Slow Motion

Two days ago, I men­tioned how the event of slip­ping while car­ry­ing the bucket of sauce took place in “slow motion”. I assume most have expe­ri­enced this phe­nom­e­non, but for any­one who has not…

Some­times in a moment of “cri­sis” events seem to take place very slowly in rela­tion to one’s thought process. The result is that in what is a frac­tion of a sec­ond, one can ana­lyze what is hap­pen­ing, go through a hand­ful of pos­si­ble responses, choose one, and still react quickly (not move quickly, just react quickly).

I have a the­ory on how this hap­pens and it has to do with yesterday’s topic, con­scious­ness.

Nor­mally, the con­scious mind has some­what lim­ited access to the sub­con­scious. Yes, infor­ma­tion read­ily moves from the uncon­scious to the con­scious, but the con­scious mind plays the pas­sive role of accept­ing the info with out hav­ing any role in its pro­duc­tion or any insight into how it is produced.

But some­times, in a “cri­sis” sit­u­a­tion, that rela­tion­ship changes and the con­scious mind is allowed access to the sub­con­scious work­ings. I sus­pect that the sub­con­scious processes infor­ma­tion at a much faster rate than the con­scious mind can. When this faster pro­cess­ing is avail­able to the con­scious mind’s purview it seems like time moves more slowly than otherwise.

It is noth­ing more than “see­ing” the sen­sory infor­ma­tion processed at a much higher rate of speed than the con­scious mind nor­mally “sees”.

Tomor­row: déjà vu

Tagged as: Consciousness, Slow Motion