Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [39]
Nobody really knows. So in 2006, Eagleman, then at the University of Texas, decided to try to figure it out through a rather unusual experiment. He designed a plan to scare people so badly that they might experience slow-motion time. The goal was to measure whether people actually saw things in slow motion—or whether it just seemed that way in their memories afterward. “We study vision by studying illusion, which is when the visual system gets things wrong,” he says. “I’m trying to do the same thing with temporal distortion.”
After eight months, Eagleman got approval for the study from his university’s committee on human experimentation. (“It was an absolute miracle,” he says.) And one fine spring day, he took twenty-three volunteers to the top of a 150-foot tower in Dallas. It was blustery outside—all the better for Eagleman’s purposes. One by one, he strapped each subject into a harness, dangled each over the side of the tower, and then dropped each one—backward—into the air. It was important that they fall backward, Eagleman felt, for maximum fear factor. Plummeting toward the ground, the volunteers reached speeds of 70 mph before safely hitting the net below. Eagleman tried out the contraption himself. It was just like falling off the roof! “It is freaking scary. I felt like a changed man afterwards. Whew! Oh, boy,” he says. “It goes against every Darwinian instinct you have to not have anything to grab on to.”
Now that he could trigger the fear response, Eagleman needed to measure the time distortion. So each volunteer was outfitted with a special watch. The screen flashed a number faster than the human eye could normally see it. As the students fell, they looked at the watch and tried to read the number. If the students could see it, Eagleman reasoned, then perhaps we humans actually do have superpowers under extreme stress: our brains can see better than normally, creating the sensation that time is actually slowing down.
The results were humbling. “You’re not like Neo in the Matrix,” Eagleman says. All of the volunteers did indeed feel like they were moving in slow motion. “Everybody reports it was the longest three seconds of their lives,” Eagleman says. But none of them could see the number. Eagleman thinks this means that time distortion primarily exists in our memory. “Time in general is not slowing down. It’s just that in a fearful situation, you recruit other parts of the brain, like the amygdala, to lay down memories. And because they are laid down more richly, it seems as though it must have taken longer.” In other words, trauma creates such a searing impression on our brains that it feels, in retrospect, like it happened in slow motion.
Eagleman is planning more free-fall experiments. Among other unexplained mysteries, he’s curious about why some people report time slowing down, while others feel like it speeds up. (Asencio, remember, felt both sensations at different times.) Eagleman is also perplexed by the way our hearing changes under extreme stress. In studies of police shootings, many officers say sounds became muted or disappear altogether. Sometimes, this can be problematic—when police involved in shootings have no recollection of firing their guns, for example. But it can also be ingenious: just when we need to focus, the brain shuts off any sound that might distract us.
The ultimate question is whether any of these reflexes can be intentionally turned on—or off. If they could, imagine what we could do. We could hone our brains to become precision, instead of blunt, instruments, to know which abilities to enhance and suppress at just the right moment. To do, in other words, what we already do most of the time, but to do it all the time—even in acutely modern crises that we haven’t evolved to survive.
The Making of a Gunfighter
Jim Cirillo was a gunfighter. Among police officers and combat instructors, he was a legend, a retired New York City Police Department officer who,