The perception of danger by people different from the special effects of "The Matrix" Bashny.Net

Associate professor of neurobiology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences David Eagleman and two of his graduate students Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta Baylor College of Medicine (Baylor College of Medicine) decided to test whether in times of danger a person perceives himself as in slow motion.

Across the famous film "The Matrix» (The Matrix) Neo dodge bullets, and time slowed down for him around. The current study significantly proved that in real life, everything is just the opposite, people feel that they are moving very slowly in the environment (fast) world.

This "wrong" sense of time does not arise from the fact that the brain increases its activity under the influence of adrenaline in the blood. Rather, it is an illusion that occurs due to an overload of information entering the brain.

To get people really scared, scientists rejected the options with a roller coaster ride and decided to lose volunteers on a special mesh with a very great height (50 meters), with no insurance, and even backwards, not only - twice.

"This is the worst that I have experienced life - says David Eagleman - despite the fact that I knew my jump will be completely safe».

Such a method is really make people feel that they are flying into the abyss is much longer than it really happened, because after three seconds from the beginning of their fall speed reached 113 kilometers per hour. According to the stories of various volunteers, they thought that they flew at least a third longer than those people who fall in which they watched from the side.

That was the first part of the experiment. In the second, researchers created a so-called "perceptual chronometer" and mount it on the wrist of volunteers - in order to understand whether in such a life-threatening circumstances, a person perceives the information faster and more.

Such a device is somewhat similar to a wristwatch. Its display can be configured so that the numbers flashed at a certain speed (at some point in the image and negative numbers are merged into indistinguishable mass).

If the human brain is able to really speed up the perception of the surrounding world in a moment of danger, then, according to scientists, during the fall, volunteers will need to see what is displayed on the display.

However, a similar result in the experiment not been received (if you believe that all the volunteers looked at the chronometer during the fall).

Then, biologists decided to slow perception fault memory. We frightened man begins to actively work area of ​​the brain called the amygdala under, accumulating a kind of secondary set of impressions at the moment of danger (other departments operate as usual).

"As a result, the memory of any horrific events become deeper and stronger - says Eagleman - and the more information about them is stored in your memory, especially long they will then appear».

About the same person experiences throughout his life. As small children, we perceive every day like a year, partly due to the fact that each of them was full of new knowledge. An adult is not considered such unusual surroundings, due to the fact that all that he had once seen and felt, and therefore less information is delayed. And the days fly by quickly for him.

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