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Comment by xenophanes | Hacker News Reader

bad title. article doesn't answer why. discusses two failed attempts to find out how it works.

An interesting article nonetheless. The "failed" attempts at least suggest that the perceived slowdown is not simply a matter of your brain processing information faster -- that it instead stores more superfluous information than normal.

So if we intentionally trigger "bullet time", it wouldn't allow us to perform superhuman feats, but it might give us superhuman recollection of details.

I thought that was the explanation. Your brain has a normal data per unit time ratio, and in these stressful situation it ends up recording much more than normal. Since you're used to a certain data/time ratio, it feels like everything happened in slow-motion.

It also works on a larger time scale. When I was working 9-to-6, weeks passed like days. Now that I'm on my own, time passes much slower because there's so much different stuff you have to do and learn every day.

Sitting in a dentists chair makes minutes seem like hours, sitting on a couch chatting with an attractive member of the opposite sex makes hours seem like minutes.

Mortgages make months shorter and years longer.

Time is pretty weird, our perception of it changes all the time depending on the circumstances, it shouldn't be a surprise that extreme circumstances change our perception of time in an extreme way.

Like an evolutionary black box. All the details stored will help the brain make sense of the event and prevent it from occurring again.

Drat, so no shooting wings off flies like in Wanted? :)

I had suspected for a while that it was memory-based rather than your brain actually "speeding up", based on an experience when I was mugged in NYC.

I expect it's so that you have an increased chance of remembering what went wrong, presuming you survive, so that you don't do it again.

Exactly. If you live through the event, the knowledge/memory of that event would be helpful in avoiding another near-death encounter. Isn't that what memory is for--to increase our chances of survival? This is just the most extreme example.

The article is all about answering the question in the title. No, it doesn't fully answer the question, but it does address the question. And even if it did present "the answer" there will always be the caveat, "as far as we know". A misleading title would be more like "Here's why a brush with death [...]"

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