I’m sure we’ve all experienced episodes—immediately prior to a car crash or while playing a sport when an opportunity to score arises—during which passage of time appears to stretch out, and we briefly perceive the event occurring in slow motion.
Has anyone produced an explanation for the mind’s perception of time under such circumstances?
You don’t actually perceive time slower as usually, it just appears that way in memory – basically, your sensory apparatus is kicked into overdrive during such high-stress events, trying to take in as much data as possible to get a better grip on the situation, and thus you get a higher flow of information – looking at this in retrospect, it seems as if more time has passed then it actually did, because you accumulated more data in a shorter period than usually.
But what if it feels like slow motion at the time? Or our experience is immediately replaced by the memory and we only think it felt like slow motion at the time?
Perhaps it has something to do with our inability to act as fast as we are perceiving all the data. There is no doubt there are sensory distortions, especially when suffering from fear-induced stress. Police officers involved in traumatic incidents (shootings, accidents etc.) commonly report everything was going in slow motion. We are used to reacting to everyday stimuli in a certain amount of time. With heightened senses, it feels like we are moving through molasses thus giving the impression that WE are in slow motion giving the perception that the rest of the world is to.
I read a book sometime last year, about who is likely to survive a disaster. Sorry, I don’t remember the title. The author found a researcher who tested for that exact situation - and found that there is no difference in perception/reaction times, but rather it is a trick of memory. I think they had people jumping off a roof for the experiment.
Anecdote: I once crested a hill and braked/swerved/skided to avoid hitting a car. It seemed that time was stretched out. It was so stretched out I apparently had time to check my blind spot over my left shoulder AND flip on my left turn signal to indicate I was going to go into a somewhat wild manuever to the left. I remember thinking about these actions just like I would if I was changing lanes in a normal non-stressed situation (decision to do a routine habit without a lot of thought). Both I and the other occupants of my car were amazed at my split second stunt driving while still following the safe rules of the road.
I saw a documentary in which they experimented with this, and found that people DID perceive more, and were able to see things that happened too quickly to see during normal times. The experiment they did was to have people fall through the middle of a tower and land on their backs on a large net. The test subjects wore a thing that looked like a giant wristwatch and had a screen that showed random patterns in rapid succession. The patterns also included an occasional fleeting display of numbers, and the subjects were to try to see these while falling. They could, whereas they could not when they were not in this induced panic.
At the Exploratorium in San Francisco, they have an exhibit called Judging Time. On a screen, a dot appears for about a second. After a pause, an animated rapidly growing dot also appears for the same length of time. But the second dot seems to appear on the screen for a far longer span of time than the first. This illusion persists even when one is fully aware of it.
So I don’t think that this effect is purely a function of memory. That said, one study indicates that people can’t actually see and perceive more during periods of stress. A literature review might be helpful.
The Unthinkable - Amanda Ripley…
One thing that occurs during moments of high stress (such as combat or imminent danger) is that your brain will actually reduce or shut off some sensations in favor of others. For instance, in a low light shooting situation, your brain will devote far less “bandwidth” to sight (that is, cognitive processing capability to inputs from the visual cortex) and dramatically more to hearing, giving greater than normal perception. This can also lead to a perception of time going slowly as you have more “clock cycles” to devote to this limited amount of data. (The brain doesn’t actually work like the processor in your PC, but for the purposes of this analogy it is a suitable comparison, as your brain can only perceive so many event and respond for a given period of time.) According to Grossman’s On Combat, The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, soldiers on a battlefield will often cycle back and forth between different perceptions as one sense is deprived and input to another increased. This has been confirmed in controlled experiments.
The corollary to this is that sensory overload causes the opposite effect, for time to seem to pass more quickly, rendering the subject incapable of effective and calculated response. This is why police and soldiers use “flash-bang” grenades and other shock devices, as it renders the defenders less able to respond even if they remain conscious. The use of high stimulus (flashlight, pain, et cetera) in combination with continual verbal interrogation can often render arrestees incapable of resisting being restrained and confined.
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