reading this article reminds me countless time I have looked at the clock and the second hand it not moving and then it starts, I am sure this takes longer than a second

If you want excitement, you should try being bombarded by a wartime "Moaning Minnie". When one lands on the side of your slit trench, you hear the 'pop' of the detonator, followed by the bang of the main charge followed by the scream of the metal casing being rent apart, it all takes a very brief time, but you can remember each as a separate event. Have they tried the experiment with soldiers on active service??

At an anti Viet Nam war protest in NYC our small group was attacked repeatedly. When we went to leave they grabbed a frail young kid, one holding him and another began to hit him.

I slung my camera over my back and jumped on the back of the guy pummeling the kid. When he turned to come after me I tried to melt into the crowd but couldn't. As he charged at me I experienced the slow motion phenomena and was able to knock him out with one punch.

I would say it wasn't memory but the speeding up of messenger cells

The bit about click trains puts me in mind of JS Bach's harpsichord music. Their intense rhythms always gave me the impression of "the sound of a mind, thinking". Maybe there's more to it....

I am curious. If the brain perceives visual motion at 13 fps why is it that we can tell a difference in movies that are captured at something like 13 fps and ones captured at 30 or 60 fps? Maybe it has to do with those seperate threads they were talking about. Perhaps we process changes of light faster than motion and we notice the screen flicker. Any thoughts out there?

Im wondering, given one waveform at 7 Hz, and another waveform at 13 Hz, each governing instantaneous encoding sensitivity, will there be found an 11 Hz waveform, so that the mixing of 7,11, and 13 Hz prime values, give rise to the 1001 Hz beat frequency, which seems to be the maximum response rate of a neuron, and so give 10 milliseconds reactions in some responses?

The time variations for schizophrenia is very intresting as well, maybe it cna be used for a simple roadside or pre purchase test, to see if people can handle traffic complexities, or what varying amount, etc?

Binaural tones are better at entraining brainwaves than clicks. There is a whole technology of mixing binaurals to get specific brain states and effects, including speeding up and slowing down of perceptions.

I remembered almost every second of my life, just seconds before hitting a tree in a car accident I had several years ago...I was about 23 years old. it only took about 3 seconds to hit the tree, open the door of my car and run for help, but the last 23 years of my life passed in those 3 seconds.

From "The Funny Times":

"People do stuff. They have reasons for doing stuff. In that order."

We rarely actually premeditate our actions. We mostly just respond to stimuli automatically and then delude ourselves as to why we needed to buy that candy bar or shiny new car. Advertisers know this. They just don't tell us that they know it. It's in the file in the abandoned lavatory behind the "Beware of the Leopard" sign.

It isn't time travel, it's Imagination. It works so well because it tells us it works so well, and it tells us it said so yesterday.

"If this theory is correct, the click train is literally resetting the brain's frame-capture rate."

If so, then subjects exposed to the click train should should get different results using Eagleman's perceptual chronometer mentioned earlier in the article, right?

William Hetrick says "The ability to attribute actions to oneself versus others, to perceive one's own thoughts against thoughts generated from external sources, perhaps requires a tight coupling in time [within the brain]."

I am Paraniod Schizpohrenic, and the above article reminds me of when I was having a psychotic episode. I believe that the voices I heard in my mind are not a muddling of thoughts and a discontinium in the time line one lives by all being relative. But are infact from an external source. I have to add im an not religous but I found the following exceprt from the Bible.

I'm convinced, folks, that the reason the Scriptures refer to the Holy Spirit as "holy" is to distinguish Him from all the UNHOLY spirits Satan has unleashed, set out to destroy people's lives. "My sheep listen to My voice; I know them and they follow Me," said Jesus Christ in John 10:27.

Doctors many years ago even used to drill holes into the skulls of schizophrenics to let the voices or what was sometimes called Demons out! Maybe they where onto something just the practice but a bit dodgy!

My sister also not being religious said that when she spoke to me when I was psychotic and in hospital it was like I was possesed by another person?

And Barry Soley I heard a great saying while I was in the psychiatic ward watching the clock on th wall 'a watched clock never moves!'

Just thoughts though.

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Time did demonstrably slow foe me once. or seemed to. I rock was headed towards the windshield of our car, I spotted it falling from the bridge. As it got closer its rotation seemed to slow so that I could see the detail of the rock rather then a fast moving spinning object. It hit the windshield, then I snapped out of it. in the meantime though as it was getting close to the windshield my hand & arm went up like a shot to protect my eyes.

And if the old saying in neurology that "neurons that fire together wire together" is right then harmonies of these perceptual rhythms could underly associative reasoning or indeed the abnormal associations of delusional perceptions should they become mistimed.

The concept of flicker frequency of the human eye is not new.

TV viewing depends on it.

I suggest the reason: - overlapping patterns, both moving at the same rate, where one is seen to reverse independently of the other - is due to left/right visual field processing occurring in different parts of the visual cortex.

His: - 30% drop with interference experiment -supports this: - other regions of the brain, which dont operate at the necessary 13 hertz, took over some of the motion perception.

I suggest these people have slight variation that allows them and not everybody to sense this. I assume the overlapping patterns were beside each other. I would follow up the same experiment with the patterns in a vertical axis overlapping arrangement (one above the other to remove this variable)

Curious that no mention was made of video framerates. That the 30-50ms "frame rate" found in the brain converts to 20-33 frames per second is striking since video turns from perceptible frames to an illusion of smooth motion in the same range. At 60fps it's almost nauseatingly smooth and any higher than that is basically impossible to detect, but really anywhere above 30 is completely convincing and anywhere below about 15 is obviously "framey".

I also experience first-hand the effect of a beat improving brain performance. Maybe it's not actually making my brain run faster, but if I ever need to get something done very quickly I put on something with a good solid beat, it works every time no matter what the music is. If it doesn't have a good beat, no matter how much I actually like the music, or if the beat isn't steady, it doesn't have the same effect. For example I love jazz but the more improvisational, the less effective it is at helping me work.

This article makes me wonder whether or not we perceive our world in real-time or whether our brains store the information first and then simply play it back to us. It might explain why you perceive something to be happening more slowly while you're experiencing it, simply because you're not experiencing it in real-time rather watching a recording that was "rich".

We're probably only talking about nanoseconds here between something happening and it being played back to you...any thoughts?

Nitrous oxide disrupts the synchronization between auditory and visual stimuli, among its many other odd effects. It's like living in a badly dubbed movie for a few minutes.

I just wanted to point out that; peripheral vision can see flickering light that the central vision cannot.

The "Watch that flicker 20-times per second" experiment need to account for this phenomenon too.

Also, outside bright-light may reduce retina response time, but indoor-electric-lighting would naturally flicker, which would interfere with the "flickering watch" experiment.

Perhaps one should directly transfer information to the brain rather than using the retina?

It was in perception/cognition by the same kind of conscious feeling that I ha d composed a couplet:

"we live by the Moments in Time to perish;

for love of the Bits of Thoughts to cherish"

The moments are like electrons or neurons, which behave differently under different conditions, like those under excited/depressed or fast/slow states etc. And it is the state of the mind, like an electric current, that prompts the neurons to either act smoothly or roughly. The 'moments' in/of 'time' or space-time are inseparably entwined with the moments in/of the electrons; and so are the 'bits' in/of 'thoughts' or consciousness with those of the neurons. It is absolutely essential for the said 'moments' and 'bits' to co-relate, coordinate and then act together as one cohesive force in order to perceive and interpret the objects and the events correctly. Any aberration of any sort, depending upon its intensity, can cause misinterpretation or confusion or chaos. Hence, it is warping of the brain that assumes or presumes warping of the time; The brain-warping and time-warping usually occurs because of mixing or overlapping of the past and the present (both are related with the 'time'), creating and imparting various/many levels to the consciousness. It is because of this mixing/overlapping that the wheel appears to rotate backwards when it is actually rotating forward; Because, in any given 'moment', there is more of the past than the present, and memory is like a needle of a gramophone on the tracks of the consciousness.That is why, we see more of the past-'moments' than the present-'moments' in our moment-to-moment perception.

You can experience the frozen frame effect when whiling away the hours until the traffic lights go green. Focus on a mark on the road in front of you, close to the track of the wheels of cars passing left/right. You'll perceive the spokes frozen or at least clearly visible, particularly of mag wheels. As soon as you look directly at the wheels, they blur as expected. The brain does see movement as a series of stills but joins them up to create the illusion of movement (see Oliver Sacks), but my guess is that it doesn't work as well outside the focal point.

I have also glanced up at an aircraft, missed focusing directly on it, then shifted focus. In that split second you can see the propellors frozen. Really spooked me the first time, I thought I was seeing a plane about to crash.

Humans' never experience real time. We always are observing the past, and live in the future. It is impossible to live and respond in real 'time'. Until you engage your brain processes, and are willing to examine your awareness of reality your journey into time, will still seem real! We may create a fourth dimension, but in reality there are at least five dimensions. The fifth time conception, which contains all dimensions is Observer.

I too have seen experiments involving a falling subject who carried a fast moving digital clock with them. They were asked to stop the clock at a certain time during their fall compared with when they were stationary on the ground. On average the test subject was able to stop the clock nearer to the target value when they were in the falling state than when they were stationary. This was explained by the effect of noradrenaline and adrenaline release in response to the falling motion - a fear,flight, or fight response. It would appear that our perception of time and inbuilt time clock is linked to our metabolic state and the effect of these hormones. This might explain how we remember shocking events like moments as if time has dilated, eg just before a car collision, with the effect of a sudden rush of adrenaline. Perhaps the experiment could be repeated on say a roller coaster ride? Of course a physicist might point out that time is different for a falling observer rather than a stationary one, but I think that relativity effect is very small compared with the adrenaline effect.Its interesting that certain anaesthetic drugs used in heart surgery ( and which block adrenaline) seem to be associated with a perception of time standing still. ie patient wakes up as if they had just been anesthetized when in fact many hours have passed. For me there are two types of time - the one that governs the Universe, which is a constant, and the other how we then percieve it, which is a variable. The idea we record info as a series of snapshots also makes sense, at least in a quantum reality. Is there any link between quantum states of the atoms that make up neurons for example, and the frequency of these snapshots?.......

~ mmm.. we need to get away from the inbuilt concept harking from classical physics that dictates things operate in a 'clockwork' universe, and the reductionistic idea that to know the whole, understand the parts.. consciousness alters throughout the day from waking to work to play to sleep. there is no set measure and it alters differently for all. time is essentially 'a measure of change' in whatever system, and that rate is relative to that system only, ergo consciousness' perception of time is an individual thing, and yet can have real results. Don't believe me? --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_paradox

so what this boils down to is that of reality is in fact relative to anything else. ie.to perceive something, you literally need anything else to compare against. the arguement is therefore reversible and so anything is really only there because of anything else. the basic architecture behind this is ultimately 'quantum' in nature. ultimate 'reality' is far more crazy and wildly interesting than anything from a text book that has been written in the last 100yrs or so.. and i reckon there's some irony in that.

I've got your time illusion right here:

http://grasshopperx.com/mind-games/how-to-stop-time/

"Sure enough, when he span a wheel at certain speeds, all subjects reported seeing it turn the "wrong" way."

Umm... was the lighting incandescent or fluorescent? Unless the lighting was incandescent, this is just a strobe effect from the 50hz pulsing of the fluorescent light - it has nothing to do with "our visual frame rate."

I think Rufin needs to brush up on his Physics before he tackles neuroscience

it is very usefull .

I fell from a stepladder during house cleaning while I was pregnant. I had a spontaneous abortion because of it. I know for sure that I experienced time slowing down WHILE I was falling and NOT while remembering it. And also I felt like on clouds, I didn't feel hitting the ground.

For those researchers who ride motorcycles...

Look at Kneival's crash films in slow motion. Imagine what you would do, yet see or watch his body language. Fascinating stuff.

When the normal rhythm of living is disrupted by something that shocks us, whether it be a fearful event or something otherwise exciting, the various chemicals that are usually in balance, such as neurotransmitters within the brain and/or hormones released by the pituitary gland, for instance, respond to this shock. This seems to be an inbuilt mechanism; a sort of fight or flight adaptation that would be common to most animals. Under such circumstances, with the increase in excitatory neurotransmitters, one is shocked and perceptions seem to travel faster along the nerve pathways and within our brains, or perhaps the signals actually short-circuit their ordinary pathways, under the bath of newly released neurotransmitters, to give us an impression that time has somehow warped. This adaptation assists with getting out of potentially 'sticky' situations; assists us to survive. It is simply a case of short-circuit and/or neurotransmitter release that starts off the cascade for a short period of time.

Schizophrenia seems to differ in the sense that there appears to be a constant imbalance of neurotransmitters that excite pockets of neurons that then combine to give an error in perception. It seems to be a progressive malfunction.

So we see at 13 frames per second. How does that work with a 30 fps movie or the hertz rate of a lcd television? Those devices would seem to present images faster than we could receive them.

You are full of.....pseudo science One can not scientifically study this topic unless you properly record and investigate those who can see ahead. And there are those who can. So stop prevaricating.

I think our mind's perception of time is also affected by metabolic rate. When one is bored time passes too slowly. When one is busy time seems too short.

Look in the mirror sometime and see if you can see your eyes move. You can't, your brain shuts off your vision while your eyes are moving. You are not aware of this at all.

My high school and college hopes of making the varsity baseball teams was blighted by my "good field, no hit" evaluations. I seldom struck out, but hit a lot of weak grounders and pop flies. Years later (ca 1970) I read an article in Scientific American about experiments on hitters where the authors tracked hitters eye movements. No one tracked the ball continuously. Good hitters, it seems, saw the ball clearly as it left the pitcher's hand, then their eyes jumped ahead and tracked the ball just before it crossed the plate. A 90 mph fastball covers the distance from pitcher to hitter in about 0.2 seconds. This is in the time frame of the events discussed in this article. Is there a correlation between inherent mental processing speed and baseball hitting ability? Could this be affected by listening to click speeds as suggested?

Many people have reported to have actually been involved in a temporary "Time Slip". I

wrote an article about this in Fate Magazine. July 2001, called "Was it a Time Slip?". This whole issue about the perception of time is definitely a fascinating one. I would certainly like to know (more) about the earth shift that

is supposed to occur in 2012, in relation to time. -Diana.

Funny you mention the "disorder" known as schizophrenia, which is manifest through a mind open to all subjectivity whether willingly or not. It's the fundamental process through which the illusion we call "objectity" can be most closely observed and manipulated. But for a human to be able to make use of such a gift is nigh improbable. Though not impossible.

The problem arises from the nature of coming into the state before overcoming fear, leading to acute psychosis through paranoia. Natural in all ways, but not because they're wrong; because we're all wrong. Buddhism says it best: we are ALL aswim in delusion.

But imagine a schizophrenic without the paranoia? To connect to the level without the impediments?

Don't have to imagine it, it's happened, over and over again. That's Tesla. That's Einstein. That's Newton.

A "sane" man can never even hope to discover new forms of current by walking around in the forest and sketching images in the sand with a stick. A "sane" man doesn't spend years alone in a room writing alchemist tomes on numbers, to discover prisms and gravity.

Good luck all my brothers in the white labcoats! Get a little crazy!!

The speed is low becasue the sprit or conciousness is un-coupled from the biological self. This happens while we sleep. Has any one try to run a dream, it very slow and you cannot run. This conciousness is a wave and travels at the speed of light. It is not know where it goes while we are asleep or when it decide to leave the physical body during a trumatic accident or situation. I think the slow phenomena is casued by the delay in the travel of the conciousness at the speed of light. We have to understand that the human is more than genes and proteins. The thought is not a gene and mRNA or a peptide!

Contents:- page 32. Gap from page 30 to 37. Every copy in the rack the same.

Curious; thought I was in the wrong zone, moved to bakery and then fruit & veg zones. No change. Left, turned watch upside down and came back earlier: still no change.

Suspect something has bitten a piece from my lifeline.

When I looked directly at a car's wheel in traffic yesterday, I saw blurred "spokes". When I glanced away and the wheel shifted to my peripheral vision, I suddenly saw a sharp image of a spoke.

In college I used to experiment with Lsd and other paychedelics. One notable phenomena of the psychedelic experience is that of slowing time. I recall once when I took an extremely large dose of LSD (.5 mg) time basically stopped and I entered into a moment of seeming eternity. The clock arm literally stopped. Panic welled up but subsided as I held on to the idea that it would pass.

A friend came to visit me and I suggested an experiment where I would gauge the time that had passed. I closed my eyes for an eternity then opened them expecting night. I said, "alright, that mustve been at least 10 hours." " try 10 minutes" was my friends reply.

I theorized at the moment that my minds processing capability mustve been sped up, much like the fast capture footage of a great white coming up for a bite. It made perfect sense and explained how I was capable wading through an incredible amount of thoughts in what was probably minutes.

It is well known that the choice of background music in a restaurant affects the speed at which customers eat meals. Flute music and baroque trumpets, I recall, get customers in and out a lot faster than do slow waltzes or folksongs ...

I believe, master musicians experience this phenomena when playing music very fast.

Have experience this many times, its kind of a sweet feeling like the ground kind of comes up to meet me or like a pair of very strong hands are holding me back letting me go down easily, anyway it is a totally awesome experience. A senior citizen (80) Thanks for letting me share.

I don;t understand why every piece I read on brain research uses the phrase 'our brain'? Such sillyness doesn't belong in Science.

Ok -human trying to visually track something that is too fast to track , use so called frames,why assume this is how we see things that aren't too fast to track? Considering that most of the research subjects have likely spent much of their lives looking at TV, computers books blackboards etc.,why assume that their perceptual styles and habits are those of all humans? Sensory overload is normal in industrial countries and the pace and rhythm of sensory input tends to be scattershot and full of extreme dynamic shifts,advertising etc makes big noises,visually and audio wise to get attention.Peple tend to screen out a lot .Not many people who live with this stuff have developed skill in maintaining steady attention.That doesn't mean humans can't do it. Yogi's, martial artists ,hunter gatherers practice such things ,with out control groups to test for habits of attention such studies are no more than preliminary. Worthwhile certainly ,but statements like "the continuity of our perception " seem to me highly irrational with so many untested assumptions in play .It 's absurdly early to draw conclusions,the data are extremely incomplete.

In my late teens (when i started to spend lots of time concentrating on problems) i would occasionally notice that if i were deep in thought and broke off to check my watch, that for some reason the second hand would no longer be moving.

Then a few seconds later it would suddenly start moving again at normal rate.

Over the years i measured this phenomenon and concluded that when deep in thought my time perception was 3x real time, and that upon coming back to the 'physical world' my brain needed to resync to normal time.

So, the slow motion effect during an accident might more likely be associated with the dis-associative effect that some experience during a traumatic event.

As a matter of interest , i have had experiences of spinning off the road in a car, falling head first down a flight of stairs etc and they have all happened in slow motion and i have had the feeling at the time of begin disassociated from the event, and in all cases emerged un-scathed.

Any musician who has practiced with a metronome or performed for audiences can tell you much about altered perceptions of time. I'm guessing studying musicians would be very profitable and enlightening.

So much of your article was about visual perception and only a little about auditory: If we get only 13 FPS via several asynchronous streams into our brains, how do we accurately discern pitch differences as small as 3¢ at a frequency of 16K Hz? Seems to me a MUCH faster - and synchronous - constant would required to do that.

I do hope these experiments were carried out in natural light.

After all, anything electrical (light bulbs, computer screens) has a flicker. This flickering is often imperceptible, but it's still there!

Not only that, what about eye chemistry? For example, what impact does the fluctuating balance of opsins in the eye have on perception?

When you drive an old car at 60 kph it feels like your doing 80. But if your in a nice BMW it feels like your 80k's while your really doing 180k's. Could this be because the extra information from the rattles and wobbles decreases the brains frame rate?

Also, when playing a fast paced action game online, time really flies. I can blow hours and not realize it.

Both high stimulus activities I mentioned are also physically exhausting

The article does not mention the common experience of time accelerates with age. As a young child a day can seem an eternity and in older age the days weeks and months increasingly fly by. Perhaps the young brain processes at our highest rate and the processing decelerates as we age. This subjective experience is often discussed but I dont know if it has been researched using objective measures

Different species are said to live in different timeframes. Dogs for example age at six times the rate of humans. Do they process time in their brains at a slower rate - are dog days longer than human days?

April the 12th 1971. On I 80 in Penn. Between exits 19&20. Front tire blowout. 70 mile per. Snap ring sailed, truck went to berm. Front axel cleaned out. Cab tore off chassis. 5th wheel tore loose. Trailer rode up on right side of cab.ALL IN SLOW MOTION.

where can I get or how can I create a click train?

Jackie Stewart once described going through a 'terrifying' part of the Nuburgring happening in 'slow motion,' but only after the first lap of practice, when he knew what the car was going to do.

Other top drivers have made similar comments.

i made sum cheesecake nd may i say it was rather delicious.........tablespoon of chocolate spread sneaked into the cream bit and raspberries on top with a hint of lemon zest

I thought the discrete frames was common knowledge, all you need to do is turn a fast turning fan off in NON Oscillating light and stare at the fan as it slows, it will go one way, then look like its going the other way, then back again until it stops.

Clearly this means we have discrete frames when processing the data coming from our eyes, however 13 FPS seems a bit slow, why is it that we can see the difference between 60 FPS and 100 FPS on computer screens?