The Slowing of Time

I had another one of those wrinkle in time events the other day. You know when all your senses seem to focus and your perception of time warps in the face of extreme anxiety or danger. All of a sudden everything seems to switch into a “Matrix” like slow motion. It got me thinking, what is it the cause of this perception? It must be just a perception and not a “real” happening because I have not been instantly rocketed to the speed of light allowing E=mc2 to kick in. (or have I?) I can recall many events where I felt the same perception of time: a car crash I was involved in one Fourth of July, a soccer game in my youth where I was facing the goalie by myself, having a gun pointed at me, and trail running out in the North Cascades. The list goes on to include other events where my senses seemed to have sharpened or my brain feels like it has kicked into turbo boots mode. Why? What is it? The research seems to attribute this “feeling” to epinephrine, more commonly called adrenaline. A wonderfully designed hormone secreted by the adrenal gland that feels really cool, I mean really cool, to experience. One of its many medical uses is to combat severe allergic reactions in the form of anaphylactic shock, a reaction to an allergen that can cause sever difficulty breathing and, if untreated, death. I have had the distinct pleasure of injecting myself with epinephrine using an Epi Pen twice. The most memorable while deadheading a rhododendron bush. I was up on a ladder and well inside the bush when two or three wasps decided to let me know I was invading their space. I was stung on the ear and back of the neck. My allergic reactions to bees had been steadily increasing in severity for a few years and today was the day to reach the pinnacle, complete system overload in three minutes. My doctor, who had trained me on how to use the EpiPen, said the next time I was stung I would have only a couple minutes to get the shot before I would have breathing problems. He was right. The brain rush was instantaneous or so it felt; increased heart rate, opened breathing tubes, it was amazing. (Dave, the friend who rushed me to the hospital didn’t seem to agree, that’s a story for another day.) All this excitement happened, as you might guess, in slow motion thus bringing us back to the topic of the day, perceived slowing of time. Here is the latest research, at least the research that I could find, read, and understand. David M. Eagleman at Baylor U. seems to be a leader in the actual real world study of the phenomenon of perceived slowing of time. Click on the time perception link it’s pretty cool stuff and not to hard to read. Here is what he theorizes is happening in a nutshell, if I can get it right. The brain perceives a stimulus that triggers a release of adrenaline boosting brain activity. This increased activity doesn’t increase the speed of the brain, and thus slow external time (drat, no time travel), it allows for increased processing ability of sensory input. For instance on a typical day at any particular moment you don’t feel the fabric of your clothing touching you skin even thought it is. It can be thought of as sensory background noise, useless and of no value to our survival, and thus is filtered out and not logged into memory. But when a stressor is perceived and the brain is bathed in “turbo-boosting juice”, all this normally brushed aside sensory input is logged into memory. Here is where the perception thing gets weird. Our minds are comfortably lazy processing “X” amount of input, discarding most of it valued as useless static. But when we are under stress and revved up, the amount of input processed or perceived as valuable to our survival, skyrockets to “X to the 10th power” (or something like that, I’m just trying to quantify it so we might understand). Now the brain is taking in and storing a volume of sensory input normally reserved for the lazy days of August in about 15 seconds, and (stay with me here) because we attach a time value to a specific volume of input, once the input is dramatically increased time is “stretched” to match the increased sensory input. Let’s see if I can explain it differently. Visualize an English ruler with 12 inches. The inches are broken down into 1/16 increments. This ruler will represent an amount of time, say an hour. Now, if we fill in each 1/16th of an inch, or 20 seconds (60minutes/12inches/16=about 20 seconds), with 10 bits of sensory input, in an hour we will have a total of 12x16x10=1920 bits of sensory input. (Remember this is just an illustration and the example will fall apart at some point.) Now we are being chased by a lion across the Kalahari dessert. To most this would be perceived as a stressor, thus triggering a wave of naturally produced brain speed juice. Back to the ruler. Each 1/16 of an inch normally content with its ten bits of sensory input is now being crammed with 1000 bits of input including such things as the sound of the hungry lion and the smell of his breath. But the bits need space so the 1/16th of an inch is stretched to allow for elbow room (Do bits have elbows?). The 1/16 of an inch is still labeled a 1/16th of an inch in our mind, with a time value of 20 seconds, but is stretched over a span of 2000 seconds (33minutes and 20 seconds) on the new ruler because we have multiplied the amount of bits by 100: 10x100=1000. Confused yet? Deep breath… So here we have our mind, perceiving 33:20 minutes worth of input in a span of 20 seconds. Our mind cannot change the 20 seconds value because that is hardwired. What changes is our perception of the 33:20 minutes. In an amazing mental adjustment we convert the bits per second into seconds per bit and our perception of real time is that is has slowed because we are processing more information per second than we do normally.(It confuses me even more as I try to describe it.) So the next time you are chased by a lion, or in a car accident, or at the peak of athletic performance and feel time slowing you can rest in the knowledge that you mind is not actually going faster it is going more. What? Never mind, it just a theory. Tony