I too, have had similar experiences with this perceived (and isn’t that what we’re dealing with here?) slowing of time. I think that we’re far more aware subconsciously than what we realize. We are fully aware walking storage devices sampling life as we live it. When we encounter an extreme situation all our senses come to life in a brief moment of fight or flight. Our entire being is suddenly (and sometimes violently) focused on a momentary flash of sensory input. Sight, sound, touch, taste, etc, all now subconsciously recording a single event in a way that no computer can ever emulate.
It’s over in the blink of an eye. It is only afterward, when we’re reviewing all the data do we perceive the dilation of time.

I’ve been hypnotized several times over my lifetime (47yrs) and it’s incredible the amount of detail one absorbs in a very short time frame.

I agree that we have a long way to go before we ever begin to understand it clearly and completely.

What Eagleman (et al) were trying to say simply is that the perceived time duration of a high intensity event expands upon it’s recollection.

High intensity events are where there is an acceleration of stimuli due to the reduction of safety buffers, ie getting closer to danger. Such an ecstatic moment increases adrenaline and heightens the senses, allowing any memory to be much more vivid than a memory made in a low intensity event.

In my engineering classes we tested and learned that most people have a reaction time of 200-250ms.
Based on the skid measurements in the police report and this knowledge I figured that I became aware of the impending accident 800ms or about 56feet before it occurred. At -600ms I got to the brakes and at -400ms I was turning the wheel, by -200ms I knew I was out of options and riding it in.
Later, the police liaison I talked to expressed amazement that I had actually got on the brakes at all, actually at 70mph turning the wheel does no good at all except for making a lot of noise. A drunk driver fell asleep and crossed the median at 85mph.

I have since learned a bit about the psychology of fear and survival and it is pretty obvious that our brains will prioritize sensory inputs in an attempt to maximize personal survival. Tunnel vision and distorted hearing are just two of the things that happen, though for me my vision was dramatically enhanced and hearing was practically shutdown, though after the impact when I regained consciousness it was the other way around. It took some time before my senses returned to normal.

The brain does amazing things sometimes, we have a long way to go before understanding it completely.

I dunno. Fascinating timeline, though.

It’s the anticipation of something dangerous that you *know* you are powerless to stop that engenders a feeling of slowed time.

I was in a near collision several years ago. It was my own darned fault, so I cannot take much credit here, but I cycled through a number of options, chose one, and implemented it much more quickly than I would in any other situation. You have a lot more than 300 ms to react to a developing situation, and that’s the scenario in my mind when I think of this subject.

Yes, if I were looking to the right when a car hit me from the left, it would all be over before I could react. That’s a given. It would be several seconds before I had any idea what had happened at all. The question at hand is whether we process with increased clarity and speed under life-threatening pressure, and the answer is certainly yes.

-4000 ms: Driver sees car rapidly approaching from cross-street.
-3000 ms: Driver wonders “Is that guy going to stop?”
-2000 ms: Driver concludes “He’s NOT going to stop!”
-1999 ms: Driver’s brain begins frantic search for avoidance strategy
-1998 ms: Driver’s brain begins simultaneous search of vocabulary for suitable words to express opinion on situation
-1000 ms: Driver notices expression of person driving car that is about to hit him. Also notes obvious character defects in other driver’s face.
-2 ms: Driver’s brain gives up finding effective avoidance strategy, begins replaying life story
0 ms: external object touches car door.

I was in the middle of a seven-car pile up some years ago (without actually getting hit myself), and I distinctly remember the beautiful cloud of metallic blue paint flakes that rose up from the Ford Mustang when it rear-ended a station wagon. They seemed to hang there for ages.

Back in the day, one started training for skydiving by executing a series of five “static line” jumps, in which a strap connects your ripcord to the airplane. The last three of the five were dummy ripcord pulls (DRCPs), in which one went through the motions of stabilizing oneself and then pulling the ripcord.

The sixth jump was a free-fall, which feels surprisingly different from a DRCP. At least, I was surprised. The chute deploys *much* later in a real free-fall jump — maybe 800 milliseconds later. I recall vividly the feeling I had after pulling my ripcord that something was wrong, I didn’t have a canopy — and both my hands went back to the ripcord, and I was pulling out what seemed like a yard of ripcord, all the while tilting head-downward… then the chute deployed, I remember it brushing by my heel, and the whole world started rocking back and forth crazily. Then I was stable under a canopy.

The whole process took perhaps two seconds. But the time-slowing-down stress-memory phenomenon is definitely real….

BBB

I would assume you had some warning…however slight and possibly subconsciously…of the impending collision therefore you were preconditioned to action. The study quoted above seems to omit any pre-collision warning from the equation, but I’ll have to read it further.

The bottom line is that in most collisions the driver or occupants have some warning of the event and that is what enables the detailed post-collision “Matrix”-style playback.