What is it that makes time appear to slow down?

[jdurg]

This is a question that I'm just a bit curious about. Yesterday morning, I got into a car accident on my way into work. I was blinded by the sun and saw something dart out in front of my car so instinctually I swerved to the right and wound up hitting a telephone pole. I was perfectly fine and nobody else was involved, but it still kind of sucked.

 

Anyway, what has been really weird is that in my mind I keep replaying the accident and it just appears to be playing in slow motion. In addition, there is this really weird haze about the entire situation. I mean, I was there and remember it happening, but a lot of the details are incredibly fuzzy. Things such as the route I took to get to where the accident took place, the exact street I was on, what it was that darted out in front of me (I believe it was a dog, but at that moment I couldn't tell and didn't want to risk hitting a child), etc. etc.

 

What is the chemical in your brain that makes you have a hazy memory of the situation? Also, what process results in the apparent slowing down of time as everything is happening? Today I feel MUCH better and a lot of the stress and bad feelings have gone away, but damn, I wish it would all go away.

[insane_alien]

i know what you mean, pretty much the same thing happened to me about a month back, a wee kid ranout into the road from behind some bushes and i almost totalled my car and some other guys car. thankfully nothing bad happened and cars and child were unhurt. can only remember slamming on the anchors and a couple of other wee things and not much else.

 

couldn't find out what causes the slow down of time though.

[YT2095]

it`s a process.

the brain filters out all trivia incl most colors even, your "Sample rate" is upped (that`s the time distortion), it`s all part of the Fight/Flight response.

[jdurg]

i know what you mean, pretty much the same thing happened to me about a month back, a wee kid ranout into the road from behind some bushes and i almost totalled my car and some other guys car. thankfully nothing bad happened and cars and child were unhurt. can only remember slamming on the anchors and a couple of other wee things and not much else.

 

couldn't find out what causes the slow down of time though.

 

It's freaky, isn't it? I didn't know what it was at first, but thinking back it was way to small to be a kid. The problem was that the sun was right in my face so I didn't get a good look and just had to go on instinct. I figured swerving to the side of the road would be safer than swerving into traffic. My car thinks otherwise. Still, it's odd how the brain reacts in situations like that. How it slows everything down and really makes you psychologically screwed up for a while. Yesterday was horrific as I couldn't think straight all day long. Today has been much better, but when I go and drive into work again on Monday I'm sure some nasty flashbacks will happen. Ugggh. Stupid brain biochemistry.

[YT2095]

it is a little disconcerting sure, but it`s there to help you to survive.

the brain goes into a high end Beta mode roughly about 40hz so you process data Much faster than you normaly do, compare this to Theta or Delta frequencies that are much slower than your daily frequency, and come into play when you sleep, you can be snoring away for hours and then wake and it seems like no time has passed or passed very quickly.

 

Glider will be able to answer far better than myself though.

[Ndi]

It's all the adrenalin and the chemicals. For example, after my "big" car crash not only it took me a while to slow down but I was also shaking like crazy. I wasn't scared or shocked per se, I was actually calm enough to pick the pieces of my car off the road to resume traffic. But I was on overclock, high breathing rate, increased vitality, etc, everything one needs to run from a predator.

 

Ah and it is said that fright boost the learning process temporarily so you have the ability to actually learn something from the 1 second process and remember what you did to survive. Nobody ever forgets these moments, you might notice even old people remember such events "like it happened yesterday". I certainly recall my flight/fight moments.

[Sequence]

yeah it happens to me to, nothing big like car accidents. I'm really good at dodgeball because when I'm playing everything seems to slow down. Now that it's mentioned, I don't remember anything of it. Just doing it. No colors or feelings. Just instinct to not let the thing flying at me hit me.

[insane_alien]

happened again about twenty minutes ago. some half-wit decided it would be fun to go round a blind corner at what must have been 60-70mph. the eejit missed my car by about 10cm. seemed as if he was going past real slow though.

 

lets just say there are skidmarks both on the road and on my underwear.

 

i'm still jumped up with adrenaline and can't actually sit still just now.

[pioneer]

There are two time distortion affects. One is where time appears to slow down, during critical events, such as war, accidents or close calls. There is also the opposite affect, where "time flies when you are having fun" or time appears to speed up, such that hours can go by, and we feel like we have been at it, for a much shorter period of time.

 

When time slows down, this is usually associated with some extreme state of stress. When time speed up, this is usually associated with the opposite, or a state of enjoyment. The first is trying to avoid something and the second is in a state of fully embracing whatever gives us the enjoyment. The first is a differential type of affect, while the latter is an integral affect. This would suggest the left and right hemispheres playing a role in how we perceive time. If we go into a pure left hemisphere affect, time gets highly differentiated, i.e., slows. If we go into a purely right hemipshere affect, time gets highly integrated, i.e., speeds up. For the most part, we use both sides of the brain, at the same time, so the two affects cancel.

 

There is an old bible saying, "Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." From a time perception point of view, this culturally induced perpetual fear, would cause time to slow down more often, i.e., an accident always about to happen. This would allow the ancient people to become more aware of subtle things, that might cause them to unknowingly make the wrong call. The result was the left hemisphere got a better workout, compared to a free spirited nature child, where time flies in paradise.

 

For example, if you asked someone what happened in those 2 seconds before they had the accident, they can do into a lot of detail. Ask the person playing the video game for three hours, having fun, they may summarize those three hours with about the same number of words. The fear of God, in ancient time increased the left hemisphere work-out. It made the day drag by, requiring culture help fill in time with activities. If one could find their joy, then they could return to right side paradise.

[Revenged]

That's a load of nonsense about the left and right hermispheres pioneer... You are just making things up...

 

You are always getting in sensory information - to both hemispheres - it's actually exceptionally percise... It's just that your brain only filters out the important information... When you are on deaths door - like in a possible car crash - your brain doesn't filter out sensory information... It takes it all in because it's a near death experience and we have evolved to not die... Simple as...

 

The apparent heightened senses in the 'fight or flight responce' is nothing to do with the body's internal circadian rhythm...

[pioneer]

The left and right hemisphere store data in different ways. The left is more differential, while the right is more spatial. What that means is the right side memories are more data dense. The left hemisphere is more differential and stores data at a much lower data density. For example, the right hemisphere has a 3-D memory for yellow, that allows us to know an unknown yellow is yellow. All the yellows we know are in that 3-D memory, allowing extrapolation. The left hemisphere will have each yellow in a separate memory spot, that may also have it unique name.

 

During stressful situations, where time appears to slow down, the rise in the brain wave frequency, causes all the neurons to fire faster. These spatial memories get going much too fast be conscious. Only the slower differential memories in the left hemisphere are data thin enough to still be conscious. The result is the 3-D memory becomes fully unconscious, for an instinctive reaction, with us conscious of the left side memory firing really fast, i.e., data processing in a shorter time than normally occurs.

 

This has to do with what I call the ego set point. The ego or consciousness has a data speed set point. As the brainwave frequency changes, certain types of memories will come to the front, because they overlap the set point speed. When time is flying because we are having fun, the brain waves are much slower, allowing the 3-D memories to become more conscious. These allow us to be smore pontaneous and creative due to fast data processing. In this case, the left hemisphere data is going too slow for the set point. This is what becomes more unconscious. It is still functional, only the right side of the brain is using the left side for differential output. The differential output become less of a conscious task, and more of an reflex activity, i.e., talking or game play. This is how the prehuman mind worked, until the invention of law/fear.

[Fred56]

The apparent heightened senses in the 'fight or flight responce' is nothing to do with the body's internal circadian rhythm...

During stressful situations, where time appears to slow down, the rise in the brain wave frequency, causes all the neurons to fire faster.

Because we know that the visual cortex is exponentially more active during the danger response, it is probably safe to assume that it is “working” a lot more, processing the images that are flooding in to the cortex from the now also much more active eyes (we look around a lot). The internal timing mechanisms in each cell of our brains also is “fired up” into running faster, so we can process more information. The system clock speeds up. So time “appears” to slow down.

[iNow]

There have been studies done with rats where they are trained to press a lever every 12 seconds (+/- .5 sec) to receive a food pellet. They are injected with saline as a control, and they very consistenly hit the lever at very close to 12 seconds and receive the food pellet. This shows that they can be trained to track the passage of time with a high degree of precision.

 

The same rats when injected with cocaine tend to hit the lever more quickly, despite their consistent performance hitting it at 12 seconds without the stimulant in their system. The average was for them to hit it every ~8 seconds (instead of the 12 for which they'd been trained), showing that their perception of time had sped up.

 

Another set of rats who had been trained to press the lever every 12 seconds for a food pellet, and which were very good and consistent at this task, were given marijuana, and they tended to wait very long before pressing the lever, on average 16 seconds. This showed that their perception of time had slowed.

 

Overall, the study showed a clear shift in the rats perception of time due entirely to the concentration of various chemicals in their systems. So, it stands to reason that when our own internal chemicals change concentrations that our own perceptions of time will equally be impacted.

 

Andrenaline and cortisol, dopamine and seratonin, and all manner of other chemicals in our bodies change depending on what is happening in our environment, and consequently so does our perception of time in response.

 

 

EDIT: Below is a YouTube link to a part of Michio Kaku's series "Time" which describes this.

 

[DrDNA]

There is an interesting TV series on the Discovery Science Channel called "Time". It is hosted by a Japanese-American physicist whose name escapes me....anyway, they showed a study to simulate time "slowing". They gave a guy a digital display that he wore on his arm that flashed 2 digit numbers too fast to tell what the numbers actually were. Then they dropped this guy from 30 stories into a net and had him watch the display on his arm on the way down. Amazingly, his could tell what 2 digit numbers were displayed as he was falling. The stated that it is linked to the frontal cortex and adenaline.

It was very interesting. You might want to try and catch the series sometimes.

[iNow]

It was very interesting. You might want to try and catch the series sometimes.

 

Or, just look at the link in the post immediately before yours.

 

 

[DrDNA]

LOL. Shouldn't try to blog while cooking dinner.....

[MrSandman]

Well, I did read a book, but I'm no expert. I believe that it has to do with actually brain chemistry rather than just adrenalin. Like an increase in the chemical much like L-Dopa that cause increased brain activity. In your situation I bet a less exprience driver wouldn't have reacted as quick. You probably recognized the situation as a threat that released the chemical in your brain to think quickly. Adrenalin usually comes too, but according to what I read there is this mustache looking thing that releases a chemical like L-dopa to increase brain activity. Your brain sort of reacted subconciously telling your body to do certain things, but however afterwards you realized what was really going through you head about why you were doing this.

[iNow]

MrSandman, good post. Your comment about having read a book which means that you're now an expert made me smile too, so thanks.

 

A few quick points. Adrenaline is big a part of our overall brain chemistry, so it might not be appropriate to separate it from the rest unless there is a specific purpose for doing so.

 

Next, L-Dopa (levodopa) is actually a precursor to dopamine. It is dopamine which is likely to have the effects you describe. Since L-dopa helps to synthesize more dopamine, and we see increased activity once it's administered, focussing on the dopamine itself would seem more appropriate.

 

Otherwise, you're points are quite valid. It sounds like you are speaking primarily of the mechanisms involved with the "fight or flight" response. I've inlcluded a link below for a cursory overview on this if anyone's interested. Enjoy.

 

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/auto.html

[cyriac]

It doesn't look like anyone tried to answer jdurg's "hazy memory of the situation". To put it simply - there was not much information available to remember. Going deeper, the brain tends to categorize visual information according to importance/relevance and ignores everything else. When you're driving, you're usually allowing your well-trained subconscious mind to control the vehicle using visual information of the road, while your conscious mind (i.e. you) is thinking/visualizing something else - e.g. things to do at the destination, someone talking on the radio, the stupid sun in my face, the shady guy with a knife in the back seat, etc.

 

The subconscious mind is like an extremely quick pattern-matching machine which finds patterns from all the sensory devices (visual, aural, touch, smell, taste) and performs either an instinctive or trained task, or notifies the conscious mind to make a decision (which is much slower). So, when you spotted something dart out in front of your car, your subconscious mind rapidly hunted for all possibilities with the limited information it was given - "it's a moving object... has to be something that's alive... a dog? a child?" A kid getting run over, or almost run over by a car is not an uncommon visual. You have probably seen plenty of it in movies. So it is likely that your subconscious mind associated this experience with that memory. The instinctive/trained reaction is to hit the brakes and swerve away. At this point, your conscious mind should already have been notified. I'm betting that it was a conscious decision to swerve right rather than left.

 

Back to the hazy memory... only the conscious mind is capable of recording new information and creating memories. The subconscious later prioritizes and catalogues this information during sleep. As far as we know, the sensory information fed directly to the subconscious cannot be remembered (or is very "hazy"). Hence why most people cannot remember their dreams or have a very hazy memory of them. In your case, your conscious mind participated very little in the whole event except for the aftermath. Notice how you seem to remember your decision to swerve right - a possibly conscious decision. Also, you remember thinking that it might be a kid - another memory where your conscious participated. Almost everything else was subconscious - hence hazy.

 

Phew! That was a long post! Sorry I couldn't make it shorter.

[stevo247]

I’ve had a few driving experiences of similar intensity. One night, when I was young and very stupid (I had been drinking), I had taken my eyes off of the road to look for something in the car, and when I looked back, I saw a mailbox tumbling in slow motion towards the windshield, and then a tremendous explosion. Thinking that I had simply hit a mailbox, I couldn’t figure out why my car had stopped and wouldn’t start. I got out of the car to survey the damage and to my complete and utter shock, I discovered a gigantic, deep, U-shaped dent in the middle of the front of my car. I had gone clear thru a telephone pole. The mailbox was about 4 feet before the pole. I had been travelling about 40mph when I hit that mailbox. So the time frame of when I saw that mailbox tumbling in slow motion, was the time it would take for my car to travel 4ft. at 40mph. That mailbox looked like a slow tumbling satellite travelling towards the windshield. It wasn’t going to hit the windshield, however. I was pretty sure of that. I had instantaneously calculated its trajectory, and it was going to clear the windshield. No need to duck. BOOM!

 

What’s also kind of interesting, is when I explore the vivid memory of the tumbling mailbox, I can see the pole.

 

I’ve had similar experiences while being a passenger in a car during an accident and while avoiding potential serious crashes. It seems to me, that these sudden crisis situations cause every available sensory apparatus to be on full alert, all centers awake. This state of hightened awareness has a peculiar timelessness quality to it. Since split second responses are required for survival, an incredible amount of data from every available source, needs to be assimilated. This slowing down of time, seems to make it almost easy to calculate your next response. I’ve had situations where another driver has done something unexpected and very stupid. The maneuvers I had to put my car through to avoid a catastrophy were complicated and needed to be impeccable. It was like threading 10 needles in 2 seconds. But it was almost easy because of the time slowdown, the automatic focus and integration of all useful relevent data, and the spontaneous co-ordination of my response. After one of these phenomenal maneuverings, with fishtails missing cars by inches etc., I remember looking in my rearview mirror. I saw a guy on the sidewalk jumping up and down, pumping his fist in the air, and smiling like he had just seen the most unbelievable thing ever. I felt the same way.