Thirty seconds of thoughts punch into a half a second of reality. Time slows or comes to a halt. Think about a car crash. How much time passes from the moment one realizes a vehicle is in front of them to the moment air bags go off and the speedometer halts at zero? This type of experience can often feel like 10 seconds or more, but often takes a second or less in reality. So why does the human brain take a life altering event that happens in a second and draw it out beyond real time?
The phenomenon is called tachypsychia, a neurological trigger in the brain when a person is presented with a life threatening situation. Researcher David Eagleman from Stanford University conducted an experiment where participants were dropped from a 150 foot tower into a net to break their fall. The participants were in free fall during the drop and their task was to watch a device called a perceptual chronometer, this device flicks numbers across its screen at a speed slightly faster than normal human perception. The experiment ended with zero participants able to recall the numbers, but they discovered that the participants were able to recall their surroundings with higher detail than on their on ground test. The ground test consisted of the participants standing on the ground watching the watch and completing the same test. This led to the discovery of Rich Encoding in the brain.
Rich Encoding is a process that takes place in a part of the brain called the amygdala. This organ becomes hyper-active and forces the brain to record memories in far more detail than it does during “autopilot” moments. Due to the memory being much denser, your brain looks back on it in higher detail and time seems to have expanded. “The full theory is more of our memories compared to the real time. Like a flash bulb memory, the high contrast of emotion content in addition with multiple parts of your brain firing neurons hold these events. The Amygdala is where it happens in within the brain,” said West Ottawa Instructor Larry DeLeon.
The Amygdala is a part of your brain that is your emotion processor. It is directly connected to the Visual Thalamus and the Visual Cortex. Both of those organs are what process your sight and if they read a situation as danger or near death, they fire more than compared to a regular Tuesday.
This temporal stretching is more than just a neurological glitch. It is an ancient survival mechanism. Remembering how a wolf attacks or anything bad happens helps one to know how to defend or protect themselves in similar situations later on. It’s a final, desperate attempt by the brain to find out how to keep itself alive when seconds are all that remain. While humans may never be able to consciously trigger this “bullet time,” understanding tachypsychia allows one to appreciate the sheer processing power of the human mind. In those frantic milliseconds, the brain doesn’t just see the world; it absorbs it entirely, proving that while time is fixed on a clock, it is beautifully, terrifyingly elastic in the heart of a crisis.
