Dr. David Eagleman

You just everything's passing through.

You're not really remembering much.

But in an emergency situation, your amygdala being the emergency control center says, everybody stop what you're doing.

This is the most important thing going on.

Everyone pay attention to this.

So you're noticing every detail and you're not used to that.

So just for anyone who knows what I'm referring to here as a Bayesian issue.

you know, your brain thinks, okay, a certain amount of memory must equal a certain amount of time.

Now you've got just a lot more detail.

And so it says, oh, well, that must have been, you know, six seconds or something.

What I did, by the way, I collected hundreds and hundreds of subjective reports from people who had been in accidents of various sorts.

You know, this guy got in a motorcycle accident and had, you know, come off the motorcycle and turned over and over and over on the road.

And he said, as he was rolling over and over, he was like composing a little ditty in his head, like a little song to the

sound of his helmet hitting the road and so on, because this is the kind of bizarre thought that people have.

But it seemed to have taken a long time, and when he saw footage of it afterwards, you know, the whole thing took whatever, a second or two, but it seemed to him to have taken six seconds.

But again, it's in retrospect when he's thinking, what happened?

What was the event like?

By the way, I'll just mention after I published this paper, sometimes people would come up to me after a talk and say, I know that's not true because I was in a car accident.

I know it took a long time.

And I said, OK, look, the person on the passenger seat next to you who was screaming, no, did it actually sound like they were saying no?