The Possibilian - What a Brush with Death Taught David Eagleman about the Mysteries of Time and the Brain

Burkhard Bilger - New Yorker
25 April 2011

• How much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?


• Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments....yet the data rarely matches our reality.


• Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?


• A sense of time is threaded through everything we perceive. It's there in the length of a song, the persistence of a scent, the flash of a light bulb. The interesting about time is that there is no spot. It's a distributed property that rides on top of all others.


• The brain needs time to get its story straight. It gathers up all of the evidence of our senses and only then reveals it to us. If all our senes are slightly delayed, we have no context by which to measure a given lag.


• When something threatens your life, the amygdala in your brain kicks into overdrive and records every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last.


• The more familiar the world becomes, the less information your brain records, and the more quickly time seems to pass.