Why Do We Feel What Happened During an Accident in Slow Motion?

We must have noticed that time changes when we are in an environment that is very boring to us or vice versa. The main reason for this is not the time but the changing our perception of time Would you still think the same if we told you it was?

Until this time “time slows down” If you have witnessed one of these moments, you will understand better what we mean. While everything develops in an instant to an observer watching what is happening from the outside, it is not so for the person who is in that moment.

In the event of an accident, everything seems to happen in slow motion.

The feeling that time is slowing down is actually a situation that occurs when a person’s life is under threat. That’s why, while time doesn’t pass in “bad” moments, it flows like water in moments of happiness. Actually An event of 3 seconds gives the person the feeling that it happened in a longer time.

In an experiment on this topic, volunteers On a secure net from a height of 45 meters they leave. Each of these subjects has a stopwatch on their arms, and the perception of time must slow down in order for these stopwatches to be read. At the end of the experiment, all of the subjects stated that the moment of jumping left a ‘long’ memory for them.

The researchers concluded that all subjects jump and fall times He sees it’s 3 seconds. When the volunteers were asked about the time elapsed between jumping and falling, the answer supported this situation: 6-7 seconds.

So why is our perception of time subject to such deception?

In fact, what we call time perception is the result of electrochemical signals sent by our sense organs to our brain, which is completely blind, deaf and dumb. Sometimes we can be so fast that the outside world comes to us very slowly. For example, from the movie X-Men, one of the masterpieces. Days of Future Past The super-fast kid, who appears in the episode called “The super fast child, moves very fast in the perception of time. Actually Time flies at the same speed. But the child is moving much faster than time, or, in the normal course of time, faster than anything around him.

Is ‘slowing down time’ actually a personal psychological ability?

The first explanation that comes to mind on the subject is that a momentary slowdown our ancestors It is a neurological and psychological ability they have developed in order to survive. So this ability can save us from emergencies. Because it gives us quick time to react to a possible situation, prepare and escape. Thus, in a nutshell “an evolutionary adaptation” we can say.

Another possibility has to do with the way our brain and senses work.

When scientists do research on the subject, this situation is actually our brain. amygdala They think it originates from the region. The brain in living things; The amygdala, which is in the system responsible for emotions, behaviors, memory and the sense of smell, is located in the temporal lobe, one of the four lobes of our brain. amygdala, from emotional memory and survival impulses such as fear, anger, surprise. is responsible. When the amygdala is activated in times of fear and danger, all our senses become sharper and our memory starts working perfectly at that moment. As a result, we think that time slowed down at that time as we quickly reviewed all the details of the moment and processed each one perfectly.

But this has a side effect!

At such a moment, our memories are different than under normal circumstances. in detail it’s coming out. When we think about our memories at the time of the event, it actually seems to us that this event took much longer than usual. Such experiences, which change our perception of reality, impose such an intense load on the memory part of our brain, which does not accumulate details under normal conditions, that our consciousness believes that this is impossible and that the time we perceive has changed or that our perception of time slows down does not rule.

Therefore, in the event of a negative situation or in the event of an accident, It feels like minutes, not seconds. At that time, all the systems in our brain work so fast that everything around us feels very slow because we put our vision, hearing, thinking and decision-making systems under strain. That’s the whole answer!