Time slows down in a crisis

I heard a woman on MSNBC talk about watching the bridge collapse and how she watched it in slow motion. Slow motion is apparently common at the moment of crisis - I've experienced it once so know it exists. I'd like to hear other's experiences with it, also an explanation for it.

but as far as I can tell, 1 second was still 1 second when the bridge collapsed from my vantage point in Northern Virginia.

I'd say yes to the perception of time changing in a traumatic situation. Two times I can remember vividly are a light plane crash I was in when I was 10 and a motorcycle accident I had back in '95. It's downright eerie to think about now....:scared:

About 15 years ago, I was involved in a car crash. I was driving, and a woman stopped at a stop sign, then pulled right out in front of me. I knew I couldn't stop in time, my first thought was to aim for the back of her station wagon so I wouldn't hit her directly... then I saw a kid's head pop up in the back!, so I aimed for the front of her car, knowing it would total my little Toyota. It did :( but other than whiplash, we were all ok.

I know it was just a second or two, but it felt like 5 or 6 seconds. 15 years later, it's still a very vivid memory.

Weird.

Bryant
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Lorentz Transformation, time dilation, and all that esoteric stuff, are also found in psychology literature in discussions of the phenomena of inconsistencies in the perception of time.

I wish my mind had more of a scientific bent so I could understand what happens.

In my case, I was on an exercise bike, looked to my right and wondered why the seat was suspended in mid-air. The seat had come off the bike and I was simultaneously looking at it and going straight down to a concrete floor. Didn't have either the sense of the reflexes to do more than observe it - suspect an athlete would have landed lightly on his/her feet instead of the back. (Which has bothered me off and on for lo, these 28 years.)

When one examines a TV screen very closely, we can see the scan lines and the space between them. When we step back, we only see the gestalt - the picture. Similarly, when we see events and the present very closely we can almost see the gaps between moments in time. Each second can become larger in our perception the closer we come to each one.

It was Wednesday, July 19, 1967, and Lyda was near her due date with her second son. She took the last load out of the dryer and carried the laundry into the bedroom to fold. Her 2-year-old son, Tim, followed.

"We heard a large airplane approaching, flying overhead," Lyda recalls. "Tim rushed over to the window because he loved watching them. They were fairly new flying out of the Asheville Airport. I remember hearing the theme music from Jeopardy coming on as Tim walked to the window to watch the airplane fly by. Just as he was looking at it I heard what sounded like a sonic 'boom.'"

Tim screamed, backed away from the window and said, "It cashed, mommy, plane cashed!"

"Just then there was another boom sound. I rushed to the window and to my horror, I saw a lot of debris flying around," Lyda says. "I especially remember a door floating around in circles, in an almost slow motion, and a plume of smoke beginning to come out of the woods from across the road."

http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20070718/NEWS/707190337&SearchID=73288241584099

I saw the aftermath of this crash. Let me add, that like the school bus full of children who escaped harm by just a few feet, that in this crash both planes went down just a few hundred yards from a summer camp full of children. No one person on the ground was hurt or killed and there were plenty houses and people all around.

1. A friend's dad was on the Boeing 727. He was part of a group of American Canning Association executives, all killed on Flight 22.

2. A friend was at the Hendersonville summer camp and was one of the first on the scene of the crash of Flight 22. The term "scarred for life" comes to mind.

3. The airline involved, Piedmont, later became my employer.

4. The course of the Viet Nam war was, perhaps, changed by the crash of Piedmont Flight 22. SEC-DEF Robert McNamara's #2, Under-Secretary of Defense John T. McNaughton, was killed (along with most of his family) on Piedmont 22 on July 19, 1967. McNamara, sick of the war in Viet Nam, was in the process of turning the Pentagon over to McNaughton (The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, Paul Hendrickson, Knopf, 1996). So McNamara stuck around a while longer.
Viet Nam might have been different for me and my lost friends, had John T. McNaughton not boarded Piedmont Flight 22 that day in Asheville.

I've always wondered about John T. McNaughton. I have a scrapbook of newspaper articles of that crash that somehow survied childhood. My cousin's future wife was a child at that camp also. I remember seeing clothes hanging from trees, charred bodies, large parts of the wreckage, and a hole in the roof of a house where a body had crashed through.

I wonder how the course of Vietnam was changed because of that. Thanks for sharing.

SPARTANBURG COUNTY, S.C. -- A counselor out on Lake Bowen with a group of campers was killed Wednesday when he was struck by a boat.

The Spartanburg County coroner told WYFF News 4 that the campers from Camp Pinewood in Hendersonville, N.C., had been waterskiing.

http://www.wyff4.com/news/13801177/detail.html

Camp Pinewood was, of course, where Piedmont Flight 22 crashed!

Thanks.

It's intense fear. Adrenaline is shooting through your body, your brain is firing like mad, etc. Your perceptions are intensely focussed for that pivotal moment. That's all, just biology.

I've had that happen to me several times. Once when I was rock climbing and very nearly fell to my death, once when a big dog charged me from out of nowhere out on some lonely road, once when I wrecked a motorcycle, once when I walked into my house in the middle of the night and someone was standing there (in the dark)...

The worst thing about it is that it feels like you're thinking faster than you can physically act. You want to move your arm, for instance, but it's two steps behind you. Feels like you've frozen.

I watched my 2 year old son fall down a flight of stairs (3 year old niece forgot to lock the stair gate). I reached out for him in slow mo, he flipped in the air twice and just missed a pillar with his head as he flew down the stairs. It seemed to take an hour for it to happen. I guess I have never screamed like that before because my wife heard me from the backyard. Freaky stuff, especially stressful when afterward the Dr. interviewed us... "just how did this happen" He could tell after 5 minutes that we did not do this on purpose or anything but it was weird all the same.