Dr. David Eagleman

So you get to a place early and you just hang out in your car and you, you know, take care of some texts or whatever.

That's the way to be always on time.

OK.

But are people good at perceiving time?

No.

We're actually quite terrible at it and some people are better than others.

But one of the lessons that's emerged from my research on this stuff is that a lot of time is illusory.

So you may know I did this experiment years ago.

I was very interested in this question of does time run in slow motion when you're in fear for your life?

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.