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Time expansion experiences, in which seconds can turn into minutes. Why does time really seem to slow down in altered states of consciousness?
We think that time passes at different speeds in different situations.
For example, time seems to pass more slowly when we travel to unfamiliar places. A week in a foreign country seems much longer than a week at home.
Time also seems to pass more slowly when we are upset or in pain.
On the contrary, it seems to accelerate when we are in a state of absorption, such as when we play music, sing or dance. Generally speaking, most people report that time seems to speed up as they get older.
However, these variations in time perception are quite slight. our experience of time can change in a much more radical way.
In your new book, Steve Taylor describes what it calls “time expansion experiences”where seconds can be transformed into minutes.
The reasons why time can speed up or slow down are a bit of a mystery.
Some researchers, like Steve Taylor, think that slight variations in time perception are linked to information processing. As a general rule, the more information – such as perceptions, sensations, thoughts – our mind processes, the slower time seems to pass.
For children, on the contrary, time passes more slowly because they live in a world of new things.
New environments lengthen time due to their unfamiliarity. Absorption contracts time because our attention becomes narrow and our mind becomes silent, with few thoughts passing through. In contrast, boredom prolongs time because our blurred minds fill with an enormous amount of thoughts.
Time Expansion Experiences
Time expansion experiences (TEES) can occur in an accident or emergency situation, such as a car accident, a fall, or an attack.
In time expansion experiments, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. In his research, Steve Taylor found that about 85% of people have had at least one TEE.
About half of TEES occur in accident and emergency situations. In these situations, people are often surprised by how much time they have to think and act. In fact, many people are convinced that the expansion of time 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, a woman who recounted a TEE in which she prevented a metal barrier from falling on her car told me how a “slowing of the moment” allowed her to “decide how to escape the metal falling on us.”
However, in this study, about 10% of reported TEES are linked to psychedelic substances.
One man said that during an LSD experiment, he looked at the stopwatch on his cell phone and the hundredths of a second were moving as slowly as seconds normally move. “It was a very intense time dilation”, he reported.
But why?
One theory is that these experiments are linked to a norepinephrine release (a hormone and a neurotransmitter) in emergency situations, related to the “fight or flight” mechanism. However, this does not fit with the calm well-being that people typically report in TEES.
Even though their lives may be in danger, people feel strangely calm and relaxed. For example, a woman who had a TEE when she fell from a horse said, “The whole experience seemed to last minutes. I was very calm, not worrying that the horse hadn’t yet regained its balance and might fall on top of me.”
The norepinephrine theory also doesn’t fit with the fact that many TEES occur in peaceful situations, such as deep meditation or oneness with nature.
Another theory that has been considered is that TEES are a evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps our ancestors developed the ability to slow down time emergency situations – such as encounters with deadly wild animals or natural disasters – to improve your chances of survival.
However, the previous argument also applies here: this does not fit into the non-emergency situations in which TEES occur.
A third theory is that the TEES are not real experiencesbut illusions of remembrance. In emergency situations, according to this theory, our consciousness becomes acute, so that we absorb more perceptions than normal. These perceptions become encoded in our memories, so that when we remember the emergency situation, the extra memories create the impression that time passed slowly.
However, in many TEES, people are assured that they have had more time to think and act.
Altered states of consciousness
In Steve Taylor’s 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 a abrupt change in consciousness. In sport, intense altered states occur due to what the author calls “super-absorption”.
Normally, absorption makes time pass faster – as in flow, when we are absorbed in a task. But when absorption becomes especially intense, during a long period of sustained concentration, the opposite occurs, and time slows radically.
Altered states of consciousness can also affect our sense of identity and our normal sense of separation between ourselves and the world. As the psychologist pointed out Marc Wittmannour sense of time is closely linked to our sense of self.
Normally, we have the feeling of living inside our mental space, with the world “out there” on the other side. One of the main characteristics of intense altered states is the fact that the feeling of separation disappears. We no longer feel closed inside our mind, but rather connected to what surrounds us.
This means that the border between us and the world diminishes. And, in this process, our notion of time expands. We slip out of our normal consciousness, into a different world-time.
