Dr. David Eagleman

Because when I was a child, I fell off of a roof of a house.

I almost died.

I landed on my – I landed in a push-up position and busted my nose so badly that they had to remove all the cartilage and so on.

Whoa.

And I've had a terrible sense of smell ever since because I busted the cribriform plate and everything.

But the part that interested me, even as a child, was that the whole fall seemed to take so long.

It felt like, oh, my God, that was this really long thing.

Obviously, I was totally calm during it.

I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland as I was falling and how this must have been what it was like for her to fall down the rabbit hole.

How old were you?

I was eight years old.

Wow.

And this is typical when people are in life-threatening situations is that there's a sense of total calmness and bizarre thought, but also it seems to have taken a long time.

You know, people report this all the time when they're in car accidents.

They say, oh, I watched the hood crumple and the rearview mirror fall off and I was looking at the face of the other guy and whatever.

People experience this in gunfights like police officers and so on.

Everything seems to take a longer time.

What happened is when I grew up and became a neuroscientist, I realized no one had ever studied that.

And I got really curious about is it the case that time seems to run in slow motion while you're experiencing it or is it a trick of memory somehow?

So I ran what, to my knowledge, are still the only experiments that have ever been done on this.