Time dilation

Time dilation is the name for the idea that time seems to slow down when in a life-threatening situation. Mr. Parker used to tell a story about the actor, Christopher George, who starred in a show called The Rat Patrol. When filming, a Jeep rolled over and was headed straight for George. He told Mr. Parker that is was like everything went into slow-motion and he had plenty of time to figure out which way to move to avoid being crushed.  Many of us have had similar experiences under stress. Mr. Parker loved to recommend a book called Super Learning which purported to teach you to tap into the subconscious mind to slow time at will, implying you could use it as a self-defense tool. When I spoke with Prof. Stephen Yelon from the Univ. of Michigan about the book he called it pop psychology.
    Popular Science recently ran an article about time dilation in their April issue. Dr. David Eagleman's research suggests that the brain keeps two kinds of time; one keeps time in the now and the other tidies up perception of now. Neuroscientist Peter Tse says that our brain is trained to notice novelty and tells us what to pay attention to. He says our brain then processes more information per second. It's not used to that and gets caught in a loop of the familiar, thinking something should normally be this and defaulting to that duration. His conclusion is that our brain stretches time during novel experiences.
  Eagleman and Tse do not agree and the article goes into why. There is a rule they call "repetition supression". The brain spends less time on the familiar, so when the novel sight or experience happens the brain spends more time on it and it seems longer. That might explain why things seem slower when the car comes your way or a gun is pointed at you.
  They make an interesting link to schizophrenia with this in which time gets out of sync and one's internal dialog seems to be coming from without.
  Get hold of it if you can. It's interesting, and the rest of the issue isn't bad either.