How the Brain Stops Time

[marieelissa]

One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

I have had this happen to me alot. How about you?

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli.

An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?

"Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?"

That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201003/how-the-brain-stops-time

[ktheodos]

hm...interesting...thanks for sharing...definitely makes sense

[Tiffanywins]

One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye.

I have had this happen to me alot. How about you?

Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli.

An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat?

"Does the experience of slow motion really happen," Eagleman says, "or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect?"

That means that fear does not actually speed up our rate of perception or mental processing. Instead, it allows us to remember what we do experience in greater detail. Since our perception of time is based on the number of things we remember, fearful experiences thus seem to unfold more slowly.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201003/how-the-brain-stops-time

very interesting i have never thought about that, and believe me I DO thhink about a lot of unique, weird, amazing scientific things in life.

[kezalter]

I've had this happen to me, too.  The experience definitely felt like slow motion to me as it was happening, not in retrospect.  If anything I tried getting my memory to stop picturing the experiences in slow motion when I'd remember them later.