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Does Time Slow Down in a Crisis?

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In The Matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In our real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing of time as they slip unavoidably towards disaster.

"Does the experience of slow motion really happen, or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect? The answer is critical for understanding how time is represented in the brain." That is the question being asked by several American scientists who, for science, decided that jumping off a 45-meter high platform would be a good method of discovery.

Their study focuses around how the brain deals with emergencies, and whether time really does slow down, as Hollywood would have us believe.

There is a common thread among victims of car crashes, and other such disasters, that time seemed to slow down. It is as if time all of a sudden decided to allow you to view everything that is happening in minute and horrifying detail.

David Eagleman, an Assistant Professor of neuroscience and psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, headed up the experiment. "It's the scariest thing I have ever done," he said. "I knew it was perfectly safe, and I also knew that it would be the perfect way to make people feel as though an event took much longer than it actually did."

The researchers had attempted to acquire the same results from roller coasters and other frightening amusement park rides, but there was still that element of safety. So they took the next step, Suspended Catch Air Device diving. With no ropes at all, participants fall backwards off a platform 45 meters high, and fall at a rate of some 112 kilometers an hour, in a fall that only lasts 3 seconds.

However, one of the results of the test found that each participant thought that their fall had lasted 36% longer than it actually took. The second half of the experiment focused around a device they had designed called the "perceptual chronometer." A watch like device that straps to your wrist, it flicks through numbers at a high speed, normally undecipherable.

Their belief was that, if the brain did speed up due to adrenaline during a crisis, then the numbers would have slowed down enough to read; or, in reality, the brain would have sped up enough to read the numbers.

The experiment found that none of the participants were able to read the numbers during their fall (though whether anyone would be able to focus on a watch during a three second 112 k/ph fall is another question altogether).

What is actually happening, according to Eagleman’s study, is as a result of your memory. According to the study, the part of the brain called the amygdale becomes more active, and lays down extra sets of memories that go along with the actual events.

"In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories," Eagleman explained. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."

Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by."

And though the results of this study can lead towards disorders linked with timing, such as schizophrenia, Eagleman believes "it's really about understanding the virtual reality machinery that we're trapped in," Eagleman told LiveScience. "Our brain constructs this reality for us that, if we look closely, we can find all these strange illusions in. The fact that we're now seeing this with how we perceive time is new."

Posted by Josh Hill