Enter the Matrix — The Science of Slowing Down Time
Episode Stats
Summary
People commonly think of time as a fixed linear objective structure, but our own experiences belie this belief. We ve all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up, and there are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster. As my guest, Dr. Steve Taylor, will explain, time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize. Dr. Taylor is a psychologist and the author of Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. In this episode, he discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older, and what factors slow down and speed up time.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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people commonly think of time as a fixed linear objective structure but our own experiences belie
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this belief we've all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up and there
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are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster as my guest steve
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taylor will explain time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize steve is a
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psychologist and the author of time expansion experiences the psychology of time perception
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and the illusion of linear time taylor the show he impacts the four laws of psychological time
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he discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older and what factors slow down and
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speed up time we delve into the way time particularly expands in accidents and emergencies giving people
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the ability to take life-saving measures and we discuss why some people are more likely to have
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time expansion experiences than others what you can do to slow down time and make your life feel
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longer as a result after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is time expansion
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all right steve taylor welcome to the show hi brett great to be with you so you are a psychologist who
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has spent his career studying time expansion experiences what is a time expansion experience
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it's a moment when time stretches out way beyond its normal speed so a second or two could stretch
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out into maybe half a minute or a minute or even longer they often happen in accidents or emergency
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situations but also in other unusual states of consciousness so really it's a massive expansion of
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one second or 10 seconds or any period of time which seems to be much longer than it really is
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okay and we're going to dig deep into this because it's incredibly fascinating the research you've done
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on this how did you get interested in researching time expansion well i actually wrote a book about
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time maybe 15 years ago and i felt as though i kind of worked out time and i didn't really need to
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focus on it anymore but then 10 years ago i had a car crash i was driving along the highway or the
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motorways we call them here in the uk just outside my home city of manchester and it was quite a busy
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afternoon lots of cars around me traveling at maybe 60 miles an hour and i was in the middle lane i was
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preparing to overtake a truck on the inside lane but the truck didn't see me and he tried to move out
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into the middle lane and he clipped the back of my car and i started to spin around he clipped the car
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again so we were spinning around even faster and immediately as soon as the i heard the sound of his
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truck hitting my car everything went into slow motion i remember saying to my wife who was in the
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passenger seat what was that noise and then it seemed like there was a long long pause but then
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the car started to spin it seemed like it was spinning slowly even though it probably wasn't
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and i remember looking behind and i saw the frightened faces of the drivers behind me stretching way way back
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along the the lines of cars and everything became very clear i had this very heightened perception
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and i was also incredibly calm you know in my mind i knew this was a very dangerous situation i thought
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well maybe we're going to be seriously injured maybe even killed in this situation but i started
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to think very methodically you know is there anything i can do i tried to shunt the car to
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the left towards the shoulder i tried to pull the handbrake and press down on the other brake
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and maybe it was because of my actions but fortunately the car began to spin towards the left towards the
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shoulder then we crashed into a barrier at the side of the road and then everything seemed to go back
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to normal speed i seemed to go back into a normal state of consciousness so in reality this whole
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incident probably lasted maybe three or four seconds but in my mind it seemed to last for much
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much longer maybe half a minute or 45 seconds because i had so much time to perceive the situation
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to think about what to do and it was my first personal experience what i called it a time expansion
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experience so then i began to do research on them as a psychologist and i found out that they're
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actually very common okay we're going to talk about some of these heightened time experiences
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where time really slows down it's almost like bullet time in the matrix yeah but in the book
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you not only talk about how time can slow down but how it can also speed up and you unpack four laws
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of psychological time and the first one is time seems to speed up as we get older and i'm sure most
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people listening to this probably agree that as they've gotten older time just seems to be going by
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faster and faster in your research how common is that experience it seems to be a fairly universal
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human phenomenon about 90 of people feel that time is getting faster as they get older and you know
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research in different countries has shown the same that it doesn't matter whether you're living in the
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middle east or asia everybody in the world seems to experience this phenomenon and um but you know
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people try to take some measures against it you know everybody kind of regrets the fact that time is
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moving quickly but it yeah it does seem to be a natural human phenomenon and this is something that
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philosophers and psychologists have been grappling with for nearly two centuries what have been the
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different theories put out there as to why time seems to go faster and faster as we get older
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the first philosopher to to speculate about this was a french philosopher called paul janet
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in the 19th century the mid-19th century and he was the first person who put forward a theory
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and i i refer to it as the proportional theory it's the idea that as you get older each period of
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your life is a smaller part of your life as a whole so that when you're five years old for example a year
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is um 20 of your whole life therefore it seems like a massive period of time but when you're 50 a year is
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only two percent of your whole life so it seems correspondingly insignificant that seems to work
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quite well it explains why time seems to speed up in a kind of mathematical way you know the older you
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get the faster it seems to go so that's one theory but there was a later psychologist called william
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james an american psychologist who suggested that it was maybe related to new experiences as well that
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when you're a child your life is so full of new experience and all of this new experience stretches
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time so that's the theory that i lean towards that it's to do with new experience i think i am i
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agree with william james and you on that one i've noticed i think other psychologists have studied this
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but a lot of our memories most of our memories are from adolescence or young adulthood like i don't
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remember too much about my childhood but i remember a lot about my high school years my college years
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and it just seems like there's like this time out of time where it just seemed expansive and i think
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it's because there's just so much going on during that time when you're a young adult because you're
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making these big important decisions you're doing new things with friends you're going off to new places
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and then once you hit you don't know your 30s life's for a lot of people kind of set you might
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be married have kids have a career and it just it's the same thing over and over again so it just goes
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by faster and faster yeah i think that's a lot to do with it when you're young you are literally
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experiencing everything everything for the first time but as you get older your life becomes a
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repetition of those experiences so there's corresponding less newness in your life and you know by the time
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you're maybe 70 or 80 years old you're living in a world of familiarity every experience has been
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you know experienced many times before so yeah there's there's less newness in your life i think
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fundamentally it's about information processing there's a strong link between time perception and
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information processing so that the more information you process the slower time goes so if you're having a
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lot of new experiences there's so much new information going into your consciousness and that seems to stretch
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time oh and that leads us to the second law which is time seems to go slowly when we're exposed to
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new environments and experiences what's been the research on this law well it's it's anecdotally you
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know it's a well-known human phenomenon that when you go to a new place if you go abroad for a few days
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particularly to a place which is very different to your home environment it makes time stretch so that
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when you come back you feel wow have i really just been away for a few days it feels more like a few weeks
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i had that when i went to india for a few weeks uh many years ago i came home and i felt like i'd been
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away for about six months rather than six weeks because i've had so much new experience and again
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this seems to be to do with new information processing you know because when we were in a
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new environment there's so much newness around us everything is unfamiliar and strange so our
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consciousness just expands and time stretches and there have been some experiments where psychologists
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have found that new information seems to stretch time people estimate longer time periods when
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they're exposed to new information and also varied information if you repeat the same information
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time contracts uh it can be for example auditory information in a laboratory noises unfamiliar noises
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they seem to stretch time whereas familiar noises which are repeated again and again people
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estimate shorter time periods with this law where time seems to go slowly when we're exposed to new
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environments and experiences is this people remembering like it's a retrospective or does it
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feel slower in the moment because i've heard this theory that part of the reason why time seems to go
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more slowly when we experience new environments have different experiences is that your brain is like a
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camera and when you do the same routine stuff your brain's like i don't need to turn on and film this
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because i've i've already seen this a bunch of times but then when you do something new your brain
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thinks i may need to remember this i'm going to remember this later so it takes a lot more
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metaphorical footage so that later when you look back there's more footage to unspool which makes the
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experience seem longer when we remember it i think that's a factor because new experiences do create more
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memories so when we look back you know we have a lot of memories to draw on but i think it's also a
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present tense phenomenon i mean all our experience takes place in the present tense so the information that we
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process that happens right now you know our consciousness is open in that moment it's taking
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in that information in the moment so i think it is a mainly a present tense phenomenon but obviously
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you can only really measure time in retrospective so we're living through time in the moment so we
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can't really get outside and measure it so usually our measurements of time take place retrospectively
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when we get home from a journey or at the end of a brief period of time but i did that doesn't mean
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that you know the actual time stretching doesn't take place in the moment i think it does take place
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in the moment and maybe there is also an effect from memory but i think fundamentally it is a present
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tense phenomenon okay the third law is about time speeding up and it says time seems to speed up in
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states of absorption what do you mean by absorption absorption is when our attention is immersed in an
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activity or it could be an entertainment it's when we we're so immersed in the activity that we forget
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our surroundings we forget ourselves we kind of lose ourselves in whatever we're doing so it could be
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when we're playing a sport it could be when we're watching a film it could be just when we're when we're in a
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social situation with friends but all these situations tend to contract time because they they lend
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themselves to absorption and i'm sure people have experienced that maybe they get involved in like a
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really if they play video games there might be a video game that was just really enjoyable and then
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they look back like oh my gosh it's been three hours it felt like 45 minutes that's right that's a very
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common phenomenon actually video games because they they lend themselves to such intense absorption
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generally there is a proportional effect the more absorbed you are the faster time seems to go
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and i guess you know particularly for young people video games are incredibly absorbing but for other
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people it could be an intense bout of work like something's going on in the office there's a lot
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of action and you have to get into the zone you have to get locked in and in that moment it just seems
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like time goes by really fast after you're all done that's right yeah in some ways that's a good
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thing because people often report job satisfaction in relation to absorption the more absorbed you are in
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your job the more effective you are in the job but also the faster the time goes you know whereas if
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you have a a job which is kind of you know maybe it doesn't engage your attention maybe it's a bit
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boring or maybe there are lots of different things that you have to do and you have to switch your
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attention around so you can't get into a steady focus of absorption those kind of jobs are less
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you know well they're less absorbing and also they tend to bring less job satisfaction and also they make
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time pass very slowly which is a bad thing well and you also talk about this is connected to this
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idea of boredom our moods and emotions can affect absorption and thus our perception of time that's
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right yeah generally uh negative states of mind tend to slow down our time perception which is you know
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it's quite quite weird in a way it's kind of as if a malevolent god is playing tricks on us because
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time goes quickly when we're absorbed which usually means fun and enjoyment and time goes slowly when
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we're bored so it's as if somebody's playing tricks on us and pain as well usually uh painful
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situations or painful states of mind slow down time depression anxiety any negative state of mind
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tends to slow down time and i think that is again because of absorption because when you're bored
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you know it means by definition that your attention is not absorbed when you're in pain you can't focus
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your mind your attention keeps being drawn back to the pain so you can't focus on a book or a film or a
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conversation so time tends to drag and the you know the negativity of the situation tends to be
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prolonged i imagine people who have had a family member or maybe themselves waiting for some sort of
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health diagnosis they might have experienced that time slowing down and dragging because they're just
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ruminating about oh my gosh what's going to happen is it could do i have cancer or something bad
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going to happen that's right so again you know you're in such an anxious state state of mind that you
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can't get absorbed in anything you can't focus your attention away from the situation there's a
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similar situation if you're on a long call flight and you're a person who feels a bit anxious when
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you're flying so you can't absorb your attention in a film or conversation you're constantly looking at
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your watch or at the time to find out how long is left so you know your anxiety is prolonged because
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you can't you can't absorb your attention and therefore the flight seems to last for much longer than
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normal yeah that's what we do if you want to make the flight go by faster you bring something to get
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yourself absorbed in whether it's a movie or a book or something like that that's right i mean we
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subconsciously make use of these laws because we know that there are certain things we can do to slow
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down or speed up our time perception and we know intuitively that absorption makes time pass faster
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so yeah you're right that's exactly why we we watch films we try to get engaged in conversations
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when we're on long flights okay so the fourth law and what the bulk of your book is about is this
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time passes very slowly in intense altered states of consciousness when our normal psychological
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structures and processes are significantly disrupted and our normal self system dissolves
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there's a lot to unpack in this law and i think the best way to unpack it is to give examples
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of times when people are put into intense altered states of consciousness and this goes back to your
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experience with the car accident one area that you research this altered state of consciousness
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happening is in emergencies and accidents in what types of emergencies and accidents do people
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typically experience time expansion in my research around 50 percent of time expansion experiences happen
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in accident situations and that that's mainly car crashes but also falls many reports from falls
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but also other situations such as under the influence of psychedelic substances also in sports
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um but also generally emergency situations when people are told bad news or when they undergo trauma
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of some kind but yeah the most prevalent situation which occurs is accidents of one form or another
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yeah and it says the action has to be unexpected sudden and dramatic that's right so you know you can't
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recreate this situation there was a famous experiment where psychologists try to recreate an accident
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situation or emergency situation where they ask people to do bungee jumps and they try to measure their
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time perception while they were jumping while they were doing bungee jumps but the results weren't valid
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they didn't find that people underwent time expansion i think that's because it wasn't a genuine emergency
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situation it wasn't unexpected it wasn't dramatic or sudden people knew what was going to happen so it has
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to be a completely unexpected situation in your research have you figured out like how much does time feel like
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it slows down in an accident or an emergency it varies from person to person most people experience a time
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dilation of maybe to the order of magnitude of 10 or 15 so that 10 seconds seems to be one and a half
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minutes or maybe five seconds seems to be something like a minute that's quite common that's the kind of
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time dilation which i experienced in my accident but there are some situations where it becomes even more
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extreme for example there are some examples of falls and when mount when a mountaineer for example falls
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off the side of a mountain and a two-second fall can seem to stretch out into what seems like many
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minutes sometimes occasionally when people are close to death through drowning that can also make time
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stretch in a very dramatic way and also there are situations like near-death experiences when a person
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actually does clinically die for a short time where you know there's an even more dramatic time
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expansion yeah what's interesting in regards to falls the first person to start kind of studying
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time expansion in a fall this happened a long time ago this is like in the 1800s this guy named albert
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heim he was a geologist and climber and he experienced a fall and he just he noticed that man time seemed
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to slow down and so he started trying to figure out what was going on there that's right he was the
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first person to study these experiences actually back in i think it was 1885 yeah as you say he was
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climbing a mountain he fell off of the side of a mountain he fell about 20 meters or 60 feet and in reality
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a fall of 20 meters takes two seconds but in his mind those two seconds seem more like minutes
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and he did he described in incredible detail the thought processes which which went through his mind
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in those two seconds now incredibly detailed thoughts about his friends and relatives and how they
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would react to the news of his death and what was going to happen to his career at university
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he pondered over where they should take his glasses off so that when he hit the ground you know he
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wondered whether they would smash and hurt his eyes he wondered about his friends who he'd been
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climbing with and you know all these incredibly detailed processes and he also had a life review when his
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previous experiences flashed before his eyes and you know he also felt incredibly calm felt a strange
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sense of well-being almost as if he was outside himself watching the situation unfortunately he survived
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and afterwards you know began to ponder over the experience and he began to collect reports from
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other mountaineers and and other people like builders or roofers who'd fallen off the roofs of
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high buildings and i think he collected around 25 examples and he he studied them to work out you know
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the most common factors in these experiences so you mentioned besides in these accidents or emergencies
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where time expansion occurs there's other characteristics of it people feel calm they feel a sense of beauty
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sometimes what are some other characteristics whenever people having these very extreme time
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expansion experiences yeah as you say the most common characteristic is a strange sense of calmness
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i experienced that and albert heim reported on it too and that's kind of paradoxical you know
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in theory we're very close to death or very close to serious injury so it seems strange that in these
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moments we feel a strange powerful sense of well-being a sense of detachment and calmness but also
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sometimes people report heightened awareness and that leads to a sense of beauty so that you know
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they could be in a very brutal or violent situation like a car crash but they describe it as if it's a
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beautiful scenario a beautiful situation there was one person in my research he reported that the
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windshield of his car smashed so he saw these tiny shards of glass floating in the sunshine and
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he said that they were like diamonds or glinting in the sunshine it looked incredibly beautiful as
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they floated by so that's quite common this heightened awareness that leads to an enhanced
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perception of beauty people sometimes report a sense that noise has become muffled external sounds
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seem to become silent so that nothing seems to exist outside the situation almost as if they're in a kind
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of cocoon of awareness and another common feature is the ability to take preventative action you know
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the feeling that they were able to to use the extra time that they had to take some measures that
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would help to minimize the danger or would help to prevent injury yeah that last one you give lots
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of examples of that i mean in your own case when you're in your car accident you started thinking
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like what can i do to mitigate the damage here and so you started taking preventative action other
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examples of people who fell you know just downstairs there's like a pregnant woman that fell downstairs and
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the fall only took maybe a second but in her mind it felt like it was going on for a minute and so she
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was thinking okay what do i need to do with my body during this fall to protect myself and my baby and
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she was able to do it like she was fine yeah that's right in fact in my research in situations where it's
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possible to take some kind of action because in some accidents it's not possible but in situations
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where it is possible over 80 percent of people feel like they were able to take some kind of action
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and often that means falling in such a way that they didn't damage their body maybe bringing their
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knees up to their chest so they so that their organs were protected and yeah it's you know the
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woman you mentioned is a good example she was able to fall in such a way that she didn't damage her baby
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and there's also another interesting example i collected from a man he was waiting at a bus stop
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and there was an old lady next to him who started to fall to the ground i think she had a stroke or a
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heart attack and he immediately held out his arm to try to protect her but her weight pulled him to the
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ground it probably takes less than half a second to fall to the ground but he described how that
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half second opened up and he described as a strange slow motion choreography where he was able to fall
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in front of the woman and twist his body around so that she fell on top of him and he was able to
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twist his body around so that he felt relaxed and didn't damage his his uh his ribs so it was yeah in
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half a second he was able to perform all these all of these actions that minimize the danger we're
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going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors and now back to the show how have
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researchers tried to explain time expansion during an accident there have been a few different theories
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one popular theory is that uh it's related to a surge in noradrenaline to the brain obviously when
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we're in dangerous situations our brains respond and one of those ways in which it responds is to
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surge to to increase noradrenaline in the brain which creates a kind of flight or fight response
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and that seems to make some sense especially in accident or emergency situations but it doesn't
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explain why in these situations we feel such a sense of calmness such a sense of calm well-being
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and that doesn't fit with a fight or flight response and also it's significant that time expansion
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experiences don't just occur in dangerous situations they also occur in moments of intense calmness
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such as in deep meditation or in moments of stillness or presence when we're in natural
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surroundings for example so the fight or flight response or a surge in noradrenaline can't explain
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that there's another theory which i'm quite fond of which i put forward myself and that it's it could
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be a kind of evolutionary adaptation because if you think about it our ancestors were living in quite
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difficult circumstances they had to protect themselves from wild animals and natural disasters so it would
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have been quite useful for them to switch into a different state of consciousness in which time
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slows down it would have definitely helped to help them to survive so maybe we inherited that from our
00:23:53.700
early ancestors as a kind of survival response but but again that doesn't really explain why time
00:23:59.420
expansion occurs in other situations such as moments of deep calmness or deep presence
00:24:04.440
okay so it's a mystery like we don't know exactly what's going on
00:24:07.980
we don't know exactly but but i think the key to understanding these experiences is that they always
00:24:13.780
occur in altered states of consciousness you know even we don't normally think of accidents or
00:24:18.160
emergencies as altered states of consciousness but they actually do put us into a different state of
00:24:21.960
consciousness the shock of the situation or the drama of the situation jolts us into a
00:24:26.840
different state of consciousness and we also know that psychedelics slow down time because they
00:24:31.960
dissolve our ego boundaries they heighten our awareness we also know that sports people
00:24:37.440
experience time expansion in the highest moments in the moments of peak performance and they also
00:24:43.140
experience altered states of consciousness so i think the key to understanding them is these altered
00:24:48.340
states of consciousness and it makes us realize that the kind of time that we normally perceive
00:24:52.960
our normal time perception is really just a product of our normal consciousness it's really just a
00:24:58.460
creation of our normal psychological processes and our normal psychological functions so as soon as we
00:25:04.240
change our state of consciousness and shift into different psychological processes and functions we
00:25:09.800
also enter a different time space and just to clarify again you think that based on all these antidotes
00:25:16.540
you've picked up over the years that people are actually experiencing slowed down time in real time it's not as if
00:25:23.400
people are just remembering later oh it seemed like it was a long time no they really did experience
00:25:28.500
slowed down time as they were falling or having an accident yeah i think if anybody listening to this
00:25:34.400
has had a time expansion experience in an accident or in another situation people are almost always
00:25:40.420
convinced that it was a real experience which happened in the now i did a survey of 200 time expansion
00:25:45.280
experiences and i asked people whether it was a real experience in the present or whether it could have been
00:25:50.600
an illusion due to an increased number of memories and only three percent of people felt it could have
00:25:55.920
been a memory illusion ten percent weren't sure but 87 percent of people were convinced it was a real
00:26:01.180
experience in the moment but also the fact that people are able to take preventative action people
00:26:07.900
are actually able to accomplish things which would normally be impossible they're able to perceive and to
00:26:13.200
think in much more detail than would normally be possible in such a period of time to me that does show
00:26:19.700
that it's a real experience in the present so you mentioned another area where people experience time
00:26:24.860
expansion is in sports when athletes experience time expansion while playing how do they describe it
00:26:30.740
what is the subjective feeling of time expansion while playing a sport they often describe having more
00:26:37.060
time to position themselves having more time to anticipate their opponent's actions sometimes there's a
00:26:44.460
there are sort of perceptual changes that the ball seems to grow in size just like accidents external
00:26:50.080
sounds become muffled so even if they're surrounded by thousands of spectators they don't hear anything
00:26:55.780
so they're usually moments of peak performance whether where they have a lot of time to you know
00:27:00.880
position themselves or to take action against their opponents and it gives them obviously it gives them a
00:27:05.500
massive advantage yeah one player you described having this time expansion experience was the great
00:27:11.520
baseball player ted williams the best hitter of all time and he described like yeah i could see the
00:27:16.520
stitches on the ball that's going 95 miles an hour the ball seemed to get bigger and you suggest that
00:27:23.680
maybe one of the reasons why he was such a great hitter is that he was able to like for some reason able
00:27:28.340
to slow down time when he's in the batter's box i think so i mean he was he described his experiences
00:27:33.720
quite eloquently i think he was actually the first person to coin the term in the zone which has become
00:27:38.600
quite common now for sports people and athletes yeah and he even said that when he was at home
00:27:42.720
listening to music in those days it was 78 rpm records so he said that in his perception the record
00:27:50.180
was moving so slowly that he could read the information on the label as it was playing so yeah if you think
00:27:55.540
about it if you're a baseball hitter to slow down time gives you such an amazing advantage you know
00:28:00.000
you have a lot of time to wait for the ball and to to put yourself in the right position so i think
00:28:04.560
that explains why he was the you know the best hitter of all time how does time expansion differ
00:28:09.960
between sports and emergencies i think it's essentially the same phenomenon you know i think
00:28:15.320
the state of consciousness which athletes experience is essentially the same state of consciousness which
00:28:19.800
people experience in accidents i think the only difference is how it arises i think in accidents it
00:28:26.320
occurs due to the shock and drama of the situation and obviously sports can involve shock and drama too so
00:28:32.060
maybe that's a factor but i think the important factor in sport is that people get into a very
00:28:38.600
incredibly intense state of absorption i know we said earlier that absorption tends to speed up time
00:28:44.300
but i have this concept which i call super absorption and it's when absorption becomes so intense it
00:28:50.860
becomes much more intense than normal over a long long period of time or maybe just during a very
00:28:56.520
intense period of a game you know when absorption becomes especially intense time seems to open up
00:29:02.660
we seem to enter a different space in which time suddenly becomes panoramic almost as if we pass
00:29:08.140
through a portal or a gateway and suddenly we're surrounded by this vast expanse of time so i think
00:29:14.020
that's what happens in in sports people get so intensely absorbed that they shift into this very
00:29:19.400
intense alter state of consciousness in which time opens up and they have a lot more time to to play the game
00:29:25.680
in your research i mean this is kind of a question with all these time expansion experiences is there
00:29:31.920
a type of person who's more likely to have them because not everyone has them you know most people
00:29:36.280
who play sports probably don't have time expansion experiences people even in accidents don't have
00:29:41.400
them i think you talked about in your accident you had a time expansion experience but i think your
00:29:46.280
wife didn't have one that's right yeah my wife didn't have a time expansion experience in fact she was
00:29:52.180
terrified she was in a state of panic well i was sort of you know quite calmly and serenely observing the
00:29:57.380
situation so no you're right certain people do not have time expansion experiences even in accidents
00:30:02.680
and most sports people no matter how good they are they don't experience these moments or at least
00:30:07.760
i think many sports people experience them very occasionally in the you know the greatest moments
00:30:12.560
of performance but i think there are a few very elite athletes who have this ability to switch
00:30:18.360
into a mode of time expansion quite easily and if you look at the great athletes who've been able
00:30:23.460
to do this over history like lionel messi the the soccer player for example ted williams there was
00:30:29.360
also an australian cricketer called don bradman who was by far the greatest cricketer who's ever
00:30:34.380
played cricket you know he's just at a level way above everybody else even somebody like diego
00:30:39.760
maradona the famous argentinian soccer player they are or were quite unusual people i mean many people
00:30:45.600
have suggested that messi may have traits of autism ted williams is quite an unusual guy kind of
00:30:50.820
neurologically diverse person so they tend to be quite unusual people and i think that's related
00:30:56.100
to altered states of consciousness i think there are certain people who live quite close to an
00:31:01.280
altered state of consciousness or maybe they're in an altered state of consciousness all the time as
00:31:04.460
their normal mode so these are the people who tend to be you know the the most elite athletes and
00:31:10.020
these are the people who are prone to time expansion so i think going back to accidents
00:31:14.380
whether you're prone to time expansion in an accident or emergency it probably depends on
00:31:20.100
how liable you are to shift into an altered state of consciousness some people you know their kind of
00:31:26.560
mental boundaries are quite solid or fixed and it's more difficult for them to switch into a
00:31:31.900
different state of consciousness so that's probably the the main factor so another area where time
00:31:37.960
expansion occurs and your research and you mentioned it earlier is near-death experiences before we talk
00:31:44.380
how do researchers define near-death experiences well usually it's used in two senses the term
00:31:51.060
near-death experience the first sense is just when a person comes close to death when they have a close
00:31:56.380
brush with death for example when they come close to drowning or when they fall off the side of a mountain
00:32:00.980
so that's one meaning but i think the more specific meaning which researchers use is when a person
00:32:06.980
does clinically die for a short time before they are resuscitated so a common situation when this
00:32:12.960
occurs there's a cardiac arrest you know it could be a few seconds or a few minutes few minutes before
00:32:17.580
somebody is resuscitated and in that space of a few seconds or a few minutes many people report
00:32:23.160
a conscious experience while they were apparently dead they report very detailed and complex conscious
00:32:28.980
experiences they report feeling that they left their body they were traveling through a very peaceful
00:32:34.520
darkness towards a light occasionally they they meet beings of some form even deceased relatives
00:32:41.180
and then you know they are resuscitated and they report back on these experiences so that's um you know
00:32:47.360
the most specific meaning of near-death experience okay and in near-death experiences time seems to slow
00:32:53.280
down a lot based on your research how much does time slow down for someone during the near-death
00:32:58.740
experience it seems to be the most dramatic kind of time expansion of all so that a person may be
00:33:05.380
clinically dead for maybe a few seconds but in that small space they may experience hours of conscious
00:33:11.380
experience they sometimes report incredibly detailed and complex series of events and experiences that
00:33:18.340
take them hours to to record now people have written whole books about near-death experiences
00:33:22.940
which lasted just a few seconds because there's such a an incredible time expansion sometimes they
00:33:28.600
have a life review in which the the events of their lives are replayed within the near-death experience
00:33:34.520
and sometimes people feel that time disappears altogether so that there is no time at all yeah this
00:33:39.840
is you call it time cessation that's what that is that's right yeah i also investigated what i call
00:33:44.780
time cessation experiences where time disappears or dissolves away entirely you also talk about people who had
00:33:51.760
near-death experiences they describe that not only does time slow down or just disappear entirely
00:33:57.240
but often sometimes they describe time as being spatial what do you mean by that this is quite a
00:34:04.020
common report from near-death experiences these experiences are quite hard to describe because our
00:34:08.760
whole language is built on time you know our language is based on different tenses and different verbs in
00:34:14.040
time so people find these they do find it quite difficult to describe these experiences but they often
00:34:19.860
say that somehow the past and the future became part of the present it was almost as if time became a
00:34:26.780
spatial landscape almost as if you're on top of a mountain overlooking a landscape all around you so
00:34:33.780
rather than time being linear somehow it became spatial as if it was all around them yeah when i read that
00:34:40.260
it reminded me have you seen interstellar i did i watched it recently actually yeah well that part
00:34:45.080
where the matthew mcconaughey character like goes to the fourth dimension and he's just kind of floating
00:34:49.420
in that weird area and he's able just to go to different places in time maybe it's like that i don't know
00:34:55.440
i think it is i mean that that film was solidly based on physics so i mean there are ideas in physics
00:35:01.340
which suggest that time is like that the time is spatial rather than linear okay so let's talk about some
00:35:06.780
practical takeaways from your research because a lot of this just this is just really interesting
00:35:09.980
it's this i love talking about this thinking about it i'm sure we've provided a lot of fodder for
00:35:14.400
people at their next get together with their friends let's talk about practical takeaways from
00:35:18.640
your research because you've done that how can we become in essence time wizards and speed up and
00:35:24.560
slow down time at will well we spoke a little earlier about how even on an unconscious level we
00:35:31.340
manipulate time you know we change our time perception by for example on a flight we get into a
00:35:36.200
state of absorption to make time pass quickly and i think this is one reason why we like vacations
00:35:40.440
is because when we go on vacation it slows down time all of the new experience stretches our
00:35:46.520
consciousness and stretches our time so we can do things like that we can mitigate the speeding up
00:35:52.460
of time that seems to take place as we get older by introducing new experience into our lives by making
00:35:57.920
sure that our lives never become too full of routine and repetition that we keep changing things around
00:36:03.040
you know we keep traveling and we keep investigating new hobbies and new challenges and meeting new
00:36:08.980
people so i think you know all of that will definitely slow down our time perception yeah i've
00:36:14.660
been really intrigued by this idea that doing new things can slow down time and make your life seem
00:36:19.440
longer and i actually find it really motivating planning activities or vacations whenever i'm feeling
00:36:25.700
that inertia it kind of just gets me up and going to start doing things and something we've done in our
00:36:30.540
families we've had periods where we've challenged ourselves to try to do at least one new thing
00:36:36.300
a week so like a new novel thing so it could be small stuff like just go to a new restaurant or go
00:36:40.860
to a new park in town and yeah hopefully hopefully it will kind of extend my life but i mean it's just
00:36:46.360
also just fun to do i'm also curious about this is it possible to deliberately induce those extreme
00:36:54.200
time expansion experiences that we talked about that people have during accidents or near-death
00:36:59.980
experiences to a degree i think it's definitely theoretically possible now we spoke about
00:37:05.620
sports people and you know they do this even if not consciously they do manage to shift into a
00:37:10.440
different state of consciousness in which time slows down but interestingly there are some martial arts
00:37:14.660
from china or japan or korea where people consciously cultivate a state of consciousness a kind of
00:37:21.220
meditative state they call it in japan mushin or no mind or empty mind and it's taken for granted
00:37:27.420
that when you're in that state of empty mind time will slow down so you'll have more time to anticipate
00:37:33.240
your opponent's actions or to take actions yourself and obviously it gives you a massive advantage in
00:37:39.080
combat so in theory you know we can cultivate a meditative state in which our minds are empty in
00:37:46.060
which the boundaries between us and our surroundings seem to fade away and that that would expand time
00:37:52.320
in fact there is research from from scientists which shows that people who regularly meditate
00:37:57.000
over a long period of time long-term meditators in other words that they do experience more
00:38:03.020
expansive time than other people interesting well steve this has been a great conversation where can
00:38:07.660
people go to learn more about the book in your work the best place is my website which is
00:38:11.880
www.stevenmtaylor.com that's steven with a v m for mark stevenmtaylor.com and there's lots of
00:38:20.120
information about my books and my activities and events and so forth fantastic well steve taylor
00:38:24.960
thanks for time it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure brett thanks very much my guest today was
00:38:29.960
steve taylor he's the author of the book time expansion experiences it's available on amazon.com you
00:38:34.500
can find more information about his work at his website stevenmtaylor.com also check out our show
00:38:38.920
notes at aom.is time expansion where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:38:43.680
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:38:55.620
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00:39:00.140
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