A story that NPR ran recently talks about the “slowing down of time†when a person falls. The story on their website expands the concept to essentially any time that we get “adrenaline chargedâ€.
Probably everyone has experienced this phenomenon at some point in their life, where after some event that was charged with lots of adrenaline, we have memories of the event that are in great, slow-motion detail.
The article had some great information in it, but seemed to focus on a pretty dry perspective of why this might happen – sort of the nuts and bolts of what’s going on in our brain and the rest of our body. While this is interesting for sure, I find that the more intriguing side of this story is really the guts of what we might be capable of in these “heightened statesâ€.
It’s clear that stuff happens in our body that makes us able to perceive time and events in a new way – a heightened state where we see more and react more quickly. Most important is that our senses don’t appear to make stuff up in these states, but rather that they are simply more tuned-up.
Seems to me pretty likely that there would be quite a bit that could be learned in these heightened states – a whole new window into the world that we stumble through every day. Study like this seems to suggest that the world right in front of our eyes is, indeed, bigger than we think it is. There’s more in front of us than we see as we float through the world.
Click here to see the article.
