Whose Faulty Vision

Perception of Time

An interesting article from the BBC on the perception of time includes some research that I’d heard about before, and one really fascinating study that I hadn’t. People often describe a subjective experience of time slowing down when something really scary is happening to them–say, just before a car crash. What these researchers did was to set up an LCD screen that was flickering rapidly in a way that made a random number on the screen completely unreadable, even if you concentrated on it. They then had someone look at the screen while freefalling 33 meters. When he was in the freefall, he was able to read the number on the screen–his perception sped up a little (which would feel like time slowing down) so that he could see past the flickering. How cool is that?