I had read many times, about that felling.
But I did not really know what that means (or even believed it ..) until
I once experienced this feeling myself.

During a seminar (understand "fun week-end") in Spain with most of the employees of our small company, we had the pleasure to visit a farm, rising fighting bulls ( for the arena). And we were given a demonstration, not with a bull but a calf ...
three or four co-workers went into the arena, along with a bullfighter and made a few passes, waving a red "muleta" in front of the animal.
One of our big bosses (I guess it was to show the upper management also could be courageous...) decided to have a go at the "muleta".
I was safely standing behind a wall, just on the side of the arena, taking pictures.
I immediately saw the guy was not at ease : he was slow to move, did not do what the bullfighter told him (i.e. he hold the muleta in front of him, instead of on the side) etc..
And sure enough, the calf went straight on, pushed him down and procedeed to trample him and to stab him with its horns.
I was looking at all this and was petrified behind my low wall, just thinking "but someone has to help him ...." and after what seemed a long time the bullfighter and other farm's hands went into the arena.
At that time I thought nobody had reacted before at least a full minute or more.
A co-worker recorded the incident with his video camera.
When I looked at the video, I mesured the time between the moment our boss went down and the moment the bullfighter was diverting the calf :much less than 10 seconds !

I still wonder at my sense of passing time at the moment : "my" time was about 10 times slower than reality ... <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />


P.S.: our boss was quite seriously injured, a horn having driven into his skull (just a bit ; not enough to prevent him to still be our boss.... h?las <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />.....)

It must be related to shock. Your brain processes what your eyes see, but deliberately slowly. Your mind can't handle the feedback at realtime, so your brain slows the feedback down. I believe it is the brain's way of protecting the mind from more severe and lasting damage.

-- Craig

Do you think the brain is slowing it down or maybe speeding it up? Like recording at 33 1/3, & playing back at 78 (for those of you who know what that means)?

I wonder if the brain is processing information so rapidly under the affects of adrenaline (etc), that everything else seems slow by comparison?

Sue

exactly what I was about to ask....
To get slow motion film, you have to film at higher speed ...
Is it the same effect with the brain ? Processing info faster so you could act faster ...if you could act at all ...
<img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

I read in a recent article that while our technology has evolved, our brains have not. We still have Neanderthal brains. So my vote is for slower processing under stress. And yes, being 44, I know all about 33-1/3 and 78 LP speeds!

-- Craig

Information processing is faster, up to a point, during the "alarm" and the early "resistance" phases of the Stress Response. During the later phases (exhaustion and recovery) it is dramatically slowed. During the "time standing still" phenomenon (which is reported in the Alarm-Resistance phase) there is a pituitary release of ACTH, to the adrenal glands which pour out adrenalin. Small vessels constrict, diverting blood from extremities to heart (which speeds up), lungs, major muscles. There is an almost instantaneous increase in liver output of glucose for the brain, and the brain changes the "mode" of thinking. This mode change is from conceptual-abstract thinking, to very focal practical thinking (survival thinking). It is accompanied by reports of "time standing still". Hearing is thought to become more acute, and pupil dilation makes vision more sensitive.
..after a while (which varies from person to person) the body moves into the resistance-recovery stages in which cortical processing is dramatically slowed.

So, everyone is right.. and wrong. There is speeding up.. there is slowing down.. of thought processing. Just depends on when you're measuring.

I have read that the reason everything is in slow motion is that the brain doesn't know what's important and what's not, so it goes into overdrive and starts processing everything. The conscious mind interprets this as "everything went into slow motion".

Don't know if that's true but it seems reasonable.

I was on an airliner several years ago when the oxygen masks deployed. The interesting thing was that, despite all the times I had sat through (and paid attention to) the flight attendant safety briefings, neither I nor anyone else made any move to don an oxygen mask until some time had passed (it seemed like several minutes but I guess it was really much shorter time). Only after there was a garbled (totally unintelligible) announcement over the PA system did I reach up and "pull the mask toward me" as I had been instructed to do about a hundred times in the past. And most of the passengers around me didn't put their masks on until I did; everyone, it seemed, was waiting for somebody else to go first, or from some sort of "official" announcement that yes, this was the real thing and not some malfunction.

And the bizarre thing was that, even while I was thinking about whether or not to put the mask on, I knew that I was being silly and should just reach up and do it.