The man who saw time stand still | Hacker News Reader

The man who saw time stand still

bbc.com

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This reminded me the description of Tibetan Buddhist teachings about the nature of the mind from the book "The Joy of Living" by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:

"Later, when I came to the West, I heard a number of psychologists compare the experience of 'mind' or 'self' to watching a movie. When we watch a movie, they explained, we seem to experience a continuous flow of sound and motion as individual frames pass through a projector. The experience would be drastically different, however, if we had the chance to look at the film frame by frame.

"This is exactly how my father [Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche] began to teach me to look at my mind. If I observed every thought, feeling, and sensation that passed through my mind, the illusion of a limited self would dissolve, to be replaced by a sense of awareness that is much more calm, spacious, and serene. And what I learned from other scientists was that because experience changes the neuronal structure of the brain, when we observe the mind this way, we can change the cellular gossip that perpetuates our experience of our 'self'."

And since we always require scientific proof, here's the relevant study regarding "mindful meditation" and its benefits:

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

This reminds me of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky's teachings about self awareness [1].

I highly recommend Ouspensky's "In search of the Miraculous". Well, you can skip / disregard the esoteric bs if you want.

[1] http://www.dennislewis.org/articles-other-writings/articles-...

I'm surprised they don't cite the research of David Eagleman. He's done very solid research to untangle the questions of subjective time perception:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian (posted here before I believe)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkANniH8XZE (A talk by him on subjective time)

"Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter, Arstila concludes that an automatic mechanism, triggered by stress hormones, might speed up the brain’s internal processing to help it handle the life or death situation.[1] “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” he says. It is even possible that some athletes have deliberately trained themselves to create a time warp on demand[2]: surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead."

That might possibly be true for life-or-death situations, but I believe the second statement is overreaching. I don't believe that the individuals have "trained themselves to create a time warp on demand", but rather that it is an effect of having learned the specific skills involved.

Having learned new skills several times over the years, one thing that I have constantly noticed is that, initially, things happen fast. Events appear quickly and it is not apparent what is important and what is not. On the other hand, after you have some experience and can recognize what events are important and which are about to occur, and have the skill to respond appropriately, the speed of events is no longer a problem for performance.

In fact, at some point common events cease to be consciously perceptible---the reaction to them is instinctive.

[1] http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00...

[2] http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00...

The bit about surfers really is reaching. No time warp necessary. The brain emulates musculoskeletal movement in parallel to actual movement, and compares performance against goal attainment, and against the emulation. This takes milliseconds, quick enough for very rapid musculoskeletal adjustment, before conscious awareness.

This does not in the slightest sound like time standing still.

Instead it sounds exactly like the symptoms when the motion-detection parts of the eye are not working.

The brain does not detect visual motion, instead the eye does that. It is one of the "layers" of information sent, and this is the symptom when it doesn't work.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia

I used to suffer from Alice In Wonderland Syndrome [1]. The first time I noticed symptoms was when I thought my CD player was broken because it was playing music slowly.

I asked other people if it sounded slow to them and they didn't think so. There was nothing wrong with the CD player.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysmetropsia

A while ago, I saw a course offering to improve use of the brain. One trick it claimed to teach was meditation that taught people to control perception of time. The idea was that you could slow time down to have more reaction, training or thinking time. I wrote it off as a snake oil thing with far-fetched possibility of happing to some degree somewhere else.

Seeing these cases makes me wonder, though. Research into neuroscience or neuro-engineering might be able to tap into this effect to do things similar to other claim. My first thought as a former martial artist was combat applications. There's gotta be a DARPA lab working on this exact thing somewhere.

So, applicable questions to this are (a) does their brain just slow down where it takes time to catch up to what happened in reality; or (b) do our brains actually waste effort to preserve a specific, temporal experience. If it's (b), then there's a possibility of re-training or modifying the brain to get more usable time to think or act. I can't be sure from the article if it's (b), though. Anyone have an idea about that?

I think the best way to think about this is in terms of frame rate or really thought rate. If only the subconscious portions of your mind were operating at a heightened frequency you would likely only remember making decisions quickly like the pilot in this article. If only your consciousness was operating at the heightened frequency you would likely remember time slowing down without being able to move like "a deer in the headlights." As the article points out, the natural mechanism for this sensory modulation is a complex soup of hormones that increase blood flow and neural activity in your brain. The question is not how fast or slow is the brain relative to one second per second, but how many decisions and perceptions can the brain make in one second.

That's a better way of framing the subject than I was even expecting. Excellent and thanks! Yes, my question does boil down to "how many decisions and perceptions" per second plus if these event indicate it might be modified to be beneficial. So, decisions and perceptions per second might be the natural starting point for research field.

I once experienced something similar in a beach volleyball match. We were up to a pair of much better...and much larger... players, but we were highly motivated and had a lot of fun.

Suddenly I noticed that everything slowed down A LOT and I could easily receive full blown attacks that were 3m away...not always clean though, as my body did not move fast enough.

It is very pleasing to read something about it here and remember this experience. I hope this "feature" will be researched more, so that everybody could unlock it at will.

This sounds like two phenomena: flow during the gave, amplified by time-dilation during later recollection.

On mobile, references awkward. Flow is easy to Google. See my previous comment re time-dilation during recollection.

Incidentally, none of this is meant to disparage your comment. In fact, it sounds awesome.

SWIM had a very intense experience of time looping which they can't explain brought on by unfamiliarity with a certain substance...they described it as reliving the same few minutes over and over, having the same conversation over and over, and their friends repeating the same bits of dialogue at different spatial locations over a 1.5 hour period...like the _exact same_ bits of dialogue with the same hand motions, intonation, sarcasm, etc.

Could be explained by certain neurotransmitters being disrupted by a drug, replaying short term memories at different times, brain incapable of integrating time correctly.

SWIM isn't sure.

What is SWIM?

Someone Who Isn't Me. A particularly silly way to refer to yourself while maintaining the illusion of legal deniability, especially popular on certain forums devoted to recreational substances.

SWIM also agree that lsd is a time warping substance. SWIM saw and lived through thousands of years of Earth in early human civilization. I reminded me later of that Star Trek episode where picard lives someone else's entire life when that space object zaps him.

SWIM has experienced his perception of music warp from slow to fast repeatedly on 450ug of LSD. With concerted mental effort SWIM could slow the music by what seemed to be a factor of 2 and hold it there for several (real-world) minutes.

FYI: For those that may be unfamiliar with the acronym, SWIM stands for "Someone Who Isn't Me" and is a misguided attempt to present (usually drug releated) experiences one has had as though they happened to someone else. For some reason, posters on drug forums believe this incantation gives them immunity from prosecution and self-incrimination...

The example refering to rotating car wheels seeming to stand still can only be seen in "artificial" street light and not in direct sunlight. It is the lights Hz (refresh rate) that causes the illusion and not some "frame rate" in the brain.

I also thought so, but the research abstract linked from the article suggests there is a real perceptual effect.

I would be curious to know if they had any estimate of the 'frame rate'

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

~18 Hz by my own imperfect measurements.

Seriously, or only joking? That's interesting. How did you measure it?

My dad used to own a company that made wheel balancers, they work by spinning a wheel really fast, then flashing a light with a known refresh rate, and seeing how the wheel behaves (if the wheel looks like it is standing still, then it is perfectly balanced, otherwise it is unbalanced, and it is speeding up and slowing down because of gravity).

Although the refresh rate of artificial light could be manipulated to create very interesting effects, even in natural light you can see wheels rotating backwards, or standing still, or forwards in slow motion, because of the exact thing mentioned in the article.

I was a kid when my dad worked with that, and I was always fascinated, I could keep staring at the spinning wheels during testing of our product for hours.

perception of time is interesting. I saw something years ago, I believe the discovery channel, where a researcher put a watch-like device on particpants wrists. its refresh rate was such that you could not see the number it displayed. when a person the was dropped from a height on a bungee, they could see the number. the explanation was the adrenaline serge causing the perception of time to become enhanced, thus the refresh rate was no longer too fast to prevent one from seeing the number. I can relate; I had a car fly in a barrel role towards my car in a near head-on collision all action-movie like. Time slowed and I could make out the driver and passenger with high clarity. their facial expressions, the passenger's 49'ers jacket and her necklass dangling in the air... it was quite the experience! (please ignore typos as my phone is not giving me spelling corrections for some reason)

As far as I remember the outcome of that experiment is exactly reverse. They could not read the numbers.

That's interesting stuff.

I was also in a car accident and afterwards both he and I could recount each other's facial expressions (Though they could be imagined).

I just wonder whether it is memory fidelity increasing or if brain "performance" also grows.

My understanding of the "time slowed down" phenomenon is that the recollection is more detailed due to the intensity of the experience. However this extraordinary detail is an illusion.

The recollection feels so detailed that, in retrospect, one feels that time must have been slowed down during the experience in order to absorb so much information.

It is the apparent intense detail that produces the subjective effect of time dilation. However the detail was not collected during the experience; it is conjured during "recollection".

These recollections are generally inaccurate. Almost saccade-style, the imagination fills in gaps. The recollected detail -- e.g. facial expressions during a car crash -- did not actually happen. They are imagined.

Eyewitness accounts of highly emotive events such as robberies or crashes are notoriously unreliable, yet the witnesses swear on their accuracy, and describe events in detail -- inaccurately.

On mobile, references tricky. Google eyewitness reliability for more.

It seems like you managed to completely reverse the findings of the bungee study to match your own expectations...

http://m.livescience.com/2117-time-slow-emergencies.html

  "Instead, the scientists found that volunteers could not read the numbers at faster than normal speeds."

ha! wow, thanks for the reality check. I woulda sworn that several people made out the number. well, that is memory for you I guess. going through the link, i like the explanation that you "record" more data over the period of time which in retrospect makes it feel like time slowed.

Ok, let's do this right:

Research is by David Eagleman [0], who has written about it on the web [1] and originally in: Stetson, Fiesta, Eagleman (2007). Does time really slow down during a frightening event? PLoS One. [2]

[0] http://www.eagleman.com/research/time-perception [1] http://www.eagleman.com/research/110-time-and-the-brain-or-w... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Not sure if this is the same thing, Around 12 years ago I was playing on the street with my friends, and got hit by a speeding motorbike, I remember seeing the motor bike coming towards me, I remember all the details it was so slow, but I was frozen, I felt as if I had all the time in the world, and then suddenly I snapped and the bike hit me on the shoulder. Fell to the ground and luckily managed to escape with just a few scratches on my leg.

I always wondered if this memory was something the younger version of me made up in my head or if it actually happened. Never experienced it again unfortunately.

The experience described in the article is, imho, quite common. The spontaneous positive ones are of the type you experience in sports, when you are in "the zone". Priceless experience. And the negative ones occur in times of danger - you want to forget these, but that's nearly impossible. Meditation gets you there as well, and with some side-effects, I'm told drugs do too. I read a hilarious account by PJ O'Rourke of how still time stood during an ill-advised drugs and dynamite experiment with some of his buddies.

If perception of space-time emerges as simplified interface to the dynamics of interacting conscious agents[0], then such ‘time glitches’ can be explained as abnormal states in the combination of conscious agents that comprise one’s mind.

(Can’t help trying to look at this through prism of my limited understanding of that research.)

[0] http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00...

Surprised the article doesn't reference the stroke of enlightenment [0].

Makes you wonder how much awakening (as described in linked video) is more accident than act of volition/determination (e.g. dedicated meditation/spiritual practice). Perhaps the latter sets the stage for the ultimate accident to occur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU

The presenter brought out a real deceased person's human brain to parade around in front of a TED talk -- ultimate disrespect, trivializing someone's life where slides or video would have done as well.

In what way is presentating a brain "ultimate disprespect"? Do you honestly think the deceased took offense at their brain being put on public display?

Talk about missing the forest (content of presentation) for the trees. Maybe watch the video, it's extraordinary. Presenter had a massive stroke (8 year recovery) and, for some reason, awakened as a result.

Anyway, the wiki [0] may help explain why the presenter, a scientist specializing in the "postmortem investigation of the human brain as it relates to schizophrenia and the severe mental illnesses", would bring a brain on stage at a TED talk ;-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Bolte_Taylor

This once happened to me. I'd been up for a few days clubbing and then everything changed so slowly as too seem to stop. It was excruciatingly boring. I could examine the entire scene in as much detail as I cared then there was nothing new to see, and all I could do was wait, and wait, for the next time quanta for something new. Thankfully it didn't last long (in clock time anyway).

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