Tachypsychia

[TSDguy]

This is a pretty interesting little experiment:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=RjlpamhrId8

[Bill Glasheen]

Actually that was two experiments.

The lack of rigor involved (small sample size, not double blinded with rats) was a ittle irritating, but the point was made about temporal distortion.

I saw a previous thing posted on this forum that showed a lack of success in demonstrating tachypsychia with a free fall experiment. We suggested that the certainty of rescue from the fall may have prevented the phenomenon. However in that one case, there appers to be a chance that the phenomenon may be measureable.

Good stuff! Thanks for posting. I'll have to stay in touch with the literature to see if these guys publish (or have published).

- Bill

[TSDguy]

I agree. The experiments weren't that hot but I assumed it was just for TV.

[JimHawkins]

I had seen this as well.. Michio Kaku is one of my favorite physicists.

I thought the feedback from the testee was impressive. That combined with what folks report experiencing makes sense to me. The brain under the dump or part of the dump appears to accelerate the timing mechanism such that an actual second, say, gets more clicks of our inner timer, thus allowing better and faster analysis of stimuli..

If so then perhaps this could be self induced.. Coffee anyone?

I've also heard of other experiments where the subjects brain was wired directly to the stimuli and tested vs the stimuli going through the CNS--in these tests they reported that the direct brain stimulation was actually slower than when going through the CNS under certain conditions.. They said that it appeared that in order for this to be true somehow the CNS was sending signals back in time..

[Bill Glasheen]

If I could share some thoughts...

I'm not convinced people understand tachypsychia. What they are assuming in the first experiment above is that tachypsychia means our senses take in information faster than they normally would. It's sort of like a movie camera that goes 100 frames per second rather than the normal 30 frames per second (for NTSC television format). Thus when you play the 100 fps back at 30 fps, you get "slo mo" with no jerkiness of the film.

I would like to propose that part of the phenomenon of tachypsychia isn't a faster "sample rate" of our senses, but rather a better recall and faster processing of what the senses already are taking in. In my day they used to say that people could tell you what they were doing when Kennedy was shot, but not so much about any other random event in time. The reason for this is that we know that emotional factors (associated with sympathetic response) affect our ability to create long term memory from the reams of information that come in our brain from all the senses. This has already been shown to some degree in experiments.

My best tachypsychia experience came during my motorcycle accident. I don't think things went slow motion so much as the fact that I have a detail of recall that defies memory as we know it from day to day.

- Bill

[TSDguy]

Is there that little research available on this, Bill?

"Taking in information faster" doesn't sound right to me... but has no one proved or disproved anything about this yet?

Our eyes DO work like cameras, filling in the missing frames with our brains. That's why animation works. I guess it's POSSIBLE that we can get a higher frame rate. I'll have to look around to see why eyes work that way and if it's possible for them to change the frame rate.

[Bill Glasheen]

Our eyes DO work like cameras, filling in the missing frames with our brains. That's why animation works. I guess it's POSSIBLE that we can get a higher frame rate. I'll have to look around to see why eyes work that way and if it's possible for them to change the frame rate.

OK... Here's a partial answer to some of your questions.

You actually have it backwards. Cameras work like our eyes. The eye came first; the camera copies what our eye does.

• Both have a lens
• Both have an iris that changes the amount of light that comes through the lens
• Both are capable of changing the sensitivity to light on the surface that the image is projected. The camera uses different ASA film or digital ASA ratings. The eye uses the chemical rhodopsin.
• Both our eyes and any decent camera have the ability to focus from near-field to far-field.

In the eye, the rods and cones that are struck by the photons of light act as transducers. They convert one form of information to another. In this particular case, they convert color and intensity of light into an FM (frequency modulated) signal. The intensity of a signal in your nervous system is proportional to the number of pulses per second - hence the expression frequency modulated.

In my opinion the "good stuff" has only a little to do with the eyeball and your brain's control of it. Rather it has more to do with how your brain processes the FM signal that comes from the optic nerve that is attached to the information-receiving retina.

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

Is there that little research available on this, Bill?

Shockingly enough, yes. If you go to Pubmed and scour the peer-reviewed literature, you get nothing when you plug in the word tachypsychia. You will however get a Wikipedia entry for tachypsychia. And there you will see the following claim.

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (August 2006)

There are zero references at the end of the short Wikipedia entry.

Also, I find the following in the discussion section.

I found this page in ruins, and I've tried to fix it up a bit (wasn't logged in, sorry). Hope it helped, and I'd appreciate it if people could add actual medical... "stuff" to this article. Vjasper 21:12, 8 January 2007 (UTC)

Not sure, but this study seems to put the findings from this article in doubt: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 121007.php - 137.99.115.237 (talk) 20:50, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

So there you go.

That hyperlinked reference, by the way, tends to confirm my own suspicion.

In The Matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In the real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing as they slide unavoidably into disaster. But can humans really experience events in slow motion?

Apparently not, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, who studied how volunteers experience time when they free-fall 100 feet into a net below. Even though participants remembered their own falls as having taken one-third longer than those of the other study participants, they were not able to see more events in time. Instead, the longer duration was a trick of their memory, not an actual slow-motion experience. The study appears online today in the journal Public Library of Science One.

The Baylor College of Medicine then was the group that got the negative finding on the freefall experiment. Whether or not this is a good experimental model to produce the schit-your-britches time perception response in question remains to be proven.

It's worth mentioning that in today's highly-regulated research environment, both animal and human investigation committees are extremely reluctant to approve any research where pain and discomfort are involved. Creating a good holistic experimental model for the survival stress reflex (SSR) and getting the appropriate funding is almost impossible. Few such review boards will put their stamp of approval on the proposal and no funding agency will support the research without that stamp of approval.

My guess is that this research will need to be conducted in a piecemeal fashion, and at the cellular and molecular level. It will then be up to biomedical engineers (such as yours truly) to put the pieces together into mathematical models to simulate the phenomenon or phenomina.

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

Here is more from Eagleman, which tends to confirm my own suspicions articulated above.

It remains to be seen whether or not there is a temporal input component to it all. I'm not yet convinced that Eagleman has his arms around the entire phenomenon, because I'm unconvinced that he's operating in the right neurohormonal state. But I understand his discoveries to date.

“We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets in slow-mo. The paradox is that it seemed to participants as though their fall took a long time. The answer to the paradox is that time estimation and memory are intertwined: the volunteers merely thought the fall took a longer time in retrospect,” he said.

During a frightening event, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down a secondary set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.

“In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories. And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took,” Eagleman explained.

The study allowed them to deduce that a person’s perception of time is not a single phenomenon that speeds or slows. “Your brain is not like a video camera,” said Eagleman.

When he says your brain is not like a video camera, what he means is that your brain isn't like the cameras they use for sporting events today where they speed the frame rate up during acquisition and then slow it down to the NTSC standard 30 frames per second to get the "slow motion" video.

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

Here was our original thread on the topic, which covered Eagleman's research. Thanks to Mike K for starting the thread.

Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies

- Bill

[JimHawkins]

I have to read all that stuff. The topic addressed in the documentary was the time component (internal clock) in human and animals.

From what I know now.. Memories are sent to the brain with the senses and then stored chemically. So you have IMO the information sent to the brain--that rate--and the memories themselves stored chemically.. IMO you have time indexes also stored chemically or by time as chemical locations and I think both the rate of info sent, the time indexes and or resolution may vary, thus the slow mo effect = more info stored in same amount of time.

[RACastanet]

In the eye, the rods and cones that are struck by the photons of light act as transducers. They convert one form of information to another. In this particular case, they convert color and intensity of light into an FM (frequency modulated) signal. The intensity of a signal in your nervous system is proportional to the number of pulses per second - hence the expression frequency modulated.

I do not believe the reference to 'FM' to be correct. FM utilizes a carrier frequency, such as 98.1 Megahertz on your radio dial, and the information, music perhaps, is overlaid on the carrier. The overlay causes a variation in the carrier frequency. FM is used to convey digital info by assigning a specific frequency to zero, say 400 Hertz, and a different frequancy to one, say 800 Hertz. This works for AM as well. If you have an old phone modem or a fax you can hear the ones and zeros being sent audibly.

Also, FM signals do not vary in amplitude. If you looked at an FM signal on an oscilliscope you would see a steady carrier magnitude.

Pulse modulation can use pulse width, pulse amplitude, or pulse quantity. All of these would work to send info from point to point.

This is not to say the human body does not use FM, as I am not an expert in that field. However I have never read of the body generating RF signals. The body more likely uses PM.

Bill?

Rich

[Bill Glasheen]

Rich

I stand corrected. You are of course right. (I only minored in electrical engineering. Wow, does this bring memories back...)

You are of course correct about how FM works. You have a carrier signal (sinusoid) with frequency f, giving you the signal A*sin(2*PI*f).The information is buried in the variation about the carrier frequency (f + delta f), giving you:

A*sin(2*PI*(f + delta f))

I'm not sure what you mean about AM being the same. There you have a carrier signal with frequency f, and the base signal is A*sin(2*PI*f). The information is buried in the amplitude (A + delta A), so you have:

(A + delta A)*sin(2*PI*f).

So far so good? I'm doing this off the top of my head. Not bad given that it's been way too many decades since I had my communications class.

With the healthy nervous system, the nerves communicate a signal via pulses of relatively constant amplitude and width. Yes, it is pulse modulation, and the modulation is the pulse quantity. Your signal is contained in the number of pulses per unit time.

- Bill

[Bill Glasheen]

From what I know now.. Memories are sent to the brain with the senses and then stored chemically.

Actually it's my understanding that memory is stored as synaptic connections.

thus the slow mo effect = more info stored in same amount of time.

Yes. This is basically what I said above, and what Eagleman was saying. At least in part... The slo-mo effect = higher memory density per unit of time. It's less in the real-time perception, and more in the recall.

The question remains as to whether or not your perceptions adjust the way a movie camera adjusts its frame rate to get a slo-mo playback. But this is something that would have to happen somewhere in-between the optic nerve and the place where memories are stored.

As I posted in my earlier thread, Jim, baseball players have been able to train themselves to read numbers off of tennis balls fired at them at 150 mph. At first this is impossible. But with practice, the best athletes can do it. Even the U.S. women's softball team was training with these machines. I saw a show where a woman was watching the balls fly by, and reading the numbers off of them. It was an astounding feat.

This is some of what Michio Kaku came close to demonstrating with the free fall and chronometer in TSDGuy's first post.

- Bill

[RACastanet]

I'm not sure what you mean about AM being the same.

What I said was:

This works for AM as well.

The tones representing ones and zeros can be imbedded in an AM carrier as well, but as you point out so eloquently the transfer function is quite different. This is how teletype transmission worked for many years. There were originally six different bits of data per character (Baudot) sent over the air on an AM carrier. Later ASCII with eight bits was used. About 30 years ago the over the air info transfer rate was an astonishing 300 bits per second. Now with digital systems we are transferring data in the gigabit range. Thank goodness for that.

Rich