Dr. David Eagleman

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.

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.