Time should be unflinching. It should be in perfect sync no matter where you go, whether you’re at the other end of the galaxy or in your bedroom.
But, according to Leeds Beckett University psychologist Steve Taylor, time isn’t a well-oiled Swiss. It’s more of a twisty-turning, tiny, whiny set of unstructured, ever-changing rules. Even more, our brains are what cause it to bend and stretch in ways that don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Taylor’s curiosity about this came from a near-death experience. In 2014, he and his wife survived a car crash where, according to Taylor, the world suddenly slipped into a Matrix-like bullet time.
Everything moved in slow motion. He saw details he shouldn’t have had time to see. This launched a decade-long dive into what Taylor calls “Time Expansion Experiences,” or TEEs. These are moments when time doesn’t just feel slower, it is slower, at least in your mind.
The Human Brain Might Be Capable of Warping Time as We Know It
In a 2020 study of 96 cases, half were near-death incidents, but others happened during sports, deep meditation, or while tripping on peyote. Thankfully, there are other ways to feel like you’re living in a Zach Snyder movie without having to nearly die.
For years, scientists have attempted to explain this phenomenon by suggesting that noradrenaline is involved. That’s the chemical that kicks in when you’re in fight or flight mode.
However, that doesn’t account for why you experience the same time warp while sitting still and breathing deeply during meditation. Or when you enter a resplendent state of bliss that stretches time when you score a goal in a pickup soccer game.
There has long been another theory that attempts to explain this phenomenon: that your brain remembers more details during stressful events, providing you with the illusion of slow motion. Taylor doesn’t buy it.
Instead, he argues that TEEs push us into an altered state of consciousness that separates us from the normal flow of time. According to his theory, this isn’t just a trick of our minds. He says it’s a different mental “time-world.”
Our brains, while under pressure or in a state of perfect focus, step outside their own understanding of time and enter a more fluid, ill-defined realm. A place where time, or at least our perception of it, stretches well beyond anything that can be measured on a stopwatch.
It’s weird as heck, but you can read all about it in Taylor’s published paper or in his thankfully dumbed-down, easy-to-read essay in The Conversation.
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