Steve Taylor: We all know that time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. For example, time seems to pass slowly when we travel to unknown places. A week abroad seems much longer than a week at home.
Time also seems to pass slowly when we are bored or in pain. It seems to speed up when we are in a state of absorption, such as when we play music or chess, or paint or dance. More generally, most people report that time seems to speed up as they get older.
However, these variations in time perception are quite mild. Our experience of time can change in a much more radical way. In my new book I describe what I call ‘time expansion experiences’ – where seconds can stretch into minutes.
The reasons why time can speed up and slow down are a bit of a mystery. Some researchers, including myself, think that mild variations in time perception are related to information processing.
As a general rule, the more information – such as perceptions, sensations, thoughts – our minds process, the slower time seems to pass. For children, time passes slowly because they live in a world of newness.
New environments lengthen time because of their unfamiliarity. Absorption takes up time as our attention becomes limited and our minds become quiet, with few thoughts passing through. Boredom, on the other hand, lengthens time because our unfocused minds fill with an enormous amount of mind chatter.
Experiences with time expansion
Time expansion experiences (or T-shirts) can occur in the event of an accident or emergency, such as a car accident, a fall, or a seizure. In time expansion experiences, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. From my research I found that about 85% of people have owned at least one T-shirt.
About half of the T-shirts occur in accidents and emergencies. In such situations, people are often surprised by the amount of time they have to think and act.
In fact, many people are convinced that time expansion saved them from serious injuries, or even saved their lives – because it allowed them to take preventive measures that would normally be impossible.
For example, one woman who reported a tee in which she avoided a metal barrier falling on her car told me how a “delay of the moment” allowed her to “decide how to escape the falling metal on us ”.
T-shirts are also common in sports. For example, one participant described a tee that occurred while playing ice hockey, when “the game that seemed to last about ten minutes all happened in the space of about eight seconds.” T-shirts also appear in moments of silence and presence, during meditation or in a natural environment.
However, some of the most extreme Tees are linked to psychedelic substances, such as LSD or ayahuasca. In my T-shirt collection, about 10% is linked to psychedelics. One man told me that during an LSD experience he looked at the stopwatch on his phone and “the hundredths of a second moved as slowly as seconds moving normally. It was a really intense time dilation,” he said.
But why? One theory is that these experiences are related to the release of noradrenaline (both a hormone and a neurotransmitter) in emergency situations, related to the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. However, this does not fit with the peaceful well-being that people usually report in Tees.
Even though their lives may be in danger, people usually feel strangely calm and relaxed. For example, a woman who was wearing a T-shirt when she fell from a horse told me, “The whole experience seemed to last minutes.
I was extremely calm and not worried that the horse still hadn’t regained its balance and might fall on top of me. The norepinephrine theory also does not fit with the fact that many Tees occur in peaceful situations, such as deep meditation or unity with nature.
Another theory I’ve considered is that Tees are an evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps our ancestors evolved the ability to slow down time in emergency situations – such as encounters with deadly wild animals or natural disasters – to increase their chances of survival. However, the above argument also applies here: this does not fit the non-emergency situations in which tees occur.
A third theory is that Tees are not real experiences, but illusions of memory. In emergency situations, this theory goes, our awareness becomes acute, so that we take in more observations than normal.
These perceptions become encoded in our memories so that when we remember the emergency, the additional memories give the impression that time passed slowly.
However, in many Tees, people are sure that they had extra time to think and act. Time expansion made possible complex sequences of thoughts and actions that would have been impossible if time had passed at a normal rate.
In a recent (as yet unpublished) survey of 280 Tees, I found that less than 3% of participants believed the experience was an illusion. About 87% believed it was a real experience that took place in the present, while 10% were undecided.
Altered states of consciousness
In my opinion, the key to understanding Tees lies in altered states of consciousness. The sudden shock of an accident can disrupt our normal psychological processes, causing an abrupt change in consciousness. In sports, intense altered states occur due to what I call “superabsorption.”
Absorption normally makes time pass more quickly – like flow, when we are absorbed in a task. But when absorption becomes particularly intense, over a long period of sustained concentration, the opposite happens and time slows down radically.
Altered states of consciousness can also affect our sense of identity, and our normal sense of separation between us and the world. As psychologist Marc Wittmann has noted, our sense of time is intimately linked to our sense of self.
Most of the time we feel like we are living in our mental space, with the world ‘out there’ on the other side. One of the key features of intensely altered states is that the sense of separation fades. We no longer feel locked in our minds, but feel connected to our environment.
This means that the boundary between us and the world is blurring. And gradually our sense of time expands. We slip outside our normal consciousness and end up in another time world.
Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University
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