Time Warped Read Online Free PDF Page A

work, real fear was essential. The neuroscientist David Eagleman, from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston (the same neuroscientist who wrote the best-selling imagined stories of the afterlife, Sum ), warned his volunteers to stay well back from the edge until it was their turn to climb up inside a 33-foot-high metal cage mounted on the roof. He radioed down to the team on the ground 150 feet below to check that everything was ready, then turned to a line of digital wristwatches with giant faces. These perceptual chronometers were set to alternate very quickly between two screens showing random numbers. They flicked so fast that to the naked eye they looked like a blur. Eagleman wanted to know whether terror would speed up a volunteer’s sensory processing enough for them to read the numbers which the calm human brain fails to register. Perhaps it’s not that time slows down when we’re afraid, but that our minds speed up.
    Eagleman had previously experimented with taking the volunteers on a rollercoaster, but they just weren’t scared enough; and in fact many seemed to enjoy the experience. It was time for something more drastic – freefall. Eagleman knew that no one would agree to take part in this experiment unless he had shown that he was willing to do it himself. Strapped into a harness, he was dangled over the side of the tower block and dropped, backwards. (Forwards wasn’t sufficiently frightening.)Then he did it again. And then again. Before the third attempt he was convinced that he would be less terrified; experience would surely tell his brain that he would be fine. But no, he told me, ‘It was stillbeyond scary.’ Then it was the turn of a young man called Jesse Kallus. Just as Eagleman had been before him, Jesse was thrown off the building and by the time he had been caught safely at the bottom he had reached a top speed of 70 miles an hour.
    Everyone who took part in the experiment reported that time felt as though it decelerated. The fall stretched every one of those unbearably petrifying seconds. So the first element of the study had worked; the desired effect of subjective time dilation had been achieved. Yet still the figures on the watch face flickered too fast for their brains to perceive them. David Eagleman had demonstrated that time itself doesn’t actually slow down when we’re afraid, and nor does the brain’s sensory processing speed up. What changes is our perception of time – our mind time.
    So how does this happen? It is true that fright does etch strong memories into the brain, and – as will emerge in this book – memory is one of the key factors in making time warp. When people are shown a video of a bank robbery lasting exactly 30 seconds, two days later they tend to guess that it lasted five times longer than it did. The more disturbing a version of the video they are shown, the greater their overestimation of its duration. 8 After a stressful event we often recall every single detail of what we saw, heard or even smelt. The richness and freshness of these memories contributes to our sense of how long it lasted. We become accustomed to a certain quantity of memories fitting into a certain time-frame. Usually this serves us well, but during a life-threatening incident the intensity of the experience results in the creation of more memories. Everysecond feels brand new, which causes us to judge the event to have taken longer than it really did, to have happened in slow-motion. This sensation is amplified by the fact that in a car accident, for example, the mind focuses on the elements of a situation necessary for survival and filters out anything inessential such as the scenery, the songs changing on the radio or the number of cars that pass. These are the cues which would normally help to assess time passing. Without them, once again time warps.
    The big question is whether the combination of the plethora of memories and the absence of cues to time passing is enough to make