"It started as a headache, but soon became much stranger. Simon Baker entered the bathroom to see if a warm shower could ease his pain. "I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air", he says. "They came into hard focus rapidly, over the course of a few seconds". Where you'd normally perceive the streams as more of a blur of movement, he could see each one hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. "It was like a high-speed film, slowed down."
source http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140624-the-man-who-saw-time-freeze
also see Slow time perception can be learned
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(Score: 4, Funny) by opinionated_science on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:17PM
this is very useful in sports...
(Score: 2) by Oligonicella on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:40PM
Indeed, George Brett of the K.C. Royals said he could watch the stitches of the ball as it came towards him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @07:17AM
This will be REALLY USEFUL when you spot an epic pair!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cosurgi on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:26PM
I didn't RTFA, and I think it's much more likely a stuff made up, than that it's real.
Flies have so small amount of neurons, that they have actually bean simulated on a computer, and due to that all neural signals travel very fast between them. And that's why it's so hard to kill a fly. For them we move so slowly, that before we hit them they have plenty of their own time to see the movement, contemplate how slow we are and then slowly fly away.
Human brains are bigger and electric signals need more time to propagate. That's why this article is talking about impossible.
Also there was an experiment where people were dropped from 10 or 20 meters (can't remember) in a controlled safe environment including a special net that caught them below. They were asked to read words showing up at different speeds. They didn't have faster perception, and their maximum speed of reading was just the same as if they were sitting on a couch. Sorry I can't spend time to find a link, especially because I can't remember if I read about it 5 or 10 years ago. You will have to do it yourself :) Sure that experiment might have been flaky to, but it seems to me more likely than what this news is talking about.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:36PM
The experiment you talk about was part of a BBC documentary series called "Time" by Michio Kaku. They were testing to see if people's perception of time slows down when in a dangerous, life threatening situation such as a car accident and their best replication of that was dropping people free fall on their backs into a net. While they concluded that people don't perceive any faster, their brain takes and records more data. Makes sense, if you survive a life threatening event, you'd want to remember every detail to ensure the same mistake does not happen again.
(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Thursday July 10 2014, @09:36PM
The problem with such experiments is that they are not real life-threatening events. Not even close, because, you know that you cannot die. It may replicate some part of the stress, but that's nothing compared to being in a real car crash...
When I was in a car crash (moderately serious: just bent the front of the car, but quite well bent), I experienced a slow down. The crash must have lasted one or 2 seconds at most, but it really happened slowly to me, much more slowly. I remember distinctly -it was over 25 years ago- thinking "this is not happening, shit, shit, shit, etc." while the cars were crashing into each other. And this is not a perception from after the crash, I was thinking that while the car was moving as I was brutally projected forward (thanks seat belts).
Interestingly, almost at the same spot, a few months later, I had a very close shave, but this time, I did not experience the slowdown. This place was a dangerous spot, where people never respected the limits or the safety distance between cars. I wonder how many accidents have taken place on that small section of road. Those are country roads: one lane only in each direction, and not too wide, in places you must be careful with cars in the other lane. Anyway, I arrived at a normal speed (~50 km/h, I always respect the limits) in a bend with zero visibility, one of the most dangerous place in that area. When I was half engaged in the bend, I saw a car in my lane right in front of me, but it was going the wrong way! The mad man was trying to overtake another car right in a spot with zero visibility and arrived straight toward me. I barely had time to swerve to my right and the 3 cars passed each other with no room to spare. The worst thing: there were several guys in the car, and I had the time to see their faces: they were laughing like crazy men (probably drunk). The assholes. The whole thing must have lasted about one second.
I have been several other times in accidents: bus smashed by a truck, car that runs the red light, motorcycles crashing in each other and sweeping the pedestrian crossing (while I was crossing), etc., as well as assaults (in the subway). But I've never again experienced that time-slowing thingie.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @07:37AM
Same here. I was on my bicycle, and the front wheel went into a hole almost a foot deep. Yeah, I shouldn't have been riding in the forest that late without lights. I went over the handlebar, hit the ground head first, and lay there for what felt like five to ten seconds, thinking "I can't believe it hurts this much from hitting sand that slowly. Then my bicycle hit the ground.
I don't need to the actual math involving 9.8m/s2 to figure out that my bicycle should be flying far higher than realistically possible for it to take five to ten seconds to come back down.
So yeah, I did not actually hit the ground that slowly, and that explains how it could hurt that much.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Oligonicella on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:45PM
Do not project your inabilities onto others. The eye does a lot of processing on its own and the fore brain isn't always involved in perception, reaction or decision. You misuse the word impossible.
(Score: 2, Informative) by crAckZ on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:52PM
Actually the eye and your "vision" is not as great as people think.
Discovermagazine.com/1993/jun/thevisionthingma227
There are a lot of papers that show your brains fills in a lot of what you see. Can't find all the different links and links don't like me when I am mobile.
(Score: 1) by crAckZ on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:56PM
That should be the right page. Working from memory so if the link isn't to how much we "see" I apologize.
I will update it when I get a chance.
(Score: 5, Informative) by umafuckitt on Thursday July 10 2014, @06:15PM
I'm a neuroscientist. No that stuff is not made up. Different parts of the visual world are processed by different regions of the brain. There's an area that processes colour and there's an area that processes motion, for instance. People with strokes or other brain damage in, say, the colour area can no longer perceive colour. Everything is shades of grey. Interestingly, the can't even imagine colour. Ditto for motion. A lesion to the motion area causes everything to be perceived as static images.
You suggest that the effect is impossible because of propagation time, etc. In theory you're on the right track, but what you're missing is that someone who has a defect in the motion system doesn't just see everything slowed down. They see things *standing still*. So you're not processing information faster than normal but the opposite: you're missing information because everything is just static. That's why the analogy with the drop experiment (which I too remember watching on TV) is not appropriate. That was testing a different scenario.
(Score: 2) by cosurgi on Thursday July 10 2014, @07:08PM
thanks, very interesting.
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#\ @ ? [adom.de] Colonize Mars [kozicki.pl]
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday July 10 2014, @09:43PM
The article implies things come in sharp focus. That's impossible, or at least an exageration, as persistence of vision blurs moving things.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by umafuckitt on Friday July 11 2014, @05:32AM
I agree, it could be an exaggeration. I really don't know exactly what people with the condition perceive. The other famous example was of a woman who described things like tea flowing out of a pot. She said it was it appeared to be frozen in time and the level of tea in the cup did not rise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @06:29PM
What you are referencing is a study by David Eagleman. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/how-time-flies [popsci.com] He's a neuroscientist who has a lot of interest in perception and in particular how the brain and law interact. You can find a bunch of his research around perception through various wiki references: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eagleman [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @07:04PM
> And that's why it's so hard to kill a fly. For them we move so slowly, that before we hit them they
> have plenty of their own time to see the movement, contemplate how slow we are and then slowly fly away.
If that were true, the venting in fly-swatters wouldn't make any difference in their effectiveness.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:51PM
I have had this happen to me once, though not as severe. It happened during college. It was finals week and I was very stressed out thanks to my GF of 3 years dumping me and also struggling in two classes. I was walking through the courtyard, head down, thinking of a million things at once. My mind was racing, my heart palpitating, so many emotions mixed together. I never felt more stressed than that in my life. And then ... BAM! ... Time slowed down. I noticed it when suddenly the normal cacophony of people became garbled as if it were being played slow. I stopped looked up and everything was in slow motion including my looking up. Then, as quickly as it happened, time sped up to normal. It was like something out of a movie or TV show that depicts time slowing. It freaked me out. I stood there for a few seconds thinking "What the hell just happened? Was that real? Did time just slow down?" I went to class and shook it off but to this day I think about it at least once a week.
I always was curious about what constitutes real time. Why does everyone perceive time the same way? Is it a natural biological clock tick that our brains run at, like an oscillator? Or is there something external that influences it? If it's natural and biological you would think that a person can be born with a defect that warps time perception. If there is no internal biological clock signal then that indicates there is an external force that establishes time perception.
(Score: 1) by danmars on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:59PM
The guy in the article had an aneurism. The article says, "Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke."
I'm glad you survived, but you may want to get that checked out.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:19PM
Thankfully, no stroke or brain bleeding. That was around 15 years ago.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:29PM
That's unfortunate. That's the problem with brains now. You just can't get them to be multiplier-unlocked. Back in my day, you could alter the perception of time as much as you wanted without needing have a full-on aneurysm.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday July 11 2014, @05:19AM
Do you mean maybe altering time perception by using LSD-25?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:02PM
I've had it happen during a motorcycle crash, and a few other high-stress events. I'm quite interested in 'learning' this ability, as it would be quite handy. Some people seem to be much better at it naturally. Every play FPS games with top level players? These people seem to see individual frames. It's amazing. It would be quite handy for gaming, sports, driving, and many other things. As it is, I've experienced it a few times, but have simply observed the slowdown; I've not been able to act within it.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:02PM
All jokes aside, this is the way I learned to do it:
The concept is easy, learning to overcome 'natural instincts' to acheive the skill...YMMV.
Start by learning to 'see everything' in your field of vision, without focusing on ANYTHING, while 'detecting and noting' movement, 'out of place' things(breaks in patterns, I guess), and colors.
Some people find it useful to mentally 'take a snapshot' of the scene.
That is the first, and hardest step, and some cannot reach that level. :-(
When that is mastered, then you learn to extend that to a panarama...a shere, if you will(yes, you occasionally look up and down also).
That is the second step.
The third and final step is learning to focus on a specific object in that 'shere snapshot' without losing awareness of everything else in the 'shere'.
When you can do that, you will have the 'matrix style bullet-time effect' skill to a limited degree.(you won't see bullets, but arrows become easy to track)
As a side effect, some have also gained the ability to 'replay' the snapshots in memory later, and notice stuff that did not make it to the concious mind at the time of the 'snapshot'.(some with really good memory can 'record' short clips in addition to the snapshot...I fall into this group)
This was taught to me by my trainer(sensai-aikido, kendo, and kenjutsu) when I was 9yo...it took me until 12 to master the third step, by 14 it was easy, and seemed natural to me. He called it 'the moonlit path', "The way to be every where and nowhere, seeing without seeing, and knowing everything around you"(paraphrase from memory).
BTW, this is the root of the seemingly magical ability of awareness badly portrayed in martial arts films/shows.(hearing, smell, air movements/vibrations felt on the skin, etc.; all senses play a role here)
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:44PM
An old dog like me will likely take longer than three years; better get started.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 13 2014, @03:35PM
Unagi! [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday July 10 2014, @09:31PM
I would think that "being able to differentiate single frames" would be experimentally mostly distinguishable from just having ingrained reflexes in that sort of situation.
Not that I'm dismissing your theory, but without more explanation I don't see it. Every once in a great while back when I was regularly playing Urban Terror a few years back, after a few hours of "twitch reflexing" I would reach a state where I wasn't really completely aware of what I was even doing. Doing a free-for-all match on a smallish server with 20 other people where two shots to the torso can kill you in the time it takes you to blink really sharpens your reflexes (or you just give up). It would be real interesting going outside and trying to walk around campus normally after that :)
And then you see a cluster of 6 people walking past and think "I could take them out with a single grenade" before you can stop yourself. Oops.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:59PM
Does everyone perceive time the same way? Even a single person does not perceive time the same way all the time! While slow motion is rather exceptional, time lapse seems to happen quite frequently.
(Score: 2) by weeds on Thursday July 10 2014, @06:59PM
"When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it's longer than any hour."
Albert Einstein
Get money out of politics! [mayday.us]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:08PM
That is a good question. Its like I always thought, do we all see the same colors? Maybe what I see as red looks green to someone else. But we all identify the same color though we perceive it differently in our mind.
But with time we can judge that as easily using reaction time tests. Most people can respond within a few hundred ms. Though some people are faster than others at certain tasks. Just have a look at trained fighters or twitch based FPS players (e.g. the old "get quaked" videos). They might be sub 200ms response but not an order of magnitude faster. And certainly not seeing everything slow to a crawl and hear garbled sound as I did. That was freaky as hell.
(Score: 1) by NickM on Friday July 11 2014, @07:33PM
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 1) by oldmac31310 on Friday July 11 2014, @09:08PM
A friend of mine went through a very stressful period in his life and suffered extreme panic attacks. He told me that one of the effects was that one day while having an attack, while walking on the street he saw people walking backwards! It totally freaked him out. He knew that what he was seeing was impossible but he also knew that he saw what he saw. Maybe he was having a similar experience except that in his case, time seemed to be moving backwards.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:52PM
I saw Jesus on my toast once.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday July 10 2014, @09:09PM
I think I saw your toast on eBay
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @10:18PM
I saw my toast on Jesus once [blogspot.com].
(Score: 3, Informative) by e_armadillo on Thursday July 10 2014, @04:55PM
I am not sure about the phenomena of the article, but I do know that as time passes each year seems to go by more quickly than the previous.
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dunbal on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:01PM
You think you've got problems I started answering this post 5 years ago.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:32PM
I watched the Through the Wormhole episode on time. They did talk about how time perception changes with age. And It does seem to hold true but I wonder if it's related to brain development while growing up. As a kid I am sure we all felt the same way in school: this is taking forever. Then, college goes by in a flash, you turn around and you're 30. Blink and you're 35 trying to figure out what happened to your 20's. I have a few older friends going on 40 who feel as if they lost 20 years.
I think it has more to do with stress. When you are a kid in school, you don't have many worries. Mom and dad do everything for you, you don't pay for school, you just show up. But once you are hard at work proving yourself in college and then off to work, its a whole new ballgame. A schedule dominates your life and you have plenty to worry about as you are now surviving on your own.
I wonder if people living a carefree life experience time differently than us normals.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @07:13PM
One day to an eleven-year-old would be approximately 1/4,000 of their life, while one day to a 55-year-old would be approximately 1/20,000 of their life. This helps to explain why a random day may appear longer for a young child than for an adult. If time perception is based solely on a person's age, then the following four periods in life would appear to be quantitatively equal: age 5 to 10 (1x), age 10 to 20 (2x), age 20 to 40 (4x), age 40 to 80 (8x).
(Score: 2) by tynin on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:26PM
I'm not sure about the time slowing effect they are talking about, but you can see Matrix like bullet travel if you take the time to notice. It is a commonly done by sniper spotters to see where the bullet went and provide corrections to the shooter. It took a few minutes to know what to look for when I was told about it, but the shock wave while the bullet travels is very noticeable.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 10 2014, @07:36PM
Not sure if that one counts though. The bullet is moving away very fast, yes. But the bullet is not moving very far vertically or horizontally to the spotter.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:57PM
you can see it from behind, at the shooter's position, but not from the front or side as the round is traveling way too fast. but yeah, it is pretty cool to watch the round drop in to the target.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JeanCroix on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:40PM
(Score: 2) by hubie on Thursday July 10 2014, @05:41PM
I bet he can make goats fall over dead too.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday July 10 2014, @06:26PM
I bet to an outsider the guy seemed to zone out for a few seconds after the event while his mind was replaying what just happened in slow motion after a failed write attempt.
Kinda like a fail-safe cd burn slowing down the speed... Only for him it felt like he was experiencing it for the first time and in slow motion...
People get their wires crossed all the time...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2014, @07:40PM
Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well; just a hallucination. Maybe not enough sleep? I remember through high school there were plenty of instance where I was convinced I was having out-of-body experiences. Once I learned about the psychological disorder known as Depersonalization Disorder, I was almost convinced that I had it. It fit the scenario far too well. Turns out that the best explanation was microsleeps, since I didn't get all that much sleep throughout high school. Ever since I've started taking melatonin to help my mild insomnia, I haven't had a single instance like I did during high school. I'm no neuroscientist, but I know that sleep deprivation can do some pretty weird things with one's perception of the world.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday July 10 2014, @09:08PM
The guy had an aneurism at the time.
(Score: 1) by PlasticCogLiquid on Thursday July 10 2014, @11:59PM
I'm not fond of fighting, but every time I've been provoked I kicked ass, I see everything they try to do before it comes. "If they can't hit you, they can't hurt you!" ~Some dumb redneck when I was young, it's true. And I remember all of my fights in slow motion as they were happening. :P
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:19PM
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so" - HGTTG
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 1) by pgc on Thursday July 10 2014, @08:26PM
I would think this is possible, however he would find himself moving very slowly in that period of time also.
Think about this:
Say there is a person, mr. Watcher, whose eyes always captures images at a speed of about 60 frames/sec.
This person knows mr. Walker, who continuously walks between two posts, from one post to another, in one second. This mr. Walker is mr. Watcher's whole world. It's all he knows.
In the second mr. Walker walks his regular meter, mr. Watcher will have recorded 60 frames. After a while, mr. Watcher's brains have recorded two truths: 60 frames equals 1 second or 60 frames equals 1 the distance between two posts.
Then, one day, something goes horribly wrong: mr. Watcher's eyes suddenly record 3 times as many frames, 180 frames, as usual.
This lasts only for a few seconds.
How will mr. Watcher's brain will deal with this?
A) He suddenly assumes mr Watcher walks 3 times as slow, since 180 frames surely equals 3 sec, thus Mr. Walker took 3 seconds to walk a meter.
B) He suddenly assumes the distance between the two posts has gotten 3 times as big, since 60 frames surely equals the distance between two posts.
C) He suddenly realizes that time has slowed down, since he knows mr Walker always walks the same speed and the posts are still in the same place. Therefore time slowed down, allowing him to snap 3 times as many frames as usual.
D) He suddenly realizes that his eye was being overactive in recording and snapped 3 times the usual amount a frames.
E) He suddenly realizes there was something wrong in his internal clock, which ran 3 times faster than usual, therefore causing D).
A and B will be dismissed, for mr. Watches (rightfully) knows the (physical) world didn't change. And being s scifi fan he'll probably pick C).
(Score: 2) by nukkel on Saturday July 12 2014, @11:43AM
But who will watch the watchers?
(Score: 1) by darkfeline on Thursday July 10 2014, @11:51PM
I think the article might be a little exaggerated and/or misrepresenting the effects, but some degree of slow time perception is definitely possible and can be learned. Time is relative, after all.
I can attest to this from personal experience, as can, I think, many other gamers or sportsmen or anyone who regularly practice any activity that requires extremely fast reflexes. I play osu! (a rhythm game) somewhat regularly, starting a few years back. When I first started, I could barely tell what was going on in some of the medium difficulty songs, even, but I would periodically reach points where songs I couldn't make heads or tails of are suddenly easy to grasp (and this isn't muscle memory either, since I pick random songs out of thousands every time). Now I can quite effortlessly see all the notes of a song that for most people just looks like a blur.
Part of it is an actual increase in reaction time that I've noticed to have spilled over to other unrelated activities, but part of it is domain-specific. I think the brain learns to shortcircuit unneeded paths after training and directs the visual signals straight to where it needs to go for processing, as well as predicting common patterns, (sort of like predictive caching in computers), if you will, but only for a specific range of inputs. For example, I cannot grasp fighting games despite my modest rhythm game skills, while my friend who can hit small frame windows in fighting games can't grok rhythm games at all.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @09:49AM
"I looked up at the shower head, and it was as if the water droplets had stopped in mid-air-- Unfortunately, after a few hours the effects wore off, and I had to repeat the dose. But alas, I had to wait more than 48 hours until my body was receptive to LSD again."