Dr. David Eagleman

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?

You've got all this density of memory that you don't normally have because you've written down every detail.

So your brain says, oh, my gosh, this is what happened and the hood crumpled and so on.

But it's because all we're ever conscious of is our memory of an event, as in what happened during the event.

So when you're in a life-threatening situation, you write more down, you think it took longer to transpire.

And by the way, this issue about memory equals time explains a lot of things.

For example, the issue of when you're a child,

And a summertime seems to take forever.

And then by the time you're our age, a summertime seems to disappear.

It's because as a child, you're figuring out the world.

You're writing down lots and lots of memory during that summer.

Oh, this is the first time I ever saw a waterfall and went hiking here and did this thing.