Dr. David Eagleman

Do you know about this?

So what I did is I rounded up 23 volunteer subjects and I dropped them from 150 foot tall tower in free fall backwards.

And they're caught by a net below going 70 miles an hour.

I want to be in your experiment.

Yeah, you would have loved this.

It's terrifying.

I did it myself three times first to make sure it was all running, and it's equally terrifying all three times because you're falling backwards.

Okay, what I did is I then built a device.

My students, I built this device that fits on people's wrist and it flashes information at them in such a way that we could measure the speed at which they're taking in information.

Essentially, we're taking advantage of what's called flicker fusion frequency where we're flashing lights really quickly and you can see that at a certain rate of lights, you can see exactly what's going on and just faster than that alternation rate, you can't see anything.

Okay.

So we draw people, we had them read the numbers on the wristband, and we're finding out, are people actually seeing in slow motion during a life-threatening situation?

This is on 23 people.

The results were very clear.

People do not see any faster in a life-threatening situation.

And yet, when we asked people retrospectively with a stopwatch to judge how long their fall was versus watching someone else do the fall, their own fall felt much longer to them.

Okay, turns out this is all a trick of memory, which is to say when you're in a life-threatening situation, you recruit not just your hippocampus for laying down memory, but a secondary memory track mediated by the amygdala.

You've got this emergency control center, and you're writing down memories in this other secondary track.

When you read that back out, you say, what just happened?

What just happened?