the obvious fact that it was round.
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...
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....
Yeah, that's true. I first encountered it after spending several years in Japan where if you're 30 seconds late to a scheduled bus/train stop, you've missed it. It was quite a shock.
...". Of course, some things will never change. The AL in PAL still means Always Late.
Time does seem to move differently there. I want one of those test boxes to try out on myself.
Since that article was written, they've started working on the next generation. One of the songs they teach children in elementary school now goes in part "Be on time, be on time, that's the true Filipino Time
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.
We still don't know how the mind works, because these people were in a perfectly safe situation and KNEW IT. Now, if they had pretended to have been doing another experiment and then shoved them off the ledge suddenly, the experiment would have been valid. As they did not, a crucial difference(that of possible threat to life) between the experiment and most car accidents is present.
Y'know, while time doesn't exist, your comment about time being only a perception is utter bullshit.
Time doesn't exist means there's no dimension of time - there's no scientific consensus about this, seeing (surprise surprise) that we cannot accurately experiment on this yet. As in, there's no way to travel to the future or the past, because neither exist.
Time being only a perception is a corrupted view of this. The rate at which events happen is the same (and simultaneously irrelevant outside a subjective view). Your perception may change but it means nothing.
Or - you don't move or react any faster than you physically could, adrenaline just gives you a massive temporary boost in both reaction time and strength. Doing this all the time would burn you out quickly and would eventually kill you by cardiac arrest, and that's why you don't normally have such strength and/or reaction time.
Are these people stupid? Talk about a frakking waste of money.
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