Time stopped when we met danger

People who fall into dangerous situations often feel time slows. This distortion of time is not the result of brain work, but rather an illusion.

In order to investigate whether the danger makes people feel like being in a slow turnaround phase, experts at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine have tried to scare volunteers by dropping them from very high altitudes. great.

These people are released (without protective belts) to fall into a net. The speed falls to 70 miles per hour for a period of just 3 seconds, from a height of 45 meters. As a result, the volunteers all guessed that their fall was about a third longer than when they witnessed another person's fall.

To check whether in danger people actually look and feel more - like a slow-motion camera - author David Eagleman and his colleagues developed a device called " induction ", attached on the wrist of the volunteer. This watch-like device displays numbers on the screen. Scientists adjust the speed of digital display until they appear too fast to see.

If the brain works faster when in danger, then in theory, the numbers on the sensor will appear slow enough for volunteers to read while falling. But in reality, the team found that volunteers could not read numbers at a faster rate than usual.

The drop test does not have a protective cord from a height of 45 meters.(Photo: LiveScience)

Just an illusion

It turns out, feeling like time is slow is a hoax of memory. When a person is frightened, a region of the brain called amygdala becomes more alert, accumulating a part of secondary memories associated with memories that are often recorded by other brain regions.

" In this way, scary incidents are often associated with thicker and more dense memories. And the more memories of an incident, the more you believe it takes longer, " Eagleman explains.

This illusion " is related to the phenomenon that you feel time passes faster when you get old ." As a child, you filled with memories of all your experiences, and as you get older, you see everything that is familiar and less memorized. So when a child remembers a summer, it seems endless, and adults think it floats past.

This study may help better understand time-related disorders, such as schizophrenia.

Thuan An