Image by Warner Bros.
While we’re not quite living in “The Matrix” — at least in a falsifiable sense — it seems that something comparable to the film’s legendary slowed-down “bullet time” sequence can, under the right circumstances, happen in real life.
In an essay for The Conversation, psychology lecturer Steve Taylor of England’s Leeds Beckett University argues that these so-called “time expansion experiences,” or TEEs for short, could well be an “evolutionary adaptation” meant to help us survive during extreme experiences.
During his research into the phenomenon, the English psychologist has spoken with dozens of people who’ve experienced TEEs. He believes that 85 percent of all people have had at least one, and that most of us experience them either during accidents, when playing sports or exercising, or in altered states of consciousness brought on by meditation or hallucinogens.
As Taylor explains in a post on the Leeds Beckett website, his interest in the phenomenon began after a 2014 car accident he was in with his wife when, as his vehicle was hit by a large truck, “everything went into slow motion.”
“I looked behind, and the other cars seemed to be moving incredibly slowly, almost as if they were frozen,” he wrote. “I felt as though I had a lot of time to observe the whole scene and to try to regain control of the car.”
That sense of slowed, detailed perception of one’s surroundings — and the clarity of mind that accompanies the decisions made within those split-second moments — seem to characterize TEEs. As the psychologist explains in The Conversation, he was surprised to be so calm at the time — and that calmness, which others report feeling during TEEs, suggests that they aren’t mere adrenaline responses.
During his research, which Taylor documents in his new book “Time Expansion Experiences,” the scientist encountered a theory suggesting that this time-slowing effect is simply a trick of memory. Because people become hyper-aware during emergency situations, that theory posits, their perception becomes acute, and that acuteness is then “encoded in our memories” as they recollect the incident.
Taylor and the majority of other people who have had TEEs, however, feel certain that they had “extra time to think and act” in the moment, as things were happening, and not just in retrospect.
“Time expansion allowed complex series of thoughts and actions that would have been impossible if time had been passing at a normal speed,” he wrote in The Conversation.
As with so much of human perception, TEEs remain somewhat inexplicable — but for those who have ever experienced “Matrix”-style bullet time know that it feels very real regardless.
More on time: Weird New Quantum Experiment Sounds Suspiciously Like Time Travel
Share This Article
This post was originally published on here
