It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. “I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air”, he says. “They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds”. Where you’d normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”
One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots”, like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” says Rufin VanRullen at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research in Toulouse, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.”
What’s more, Valtteri Arstila at University of Turku, Finland, points out that many of these subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude”. Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation. “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze
Before I read... We don't actually really remember in "video clips" per se. We remember the snapshots, usually connecting them together, but able to remember single frames, along with all of the other data our minds collected along the way: smells, sounds, other sensory input.
ReplyDeleteTime slowing down during moments of crisis is normal to me. Maybe because I have been a bicyclist all my life, and been in a fair number of crashes :).
ReplyDeleteWhile flying through the air, I have time to run through the different possibilities of how I can land or roll, choose the best option and execute it.
A lot of our reactions occur more quickly than we can think.
ReplyDeleteI've often wondered if this effect could be exploited for a sci-fi novel : some kind of device that speeds up the brain's processing dramatically, allowing more time for learning new information. I suppose this has been already done in various VR fictions.
ReplyDeleteBicycle crashes weren't exactly what I had in mind though. :P