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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.
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 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
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!
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.
That's why I can type all this and then hit
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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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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.
Don't thank me, my boss mandates slashdot breaks every few hours so that we don't get burned out.
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.
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
In truth, time is an illusion...
Lunch time, doubly so.
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
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....
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'
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
Next time I go to a soccer game, I'm definitely inviting you along. However, I'll be the one doing the driving.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Wow, I had a shockingly similar experience about 10 (oh god, TEN!) years ago. Complete with the lightning like reflexes. I was working a a backpack and canoe guide in the Adirondack mountains, but had been asked to ride with group going on a three day mountain bike trek because they were down one staff member and I had the necessary first aid skills. On the last morning of the ride one of the kids bikes broke. I don't remember what, I think something with the rear sprocket. Rather than stop and make repairs, we just traded the bike I was on for the bad one. I rode on the bad bike with little problem, though I remember not being able to change gears. Anyways, as the ride went on, I pretty much forgot about being on a hobbled bike. We were less than a mile from being back when the trail made a sharp sidling cut down a really steep hill (actually the side of a sandy esker). I got about half way down when the chain came totally off the bike. The soil here was so loose and sandy that braking was useless. Here's where time stopped. Over maybe fifteen feet of distance at breakneck speed I analyzed my options. I couldn't shift my weight enough to ditch into the hill, I was gradually cutting sideways of the trail despite my effort, and if I ditched to my right I was going straight down an almost vertical run into the lake. Out of option I realized I was headed straight at a monster Canadian Hemlock. A beast of a tree, probably a 36 inches across. I don't know exactly what happened next, but the bike smacked into the tree, the next thing I knew I was going over the handle bars. I remember pushing off, flipping once in the air, hitting the ground tucked, somersaulting twice. In the second roll I distinctly remember thinking I needed to stop before I went much further. So, I sprang up out of the roll, jumped a little in the air to break the backward momentum and landed with a perfect plant, two feet square on the ground and my handy over my head in the air. I didn't have a scratch on me.
When we all recovered enough to take a look, the front reflector bracket of the bike had driven into the tree like a nail, the front wheel egg shaped, the forks bent back 6 inches and the rear wheel in the air up off the ground. It took two of us to rip the bike reflector out of the tree it was in so deep. I had that fork for a few years, and still have the chain. I wore in like a necklace long before it was cool. We used to joke that it was the same way if I had wrestled a bear or wolf I would have worn the teeth or claws. I never did figure out how I managed to go over, around or through that hemlock, but that will have to be a question for more advanced temporal physicists. I should have taken it full in the face, and can't figure out from my roll and trajectory how I could have gone to either side of it. And if you don't believe me, I took my wife there hiking several years later and there was still bits of plastic reflector stuck in the tree.
Are these people stupid? Talk about a frakking waste of money.
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