David Eagleman

Yeah, so I slipped off the roof, ended up breaking my nose on the brick floor below.

But the thing that really struck me about it was that it seemed to take a long time to fall from the roof.

And so I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling and how this must have been what it was like for her.

And, you know, it felt like lots of time as I felt.

And later when I got to high school and I took physics and I learned D equals one half A T squared, I realized, wow, the whole fall took place in 0.6 of a second.

And I couldn't reconcile that.

I couldn't figure out how those, how it had seemed to have taken so long.

So I got really interested in perception.

I grew up, I became a neuroscientist and I've studied a lot about time perception in my laboratory.

And so one of the experiments I ended up doing then was dropping people from 150 foot tall tower

backwards in free fall, and they're caught by a net below.

And I measured time perception on the way down.

I made a series of discoveries there.

Essentially, the bottom line is we don't actually see in slow motion.

Instead, it's a trick of memory.

When you're in a life-threatening situation, you're laying down really dense memories such that when you read it back out, when you say, what just happened?

What just happened?

It feels like it must have taken a very long time.

Well, that's right.

There's a sense in which you're never perceiving time directly.