Time Slowing Down
Many of us have had dreams where it seems that time slows down. I had always thought that such time Slow Downs were linked to high stress adrenaline producing situations, and that time slows down in order to give us the advantage of seeming to have more time to react to crucial and dangerous situations.
And now I seem to have some verification in a recently published best selling book, “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell. In one chapter Gladwell tells of instances where police officers in extremely dangerous situations had experienced time slowdowns. Also, he tells that even some athletes during important playoff games had experienced these slow downs, thus giving them an extra edge in their game. I had always suspected that the best martial artists employed some control over their adrenaline in order to induce these time slow downs, as we can see clearly enough that they could not possibly be thinking as fast as they are moving – they must either be thinking faster or finding a way to slow down time in order to keep up with their perceptions.
However, there is a catch to these adrenaline rushes. It seems that this Time Slow Down occurs with the release of adrenaline but only when the heart rate stays at just a moderately high rate. If the heart rate climbs from the optimum rate of about 125 to 150 to 175 and 200 beats per minute, then this apparent time slow down, which aids us in the best “fight or flight” reactions, instead begins to paralyze us – it channels blood flow away from the surface skin and external muscle groups and conducts it rather down into the deep musculature transforming it into a kind of armor which helps one to take a beating with the least risk of broken bone or external bleeding with its danger of excessive blood loss. Also, as the heart rate climbs to the extreme, the brain’s activity changes. Awareness and Consciousness depart from the higher centers and retreat back into the more residually animal sections of the brain. People in these panic attacks lose the ability to articulate their thoughts – they can roar or scream, but they cannot speak.
So, it probably takes more than just a release of adrenaline to induce one of these optimum experiences of Time Slow Down. Now, when I have had dreams of Time Slow Down, and when I have had motorcycle accidents in which Time Slow Down had been instrumental in helping me to preserve my life, or the few times I had engaged in hand to hand combat and ax fights, what I have noticed was that I was able to maintain an emotional neutrality. One may suppose that one needs ‘fear’ in order to release Adrenaline, but actually one only requires ‘danger’. The police would say that all it would take was a suspect drawing a gun – they felt no fear, but were certainly aware of the extreme danger into which their situation had plummeted. There is a difference – fear is emotional, while danger is discerned instinctively and is emotionally neutral. I suppose one needs to be able to feel a degree of detachment. If one is too present, then fear might revolve into panic, and then one can only roll up into a solid little ball and hope to survive with the strategy of being a tortoise in a shell. But with just a little bit of distance, depersonalization – the thought of “this really isn’t happening to me” – one can hit that adrenaline rush with enough peace of mind to keep the heart rate controlled and one’s faculties present, so that the Time Slow Down can be used to most advantage – where, ‘Matrix’ style, one can see the bullets coming and get out of their way.
