Time can play such a joke with each of us: one fine moment it suddenly stops, and you see how everything around you froze or moves fragmentarily, as in slow motion …
It all started with an ordinary headache, but then things took an unexpected turn. Simon Baker decided to take a warm shower in the hope that it would give relief. “When I looked at the shower head, I saw the water droplets froze in the air,” he recalls. "The gaze focused on them for a few seconds."
If in ordinary life, jets of water are perceived more as a blurred movement, then Simon saw in front of him every drop deformed by free fall. According to him, the effect he saw reminded him of how the bullets flew in the movie "The Matrix" - "like a movie set in slow motion."
The next day, Baker went to the hospital, where doctors discovered he had an aneurysm. The immediate threat to his health overshadowed the experience, but later he mentioned what he saw at the neurologist's appointment. Fred Ovsyu - that was the name of the neuroscientist at Northwestern University of Chicago - was impressed by the clarity of Simon's story.
“He's a very smart guy. And a good storyteller,”says Ovsiu, who recently published an article about Baker in NeuroCase (the patient's real name is not given in accordance with the practice of such studies. In fact, his name, of course, is not Simon Baker).
On the face of it, time should flow at the same rate for everyone, but Baker's experience and others like it demonstrate that our continuous stream of consciousness is no more than a fragile illusion put together by our clever brains. By studying what is happening at such extreme moments, researchers gain information about how and why the brain can play such games over time. According to scientists, in some circumstances, we can all experience a change in the time scale.
While Baker's case is perhaps the most striking, a number of remarkably similar patient accounts can be found in the medical literature. There are descriptions of how time accelerated (this phenomenon is called "time-lapse"), as well as more fragmentary publications about the so-called akinetopsia, when the movement of objects is perceived as a sequence of static frames.
For example, one 61-year-old woman recounts how she was returning home one day, and the closing doors of the train and other passengers looked as if she was being shown “single freeze frames”.
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The 58-year-old Japanese, in his own words, perceives life as a poorly dubbed movie: the voices of other people during a conversation sound normal to him, but at the same time they are not synchronized with their facial expressions. Ovsyu believes that there may be many more such cases, they just are not described: "Since this is a transient phenomenon, they often do not pay attention to it."
Mutant Mercury from the fantastic movie X-Men. Days of Future Past”(2014) can move so fast that time for him in the world around him freezes.
Photo: bbc.com
Such experiences often accompany diseases such as epilepsy or apoplexy. Baker was only 39 at the time; it appears that his condition was caused by a weakened blood vessel that burst while carrying heavy boxes. As a result, a relatively large area of neuronal damage appeared in the right hemisphere of the brain. “In the pictures it looks like a cigar is stuck in my head,” he jokes now.
But why did what happened to Baker affect his perception of time? Clues can come from studies that have tried to identify areas of the brain that are responsible for the function of interest. Particularly interesting in this respect is the visual cortex called V5. It has long been known that this area at the back of the skull tracks the movement of objects, but it may also play a more general role in timing.
When Domenica Bueti and her colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne exposed this area to a magnetic field to disable its activity, the subjects found it difficult to perform two operations. As expected, they had difficulty keeping track of the movement of the dots on the screen, but they were also unable to determine how long some of the blue dots lingered on the monitor.
One of the explanations for this "double failure" says that our motion perception system has its own chronometer, which records the speed of movement of objects in the field of view. When his work is disrupted due to brain damage, the world freezes. In Baker's case, the problem could have been exacerbated by showers, as the warm water diverted blood flow from the brain to the limbs, further interfering with the brain's processing of external signals.
Surfers think very quickly - otherwise you won't catch the wave
Photo: bbc.com
However, this is just one of the options: not all patients who have experienced the distortion of the passage of time have damage to the V5 zone, so other elements of the brain mechanism responsible for timing may play a role.
Another explanation has to do with the discovery that our brains store impressions as separate “snapshots,” like stills on film. “A healthy brain rebuilds what happened by gluing individual images together,” says Rufin van Rullen of the French Center for Brain and Cognitive Research in Toulouse, “but if the malfunctioning brain destroys this glue, you may only see images that have no connection.
We all periodically experience the feeling that an ordinary continuous picture is being broken into frames. If you've ever watched cars overtake you on the track, you might have noticed that their wheels seem to be stationary. This is due to the fact that the discrete “snapshots” with which the brain captures the movement of the wheel cannot fully capture this movement. If, for example, the wheel has managed to make a full revolution between the “frames”, then on each of them it will be captured in the same position, as if it were motionless.
In addition, people who use LSD often report blurry traces left behind by moving objects, such as the bullet marks in the movie The Matrix. According to Van Rullen's assumption, this may be due to the fact that the brain in one way or another superimposes these sensory "images" on top of one another, and does not completely update the picture.
"At one moment in time everything is fine with me, and the next moment I am already in an altered reality." Simon Baker, a time stop man.
Often, participants in life-threatening accidents tell about dead time; according to one poll, more than 70% of people who were in the balance of death felt as if everything was happening in slow motion. Some researchers believe that this effect is solely due to the peculiarities of our memory - strong emotions are remembered in more detail, and later it seems to us that the events took much longer than they actually lasted. However, the stories of these people resemble the cases of patients with neurological disorders, so it is possible that we are talking about a similar mechanism.
Valtteri Arstila from the University of Turku in Finland points out that many people who find themselves in a dangerous situation start thinking at an accelerated pace. Here is what a pilot who survived a plane crash during the Vietnam War says: "When the nose wheel chassis broke, I clearly remembered - within about three seconds - more than a dozen ways to successfully return to the required altitude."
After studying the described cases and scientific studies devoted to this problem, Arstila comes to the conclusion that a mechanism activated by stress hormones can accelerate the brain's internal processing of external signals to help the latter cope with an extreme situation. “Our thoughts and movements are accelerating - and since we are doing everything faster, the world seems to slow down,” he said. It is even possible that some athletes train specifically when it is necessary to slow down the time: for example, surfers can often change the angle of their board in a split second, necessary in order to rise on a rapidly growing wave.
In dangerous situations, time often seems to slow down. But then it speeds up again
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Baker's experience was unique to him; he has now fully recovered from surgery to remove damaged blood vessels. He remains optimistic about the consequences of his illness, believing that in some respects it even benefited him. If earlier he could be called silent, especially in the presence of strangers (at school they even considered it a mental disorder), now his shyness has disappeared.
This is especially evident during our telephone conversation - my interlocutor is happy to talk about himself. “I didn’t just feel more sociable, I felt the need to speak directly,” he explains. Ovsyu asked Baker's wife to comment on his words. “She confirmed that her husband became calmer, more talkative and more friendly in the presence of other people,” says Ovsyu.
The experience of stopped time gave Baker the opportunity to appreciate the fragility of our consciousness. “It was a very concrete example of how what happens in a microsite of the brain can completely change your perception of the world,” he says. “One moment in time everything is all right with me, and the next moment I am already in an altered reality.”
David Robson
Bbc future