The slow-motion effect may be your brain's way of making sense of all this extra information. Now it's writing down everything - every cloud, every piece of dirt, every little fleeting thought, anything that might be useful.īecause of this, David believes, you accumulate a tremendous amount of memory in an unusually short amount of time. But if a car suddenly swerves and heads straight for you, your memory shifts gears. Most of this, though, never becomes a part of your memory. "We're not writing down most of what's passing through our system." Think about walking down a crowded street: You see a lot of faces, street signs, all kinds of stimuli. "Normally, our memories are like sieves," he says.
"It's something more interesting than that."Īccording to David, it's all about memory, not turbo perception. It's not equivalent to the way a slow-motion camera would work," David says. "Turns out, when you're falling you don't actually see in slow motion. The numbers on the perceptual chronometer? They remained an unreadable blur. "We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10," he reports, "and everyone said 10." And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall. The falling experience was, just as David had hoped, enough to freak out all of his subjects. But David figured, if his subjects' brains were in turbo mode, they would be able to read the numbers. Under normal conditions - standing around on the ground, say - the numbers are just a blur. It flashes numbers just a little too fast to see. So, he outfitted everybody with a small electronic device, called a perceptual chronometer, which is basically a clunky wristwatch. But he also needed a way to judge whether his subjects' brains really did go into turbo mode. SCAD diving was just what David needed - it was definitely terrifying. Then, with a little metallic click, the cable is released and you plummet backward through the air, landing in a net (hopefully) about 3 seconds later. Imagine being dangled by a cable about 150 feet off the ground, facing up to the sky. (SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device.) It's like bungee jumping without the bungee. "But it turns out nothing there was scary enough to induce this fear for your life that appears to be required for the slow-motion effect."īut, after a little searching, David discovered something called SCAD diving. "We went on all of the scariest roller coasters, and we brought all of our equipment and our stopwatches, and had a great time," David says. His first attempt involved a field trip to Six Flags AstroWorld, an amusement park in Houston, Texas. But to do that, he had to make people fear for their lives - without actually putting them in danger. So David decided to craft an experiment to study this "slow-motion effect" in action.
This would work just like a slow-motion movie in a slow-mo shot of a hummingbird, for example, you can see each individual wing movement in what would otherwise be just a blur. If the brain were to speed up, he thought, the world would appear to slow down. Everyone, he says, seems to say the same thing: "It felt like the world was moving in slow motion."īut what is really going on? David started to think that maybe, in a crisis, the brain goes into a sort of turbo mode, processing everything at higher-than-normal-speed. He has gathered a huge number of stories from people who have survived falls, car crashes, bike accidents, etc.
Several years ago, motivated in part by his childhood plunge, David started studying the way our sense of time distorts in crisis situations. Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, and one of his specialties is exploring how our brains perceive and understand time. David knows that now because he has calculated how long it takes to fall 12 feet. He even did a little literary analysis: "I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland, how this must be what it was like for her, when she fell down the rabbit hole."Īll of that happened in just 0.86 seconds. As David remembers it, he noticed every detail of his surroundings: the edge of the roof moving past him, the red bricks below moving toward him. But between whoosh and the thud, something odd happened. But what looked like the edge of the roof was just tar paper, and - you can feel it coming - when David stepped on it, he fell.ĭavid was fine. He found a house under construction - prime territory for an adventurous kid - and he climbed on the roof to check out the view.
When David Eagleman was 8 years old, he went exploring.