The whole thing about everything seeming to take a lot longer than it actually does (i.e. with the story regarding the lion, and much to my disappointment, the lack of a boat), is a side effect of the adrenaline your body has just dosed itself with. Your heart is cranking the RPMs, your blood vessels are opening up to allow the extra blood to flow to every part of your body, your brain has gone to full on general stations red alert alarm 4 mode, and is now actually processing all the copious amounts of information your senses bring in, as opposed to filtering most of it out like it does for most of your life.
Things don’t seem to go in slow motion, in my experience, but you basically think faster because you are now taking in all the details without needing to take the extra time like you normally would (adrenaline, it’s a hell of a drug). I think part of this might be related to how well trained/experienced you are in a given set of skills. If you are an experienced driver who knows the proper responses to a skid or having to stop suddenly, you are more likely to hit the breaks and steer clear of the hazard than someone who just never gave it much thought or hasn’t done it much.
I have a traffic related story from a minor road trip a room mate and I were taking out in California one time, near Fairfield. We had gone out to go shooting at an outdoor range we had found online, and were driving back that night, with that kind of intense darkness you only see on highways right after sundown. We’re driving and BSing, when just as we crest a hill we see a bunch of backed up traffic right ahead of us, moving much slower than we are.
I stand on the break pedal, feeling the entire car vibrate beneath me, and hearing my room mate say… something. I don’t remember the details, but it wasn’t a happy thing he said. We both realized that we weren’t going to stop in time, so I turned the wheel to the left until I was out of shoulder, and then turned it to the right, zig zagging the car to eat up more of that damned inertia. We stopped with maybe a foot to spare from the next car’s bumper. I wouldn’t describe the feeling as “calm”, but more like “Intensified focus”. Couldn’t say that I was thinking much either, more like concepts. “Brakes! Too fast! Swerve! Shoulder! Lane! Brake lights! Car behind us!” (there was a car close behind us, and nothing to be done about it save hoping he would stop soon enough too, or failing that, having faith in the engineers at General Motors and the workers at the plant in Lansing, Michigan that built the car, who seemed proud enough of their work to put a little decal on one of the windows claiming responsibility for the car’s construction)
After that physics equation had come to its conclusion and nobody had intersected with anybody else, we were both pretty shaken up, but, well, still driving, so we just took a deep breath, collected ourselves, and got on with the rest of the drive, laughing the experience off.
BTW, 2001 Pontiac Grand Am SE? Freaking awesome brakes on that thing. It’s a crying shame Pontiac got shuttered when GM went bankrupt.
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention: This reaction is pretty much what they are hoping for in the military when they make you do the same repetitive tasks over and over and over again, depending on the training environment, maybe while screaming at you in a motivating manner. They want you to go into that mode where you don’t think about what you need to do, you just do it because it’s been hammered into you as a spinal reflex.
