Free-fall Psychophysiology!

In August, 2005, David Eagleman, Matt Fiesta, Donny Vaughn and I took a break from our normal laboratory routine.

We tried an experiment to see if time really does "slow down" when you're really scared (as you are in a car accident, for example). We built a device which flashes numbers at you so fast that you can't see them under normal circumstances. Then, we asked participants to try and resolve the numbers while falling 100 ft through the air. We figured that if fear made your whole brain "speed up", as the popular anecdote would suggest, you'd be able to see the flashing digits.

It turns out, the story isn't quite so simple. Our results, published here in PlosOne, show that people don't do significantly better than expected on the perceptual task. However, their retrospective judgments of the duration of their fall were dilated. These results may suggest that the feeling of time passing is not always coupled to the rate at which the brain takes in information.

Instead, it seems likely that how much you remember of an event affects how long it seemed to last. The evidence that fear affects how memories are laid down is abundant (for example, Tully et al., 2007). What we need to ferret out next is the relationship between the density of memory, so to speak, and the perception of time.

Discovery Science did a short piece on this experiment. This video doesn't explain our results, but it may give you some idea about what it feels like to fall 100 feet through the air.