The following text is reprinted with the user’s permission 
The conversationan online publication featuring the latest research.
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 unfamiliar places. A week in a foreign country seems much longer than a week at home.
Even time seems to pass slowly when we are bored, or in pain. It seems to speed up when we are in a state of absorption, for example, when we play music or chess, or when we paint or dance. In general, most people seem to find time speeds up as they get older.
About supporting science journalism
If you like this article, please consider supporting our award-winning journalism subscribe. By purchasing a subscription, you’re helping to ensure a future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
However, these variations in time perception are relatively mild. Our experience of time can change in much more radical ways. In my new bookI describe what I call “time dilation experiences” where seconds can stretch into minutes.
The reasons why time can be sped up and slowed down are a bit of a mystery. Some researchers, myself included, believe that subtle variations in time perception are related information processing. As a general rule, the more information – such as perceptions, sensations, thoughts – our minds process, the slower it seems to pass. Time passes slowly for children because they live in a world of novelty.
New environments take time because of the unfamiliarity. Absorption shrinks time because our focus is narrowed and our minds are quieted so that few thoughts pass through. On the contrary, boredom makes time go by because our unfocused minds are filled with a lot of thought chatter.
Time dilation experiences
Time dilation experiences (or Tees) can occur in an accident or emergency situation, such as a car accident, a fall, or an assault. In time dilation experiences, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. In my research, I’ve found that about 85% of people have at least one t-shirt.
Half tees occur in accident and emergency situations. 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 dilation saved them from serious injury, or even saved their lives, because it allowed them to take preventative measures that would normally have been impossible.
For example, a A tee reported the woman where he avoided a metal barrier falling on top of his car, he told me how a “slowing down of momentum” allowed him to “decide how to escape the metal falling on top of us.”
T-shirts are also common in sports. For example, one participant described a T-shirt that happened while playing ice hockey that “looked like it was going to last about ten minutes when the game happened in about eight seconds.” Shirts also happen in moments of stillness and presence, in 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% are psychedelic related. One man told me that, during an LSD experience, he looked at the stopwatch on his phone and “hundredths of seconds were ticking by as slowly as seconds normally move. It really was an intense time dilation,” he said.
But why? A theory is that these experiences are associated with the release of noradrenaline (a hormone and neurotransmitter) in emergency situations, linked to the “fight or flight” mechanism. However, this does not match the peacefulness that people often report on the Tees.
Even when their lives are in danger, people usually feel strangely calm and peaceful. For example, a woman who had a T-shirt on when she fell off her horse he told me: “The whole experience seemed to last a few minutes. I was very calm, without worrying that the horse had not yet regained its balance and could possibly fall on top of me.” Nor does the norepinephrine theory match that many Tees occur in peaceful situations, such as deep meditation or being at one with nature.
Another theory I’ve noticed that t-shirts are an evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps our ancestors developed the ability to slow down time in emergency situations, such as encounters with deadly wild animals or natural disasters, to improve their chances of survival. However, the above argument also applies here: this does not match when the Tees occur or in emergency situations.
A third theory is that shirts are not real experiences, but illusions of memory. In emergency situations, says this theory, our consciousness becomes acute, thus we take in more perceptions than normal. These perceptions are encoded in our memories, so that when we recall the emergency situation, the additional memories make it seem like time has passed slowly.
However, on many Tees, people are sure they had more time to think and act. Time dilation made possible complex sets of thoughts and actions that would have been impossible if time had moved at a normal speed. In a recent survey of 280 Tees (not yet published), less than 3% of participants thought the experience was an illusion. 87% believe it was a real experience today, while 10% were undecided.
Altered states of consciousness
In my opinion, the key to understanding Tees surrounds altered states of consciousness. The sudden impact of an accident can disrupt our normal psychological processes, causing a sudden shift in consciousness. In sports, intense altered states occur because of what I call “super-absorption”.
Absorption usually makes time pass more quickly, as in flow, when we immerse ourselves in a task. But when the absorption becomes particularly intense, at a sustained concentration for a long time, the opposite happens and time slows down radically.
Altered states of consciousness can also affect our sense of identity, and the normal sense of separation between ourselves and the world. As a psychologist Marc Wittmann stated, our sense of time is closely related to our sense of self.
We usually feel like we live inside our own mental space, with the world “out there” on the other side. One of the main characteristics of altered living states is that the sense of separation disappears. We no longer feel enclosed within ourselves, we feel connected to our surroundings.
This means that the boundary between us and the world softens. And in the process, our sense of time expands. We slip out of our normal consciousness and into another world of time.
This article was originally published The conversation. read it original article.
