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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

The below is not specific to lucid dreaming but more about experiments regarding consciousness and perceived passage of time:

- Researchers wanted to see how the "time slows down under extreme events" worked

- They created a watch that blinked a message at a time too fast for humans to see under normal circumstances

- They then had people bungee jump and try to read the watch during the jump

Turns out that people could not perceive the message even though they reported the "time slows down" effect during the jump.

This has led researchers to believe that humans are not actually processing events more quickly and/or time is perceived to slow down but rather this is a coping mechanism for dealing with extreme events.

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That experiment seems a bit silly. Is anyone expecting time perception to actually take the form of basic sensory/cognitive processes running as if “overclocked”?

I certainly wouldn’t expect basic stuff like perceiving blinking messages to change, since nothing is really changing optically (at least controlled for other things like pupil dilation).

That’s just as silly as expecting someone to be able lift heavier weights when they’re perceiving time more slowly, since their muscles would exert the same energy in a shorter period of time (again, controlled for things like adrenaline).

It is not silly at all, although the experiment may be flawed.

Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly, down to details like the stitches on the ball. Zen martial artists also have claims of being able to react as if time has slowed down.

I find it plausible that this enhanced level of awareness cannot be directed at will to just any object, but is bound to whatever goal puts one into the zone. Which would be the flaw in the experiment.

> Pro baseball players report that they can see 90+ MPH fastballs clearly,

Has it been tested? Like by putting marks on randomly thrown balls and asking the player to identify the balls?

My own experience with edibles (of various ratios of the desired chemicals) is that, the only way I can describe it, the sample rate of my senses change and my brain isn't processing all the sensory input at the same rate—a different rate than when I'm sober and a different rate from each other. Time slows down as the sample rate for my perception of time passing increases. Meanwhile, the sample rate of my hearing decreases and I perceive music differently, low frequency tones (and background music) are significantly more prominent I my perception.

That is far from a definitive experiment. It's not testing the perception of time, just visual acuity during unrelated stress event.

Most psychological experiments are far from difinitive due to the complexity and difficulty to measure abstract measurands like "perception".

Can they produce useful results then? Do you know of any instance where even though the experiment was limited it led to breakthrough?

Not asking to trap you into the induction problem (believing that something that happened in the past will happen in the future). I'm just curious.

A negative result is still a useful result.

Before this experiment, no one knew if a high-stress environment would speed up visual perception. Now we have some evidence that it does not.

Only if paired with a follow-up hypothesis, otherwise you only mapped the outer boundaries of your domain, but gained no information about the domain of study itself.

>> read the watch

> It's not testing the perception of time

It's literally testing the perception of time?

It's testing the perception of reading numbers representing time while falling at a high speed and then bouncing a bit suspended off of a cliff or bridge or something. It's not obvious to me how you could conclude that the inability to read the numbers could be due to reading being hard when plummeting several hundred feet rather than due to any perception of time; if the experiment was trying to test whether the slowed perception of time could cause you to read times at finer granularity, how can you conclude whether it would be possible with slowed perception while stationary?

All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception.

Ok ok, so the experiment actually just tested whether an individual frame of a high frame rate display could be read while while falling. Since it could not, we do not have objective evidence for the subjective "time slowing down" experience. We just know that there was no difference from the control, i.e. subjects were unable to read display at high frame rate under normal conditions.

That's all you know. Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.

> All objective observations of time involve reading numbers. You can't test subjective perception.

Not all experiments testing the perception of time require the person undergoing the experiment to read the time themselves, though.

> Sure, maybe stressful conditions make it harder to read, but then again the watch is stationary with respect to the eye while falling.

My point wasn't that the stress could cause it to be harder to read, but that the physical act of falling could cause it. The experiment intended to test if a psychological phenomenon (the slowed perception of time) could be caused by a certain psychological cause (stress), but they tested it in a way where both the cause _and_ the effect could be unrelated to their testing; we don't even know if falling makes it physically harder to read independent of stress, so I don't know how you can conclude anything psychologically about what might be going on. The watch being stationary relative to the eye also doesn't rule out vision impairment regardless of what's being looked at; the strain on the eyes from the air rushing by could be enough to make it hard to see clearly.

The hypothesis here is that bungee jumping -> stress -> slowed perception of time -> increased ocular frame rate -> increased ability to perceive short frames. It's either difficult or impossible to properly test for stress, perception, and ocular frame rate (whatever that's called), so you use the ends of the chain.

If you get a positive result with your wacky experiment, then you go back and control for confounding variables. If you get a negative result, you can't really conclude anything other than you need more grant money to do some other click bait.

This is just how the business of science works. It's sort of like the economy. You try a bunch of random things as quickly as possible and follow up on what looks promising. Or, like in this case, you just try to do click bait and you skip even really bothering with delivering value at all. It's stupid and I don't like it either.

It's possible, but completely anecdotally I was in a six car pileup and watched the stuff move from my backseat to the window to smash against it in what felt like 20-30 seconds.

I remember clearly having several thoughts in what could not have been more than 1 second between getting hit and my entire car smashing into another at 60 mph.

  "Oh, that's my kleenex box, dang that's just hanging there huh?"
  "What's that noise? Oh, its me screaming."
  "I better hold my self against the steering wheel for the airbag... wait, if I am thinking this that means there's no airbag"

I remember watching my seatbelt break and snap across my chest, moving like a languid snake, barely motivated to snap back to the wall.

However, many other times in my life in extreme situations nothing like that happened, so I don't know if just jumping off a cliff is enough trauma or fear of death to cause it reliably.

Weird that your seat belt broke, they aren't supposed to do that. Was it damaged previously?

Not sure, I realized later that the car was made in 1986 and was 20 years old at the time of the crash (and so literally didn't come with airbags.)

I just figured they were old as hell, and I ended up having to hold myself off the steering wheel with my arms.

Ended up bending it significantly, which I can only put up to the time(not much!) that was actually spent transferring energy from me to the wheel.

Steering wheels are designed to bend, for that exact reason.

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