A while ago, I saw a course offering to improve use of the brain. One trick it claimed to teach was meditation that taught people to control perception of time. The idea was that you could slow time down to have more reaction, training or thinking time. I wrote it off as a snake oil thing with far-fetched possibility of happing to some degree somewhere else.
Seeing these cases makes me wonder, though. Research into neuroscience or neuro-engineering might be able to tap into this effect to do things similar to other claim. My first thought as a former martial artist was combat applications. There's gotta be a DARPA lab working on this exact thing somewhere.
So, applicable questions to this are (a) does their brain just slow down where it takes time to catch up to what happened in reality; or (b) do our brains actually waste effort to preserve a specific, temporal experience. If it's (b), then there's a possibility of re-training or modifying the brain to get more usable time to think or act. I can't be sure from the article if it's (b), though. Anyone have an idea about that?
I think the best way to think about this is in terms of frame rate or really thought rate. If only the subconscious portions of your mind were operating at a heightened frequency you would likely only remember making decisions quickly like the pilot in this article. If only your consciousness was operating at the heightened frequency you would likely remember time slowing down without being able to move like "a deer in the headlights." As the article points out, the natural mechanism for this sensory modulation is a complex soup of hormones that increase blood flow and neural activity in your brain. The question is not how fast or slow is the brain relative to one second per second, but how many decisions and perceptions can the brain make in one second.
That's a better way of framing the subject than I was even expecting. Excellent and thanks! Yes, my question does boil down to "how many decisions and perceptions" per second plus if these event indicate it might be modified to be beneficial. So, decisions and perceptions per second might be the natural starting point for research field.
Seeing these cases makes me wonder, though. Research into neuroscience or neuro-engineering might be able to tap into this effect to do things similar to other claim. My first thought as a former martial artist was combat applications. There's gotta be a DARPA lab working on this exact thing somewhere.
So, applicable questions to this are (a) does their brain just slow down where it takes time to catch up to what happened in reality; or (b) do our brains actually waste effort to preserve a specific, temporal experience. If it's (b), then there's a possibility of re-training or modifying the brain to get more usable time to think or act. I can't be sure from the article if it's (b), though. Anyone have an idea about that?