David Eagleman

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.

You're always living at least half a second in the past.

So it takes, right, photons hit your eyes or air compression waves hit your ears or whatever, you know, I touch your toe and those signals have to travel along nerves, which are very slow.

I mean, thousands of times slower than, you know, electronic signals travel in your computer.

So it takes time for this stuff to move around in the brain and

get to different places in the brain, and then it has to get stitched together with other senses.

And by the time all of this gets done, and you're served up a conscious perception of what happened, the event's already long gone by that point, and you're living in the past.

And by the way, I've...

been pursuing a hypothesis that taller people live farther in the past than shorter people because it takes longer to get all the signals there.

So anyway, yes, we're never perceiving time directly.

And when you are thinking back on an accident situation, you're probing your memory.

You're saying, what just happened?

a moment ago.

And so all you're ever perceiving is your conscious perception.