In the matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In the real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing as they slide unavoidably into disaster. But can humans really experience events in slow motion? Apparently not, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studied how volunteers experience time when they free-fall 100 feet into a net below. Even though participants remembered their own falls as having taken one-third longer than those of the other study participants, they were not able to see more events in time. Instead, the longer duration was a trick of their memory, not an actual slow-motion experience. The study appears online today in the journal Public Library of Science One. “People commonly report that time seemed to move in slow motion during a car accident,” said Dr. David Eagleman, assistant professor of neuroscience and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at BCM. “Does the experience of slow motion really happen, or does it only seem to have happened in retrospect? The answer is critical for understanding how time is represented in the brain.” When roller coasters and other scary amusement park rides did not cause enough fear to make “time slow down,” Eagleman and his graduate students Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta sought out something even more frightening. They hit upon Suspended Catch Air Device diving, a controlled free-fall system in which “divers” are dropped backwards off a platform 150 feet up and land safely in a net. Divers are not attached to ropes and reach 70 miles per hour during the three-second fall.

“It’s the scariest thing I have ever done,” said Eagleman. “I knew it was perfectly safe, and I also knew that it would be the perfect way to make people feel as though an event took much longer than it actually did.” The experiment consisted of two parts. In one, the researchers asked participants to reproduce with a stopwatch how long it took someone else to fall, and then how long their own fall seemed to have lasted.

View: Full Article | Source: EurekAlert.org

apparently they have never tried psychedelics...

Interesting.

But.... egads! That has to be the scariest test I've ever heard of.

I have experienced that a few times,one of them when I smashed my car a few years ago. I think is just your brain giving you time to take in whats happening. One time it happened at work I had time to visualise a picture from a book on how to assemble a peice of equipment.It seemed like around one minute but was actually a couple of seconds. Its a weird feeling.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Thought itself is energy, and can actually experience the slowing of time. The only way i can describe it is....imagine a dream..a very vivid dream...a dream where you went places, did things..and you remember a sequence of events. Now think about it...really hard...you did things..but there was no passage of time as you experience time when your awake..thats because thought is zero point mass...and being so...there is only infinity.

besides my dabbles in psychedelics,,i had this feeling in a wreck i was almost in but ended up in,,

i was waiting to make a right hand turn and acroos the street was a women making a left hand turn.she had been waiting so i motioned she could go first.she never looked and just took off she got hit by a truck doing atleast 60mph and at the point of impact everything went into instant slowmo,,,,,the truck that hit the car turned a weird 180nose dive,,i seen the bootm end of the truck,,the axel and all 4 tires came off the ground,,the camper shell of the truck flew towards me,,,i thought it was the truck landing on me as i was trying to lay my seat down to give me more room incase she crused my roof,,i remember reading EXCALIBER thats the name of the manufacturing company that made the camper shell,,,, i jerked the emergency break instead of the seat release,,,,anyway the camper shell rolled over my car no damage its light fiberglass,,but the lady the truck hit ended up hitting me on the driver side of the car denting every panel in my car,,,,but right after the camper shell rolled over my car everything went back to normal speed,,,it was almost like a movie clip,,scared the hell out of me.

That experiment and a car crash are 2 entirely different things.

The people KNEW they were going to fall the 150ft. Whilst a car crash is an unexpected event.

Maybe an event with an unexpected nature may trigger this "slow motion" feeling?

Reminded of endless math tests.....

"...Time goes by ,..so slowly...."

Time goes slower than a snail,And even slower when a 'crisis' happens.

Time goes slower than a snail,And even slower when a 'crisis' happens.

so does double posters...

Am I missing something? What's with the wave of new members coming in posting random nonsense about "energy" and "infinity"?

I've experienced this slowing of time in a sort of slow motion when I lost control of a car I was driving too fast down a country lane. The car lost cohesion with the road and started to spin, everything slowed down and my arms on the steering wheel were making adjustments together with my foot on the brake, some how I'd stopped the car from going down a deep ditch that was on either side of the road. The view in front of me at this time had slowed up considerably, it was like watching a movie in slow motion, I think its got something to do with the brain, something kicks in making your reactions much faster and thus appears to slow time down.

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this experiment proved anything. And I agree a scary but expected and known-to-be-safe experience can't come close to reproducing a random and possibly deadly event.

I have this type of thing happen very often. Not always in a life threatening way. Sometimes when I think really hard on something, and completely forget I'm around others, I notice that time went really slow, but it's the fact of paying attention to every single detail rather than skimming the obvious which gives the illusion time went slower.

Our lives are too fast paced now-a-days that we illusion ourselves enough time for it all. You can say that life is becoming less intimate with itself.

For example, If I don't sleep for a day or two, then sleep the deepest sleep I've had the day after, I have multiple vivid dreams that I don't forget when I wake. There was no sense of time during the dreams, nor does time seem to run as fast during that day as the usual. I wouldn't say it's a play with actual time, but of course it would be the minds trick. Time is perceived by the mind, thus it can be manipulated by it.

Amphetamines are also being studied with this effect, not only psychedelics. Amphetamines seem to be able to make time seem slower, despite the irony of it's nickname "speed".

Muy interesante.

¡TeraLink Estuvó Aquí!

I've been in a couple of minor car accidents as a passenger and I only experienced the feeling of everything slowing with one of them.

In that incident my friends 4x4 went into a spin coming off a large roundabout (road surface was damp) and the vehicle tipped onto 2 wheels, crossed to the other side of the road landed back down on all 4 wheels and plowed thru a hedge which brought it to a halt.

The whole event played out in slow motion, there was also the sensation of feeling nothing at all and having an out of the body sense. I was squashed up hard against the side of the backseat window but at the same time I felt 'suspended' it was weird.

Perhaps the slowing down sensation is something to do with a shift of consciousness or out of the body feeling.

I'm not sure if they're right here. Maye they should test the speed at which the eyes process the information in a crisis. By this i mean how many frames a person can process. The eyes process at 24 frames per second, so if there is a slight ajustment then you would see things slow down. Theoretically giving you more time to process. As a footballing goal keeper and now volleyball, i have done things where the ball seemed to move slower and yet people have said that i reacted quickly. Watch football (soccer) on a weekend and you'll see many keepers reacting much quicker than they maybe should, maybe it's great anticipation or maybe its an adjustment in frames per second.

after some time, when we will be able to scan human brain, I guess we will be able to make this trait perhaps even manual. Imagine, you could turn this feature (make your brain process information a lot faster) on and percieve the world around you in low-mo...

Would be awsome !!

I've also experienced this slowing of time and it usually happens when I am in deep trouble with my relatives or when I sprain an ankle or in a fight or flight type of scenario. I think it has more to do with the body then time itself. During deep trouble or a moment of being scared, your pupils dialate and you become more alert which makes you aware of time much more slower because your paying much more attention. The opposite of this time slowing down is when your having fun, time fly's because you are not as deeply concentrated as you are when you are free falling into a net, there is no adrenaline rush.