Walking the Wall

Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.

~William Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act iii. Sc. 2. 

Time has been a big issue with me lately, I have been struggling with being overwhelmed this semester, not managing my time properly and/or simply not having enough time in the day. I’m feeling stretched very thin and already looking forward to the end of the semester in a way that I usually don’t until closer to the end. So it was interesting to flip through my current Discover: Science, Technology, and The Future magazine (which I got by accident and have enjoyed ever since) and find an article on Time. The question the article delves into, is whether or not time can be slowed down in the brain through drugs or a "neural pacemaker"–but the supposition is that our brain has some control over time–arguing that our brain already deals time, or as David Eagleman, a neurobiologist says, "The brain lives just a little bit in the past. The brain collects a lot of information, waits, then it stitches a story together. ‘Now’ actually happened a little while ago (21). This helps adjust, for example, in the delay between sight and sound for a lot of different situations. So the question is, could we actually slow time down to make better use of it?

Weird as it seems, it can be done. Not long ago, Eagleman became intrigued by the stories one hears of people who experience time slowing–during a car crash, say. He wondered: What’s really going on? Does the experience gain added vividness only afterward, as it’s being recalled? Or does a person’s perception of time truly slow down enough to absorb extra information?

Eagleman designed a test. He built a small LED screen that flashed a series of numbers too quickly to comprehend. He attached the screen to his subjects’ wrists, clipped a bungee cord to their legs, and had them jump backward, one by one, off a 150-foot tower–a fairly terrifying experience for the uninitiated. To his suprise, his jumpers were able to read the flashing numbers on the way down–evidence that a brain under duress can warp time. 

 Now, granted, as of the writing of the article, his "subjects" only consisted of two people, but the idea is fascinating. We’ve all probably had those moments of slow motion. I have experienced it three times that I can remember:

1. Just before getting hit by a car while I was standing on the side of the road, it happened so fast, but I could see the accident lining itself up, the sequence of events slow, logical, and I remember thinking how stupid it was that this was going to play out when there was so much time (for me) to fix it. The driver, however, seemed to NOT be working in slow speed and I was hit anyway, waking up in the front yard where I had been thrown.
2. Just before and during being hit while in a vehicle when a brand new driver pulled out of a side street without stopping at a stop sign.
3. Jumping out of the airplane last year. Whenever people ask me about it, I am inevitably drawn to that very first moment of falling out of the plane–for me, it is this initial fall that was the most incredible experience, I could live without the rest of it, but that moment is burned in my memory. It was so slow, so calm, so quiet, so vivid of colors, and then when the world righted itself and I was facing down at the earth–BAM–the speed hit, the loudness of the air hit, the buffeting of the wind hit. It’s that moment of slowness, though, that made it an experience worth all the rest.

I’m not saying that I want to bungee jump, get hit by a moving vehicle, or even fall out of a plane just to get some extra time in the craziness of life’s time constraints–but I have to admit that it is pretty amazing to think of all the things going on in our brain and in our bodies just to keep us upright, walking, and talking!