Slow Motion

            Imagine jumping from an airplane and those seconds or minutes would become the longest minutes of your life. They will become hours and hours. Like in the Matrix movie where a bullet that comes out from a gun slows down and the hero perceives it as in a walking pace.  So in life and death situations and in fear thing feel like they happen slower. David Eaglemen said it would either be a person’s cognition would speed up or it was only an illusion. He did experiments to find out if there really was something called slow motion.  He used a group of people and made them free fall from the top of the tower.  The experience showed that the participants felt that it took 36 percent longer. This showed that the time dilation was occurring. However, then he did an experiment using the perceptual chronometer which was a numeric display device. The rate of the numbers would be adjusted by researchers in order for the numbers to flash. They speeded up the numbers so the numbers would be hard to read. The participants were not able to read the numbers while experiencing the terror of freefall. This experience showed that fear did not increase the rate of perception. However it does make us remember in detail. Eagleman’s experiment shows how fear is experienced and how the conscious plays a role. The participant who fell from the tower felt like things moved in a slow motion. However Eagleman says that it’s a memory of what we feel seconds ago and it is not a direct experience of what is felt ‘now.’ He argues that the experience is an illusion. I believe that it must be an illusion of the memory that was lived a few seconds ago and the continuing feeling of what we felt. I guess we live the fear very intense and remember exactly what it felt like and the memory keeps building on and we can explain how it was experienced in such detail so it feels like it was a long time. But in intense feelings such as fear and happiness in my experience fear has always felt longer compared to my happy experiences. This makes me question if it is only an illusion or not.     

Zeynep Ercan