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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'."
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.
The advantage of using 60 is that it's an abundant number so it is easy to split your hour in 2 parts, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 10, etc... This comes up a lot in the middle ages when people need to precisely measure stuff but have only relatively crude instruments with only integral markings on them. That's also why there are 12 inches in a foot instead of 10, because it's a lot easier to split 12 into 3 or 4 parts (a common operation) than 10.
I read the internet for the articles.
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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Days, weeks, and months are going by quicker than I ever remember, and I see NO sign of it slowing.
My favorite theory about that:
at age 5, 1 year = 1/5 of your life
at age 15, 1 year = 1/15 of your life
at age 40, 1 year = 1/40 of your life
and in our heads we measure time relative to our lives.
Well, I like it, so it's true.
Your higher brain functions work to make your consciousness a seamless experience. Your lower brain functions, more concerned with survival, do not attempt to do this. Thus, when the body is in a fight or flight mode, time seems to speed up, slow down and become disjointed. This is how your primitive lower brain functions work, they don't care about making it seamless, they care about processing the data your senses are giving as close to real time as possible so you survive.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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...
In truth, time is an illusion, however in the Earth plane we use it as a point of reference
About 15 years ago my friend Rick and I were out deer hunting and both of us got big deer (Missouri corn fed ones) and we were hauling them out of the valley on a 4 wheeler. They were tied on the front carrier.
There is one point where the edge of the bedrock stick out and it is always wet and icy in that vicinity. I told Rick that we better walk the 4-wheeler out in this area but he is one of those large barrel chested men with mammoth arms and he just put his hand on the front of the 4 wheeler and held the front down as i was cautiously driving up the steep slope. I had gone about 15 feet when he slipped on the ice and let go and the 4 wheeler immediately flipped backward throwing me down 15 feet onto my back with a 4 wheeler and an additional 450 lbs of deer tied on falling toward me.
Suddenly everything moved in very slow motion as it came towards me ( just as you experienced with your shot) and I merely lifted my legs up and positioned them and had plenty of time to catch the 4 wheeler's seat with my legs and toss it about 20 feet away.
To my perception all of this took about 10 seconds to accomplish. To Rick's eyes it happened in a flash and he could not comprehend how my reflexes were so quick... in reality they were not. I simply was on a different timeline than he during that moment.
I agree that Time is only a perception.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
The speed of light in a vacuum may be constant, but once other effects start getting involved the picture changes. I think this was an interesting experiment, though I'd like to see it repeated under the same and different conditions. You can't prove anything scientifically unless the experiment is repeatable (by other people).
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.
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