Time flies when you’re having fun, the saying goes, and it often seems that in emergency situations time slows down. However, a recent experiment indicates that people’s perception of time does not shift during a moment of danger, and that sense of everything moving in slow motion is just a trick of memory.
For the experiment, people did something called Suspended Catch Air Device diving, which involves falling backwards from a platform suspended 150 feet above a safety net. It takes only three seconds to fall, but people are moving 70 miles an hour when they hit the net. It sounds absolutely terrifying, but it’s supposedly safe, so it’s a good experience for testing whether or not time perception shifts during times of crisis.
Participants observed the falls of others and timed them, and then estimated the length of time their own fall had taken; their estimates were about a third again as long as the actual time it took to fall. However, they were wearing a gadget that flashed numbers too quickly for them to make them out, and during the fall they were not able to see the numbers any better than when they were not scared, indicating that they were not really perceiving a slowed-down world. They could see numbers flashed at a slower speed, so the problem was not with being able to read the numbers while in free fall.
What is probably happening to give people that sense of time stretching out is that the brain retains much more detailed memories of what happens in such adrenaline-charged moments. When people look back at the density of memories, it feels like the scary experience must have taken longer than it did, and in retrospect it seems like their perception of time must have expanded to allow for all that experience in such a short amount of time—but in fact it didn’t. This press release on EurekAlert has the details.
