Neo, the hero of the movie The Matrix, wins battles by slowing the pace of time in a fictional world. In the real world, people who have experienced terrible events also talk about a similar slowdown in time at the time of the incident. Can we actually relive events in slow motion?
Obviously not, say researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studied how people perceive time as they free fall from a 100-foot height to the grid below. Although the participants in the experiment say that their falls lasted 1/3 longer than the falls of other participants, they did not experience more events in time. The flight duration was just a memory trick, not a real slowdown in time. The study is due to appear in the online journal Public Library of Science One.
“People often say that time went by in slow motion during car accidents,” said Dr. David Eagleman, assistant professor of neurology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. “Is everything really happening very slowly or does it just seem that time is slowing down? The answer to this question is necessary in order to understand how the brain perceives the passage of time."
When roller coasters and other similar rides weren't so intimidating that time would slow down, Eagleman and his graduate students Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta decided to find something more intimidating. Their choice fell on a free fall, where people fly down from a 150-foot tower without belay and land on the net. The speed during this three-second drop reaches 70 miles per hour.
“This is the scariest thing I've ever experienced,” Eagleman said. "I knew for a fact that it was completely safe and that it was a great way to make people feel like the process took much longer than it actually did."
The experiment consisted of two parts. In the first part, the researchers asked the participants using a stopwatch with a time-stopping function to reproduce how long it took other participants to fall, and how long they thought their own lasted. Most of the participants rated the duration of their fall 36% longer than the duration of the fall of other participants.
However, in order to determine if this time difference meant that people experienced more events, Eagleman and his students developed a perceptual chronometer that was attached to the volunteers' wrists. Numbers flashed on a screen resembling a clock screen. Scientists increased the rate at which the numbers appeared until the subjects could barely distinguish between them.
Their theory was that if the perception of time really slows down, the numbers will appear so slowly that subjects can easily distinguish them during the fall.
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In the course of the experiment, the scientists found that during the fall, the subjects easily read the numbers that flash at normal speed, and could not distinguish them at all when they were displayed at high speed.
“We have established that humans are not Neo from the Matrix who dodges bullets by slowing down time. The paradox is that the participants in the experiment felt that their fall took a long time. The explanation for this paradox can be given as follows: the sense of time and memory are interconnected. The subjects only thought it took a long time to fall,”Eagleman said.
During a terrible fall, an area of the brain called the amygdala begins to work more actively, creating a second layer of memories that arise along with those for which the rest of the brain is responsible.
“In this case, the terrible event is associated with richer and stronger memories. And the better you remember the incident, the longer you think it lasted,”Eagleman explained.
The study led scientists to conclude that time perception is not the only phenomenon that slows down or speeds up. “The brain doesn't work like a video camera,” says Eagleman.
Eagleman and his associates also confirmed this conclusion in the laboratory. An experiment to appear in Public Library of Science One was conducted by Eagleman and his graduate student Vani Pariyadat and was to create a distortion of temporal perception. For example, when they showed a shoe on the screen three times, then a flower, and then a shoe again, the subjects claimed that the flower stayed on the screen longer when, in reality, it was there as long as the boots. Through experiment, Pariyadat and Eagleman proved that the perception of time is distorted, while all other temporal aspects, such as flashing lights and sounds, do not change.
The conclusion of both studies was the same.
“It may seem that time has passed unusually long, but this does not mean that the amount of time lived is really increasing. It just means that when you remember the events, you feel like they lasted longer,”said Eagleman.
“It also has to do with the fact that as you get older, you feel like time is speeding up. In childhood, vivid memories of each event are deposited, and when you grow up, memories become less, because you have already experienced a lot and know a lot. So, when a child at the end of the holidays looks back at the past summer, it seems to him that it dragged on for an eternity. It seems to adults that it passed instantly."
Olga Polomoshnova