Slowing down time

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Various processes take place in nature, but the process that reflects the meaning of our term "time" does not exist in nature! Time was invented by people for the convenience of organizing their own lives. This is a conditional, not an objective value …

It all started with a headache, but then something strange began to happen. Simon Baker went to the bathroom with the thought that perhaps a shower would ease his headache. “I looked up at the shower and saw that the water droplets were just frozen in the air," he says. “After a few seconds, the droplets became indistinguishable again and turned into a stream of water." was able to see every drop hanging in the air, bent under the air pressure and sweeping past him. “It was like,” recalls Simon, “like the bullets flew in the movie“The Matrix.” slow ".

Built-in stopwatch

There were organic reasons for this phenomenon. Later, Simon Baker (not his real name) developed an aneurysm. Hence the headache, accompanied by unusual special effects. Neuroscientist Fred Ovsyu of Northwestern University Chicago has published an article about Simon in the scientific journal NeuroCase. This is how the anonymous patient became a celebrity. Even a superficial study of the issue shows that practical similar cases can be found, and new ones periodically appear in the medical literature. There are articles about the acceleration of time - the so-called Zeittraffe-phenomenon ("time interval" in translation from German). There is no analogue in Russian yet.

Presumably, the vessels damaged by the aneurysm could affect the activity of the areas of the visual cortex, which are responsible for our perception of time. An area of the visual cortex called V5 is under close scrutiny. This area, which is located at the back of the skull, has long been identified as being responsible for determining the movement of objects, but it may have a more important role to measure the passage of time. When Domenica Bouetti and her colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland stimulated this area with magnetic fields to provoke its activity, her subjects found it difficult to do two things: they could hardly track the movement of a point on the screen, but this was expected in principle, but also for them it was difficult to estimate how long some of the dots appeared on the screen.

One explanation for why the subjects in this experiment were unable to do these two simple things is that our system, which is responsible for detecting movement, has its own stopwatch, which records how quickly things that are in our field of vision move. And when his work is disrupted due to brain damage, the world around us freezes.

See also video: A Matter of Time or the Real Theory of the Universe

Slowing down time as a guarantor and a norm of life

When the BBC published a story about Simon Baker's unusual experience, in which time literally stood still around him, and invited readers who might have similar experiences in their lives to respond, it was surprised by the flood of letters that began to arrive at the publisher.

This allowed us to look at this experience a little more broadly, summarizing a large number of similar evidence. Here are the most striking of them and how these cases are explained by scientists.

Philip Healy describes a horrific car accident in his letter:

He describes numerous cases of time dilation among soldiers in battle or among paratroopers during parachute jumps:

And this is how the author describes his personal experience when he came face to face with time dilation.