Why Time Seems To Slow Down During Stressful Events

You're driving on a rainy highway when suddenly another car swerves into your lane. In that critical moment, something strange happens — time itself seems to stretch. The oncoming headlights approach in something like slow motion. You have what feels like minutes to calculate your options, adjust your steering, and avoid a collision, despite the entire event objectively lasting just seconds. This perceived slowing of time isn't just used for dramatic effect in movies; it's a well-documented psychological phenomenon.

These temporal distortions are remarkably common. Researcher Steve Taylor, a psychologist at Leeds Beckett University in England, suggests that around 85% of people have had at least one "time expansion experience" — TEE, for short — in their lifetimes. These tend to occur during accidents and emergencies, though not always. While we all experience variations in time perception, like time "flying by" when we're having fun or "dragging" when we're bored, TEEs represent something far more dramatic. During these events, seconds can stretch into what feels like minutes, allowing for complex thought processes and decision-making that would normally be impossible with such compressed timeframes.

The phenomenon isn't limited to dangerous situations, either. Athletes report experiencing it during moments of peak performance, meditators describe it during deep states of awareness, and some people encounter it spontaneously in nature or during psychedelic experiences. What causes our brains to radically alter our perception of time's passage? Are our memories playing tricks on us, causing us to remember time stretching in a way that never actually occurred? We can already edit bad memories in our brains — could the science behind this common yet mysterious phenomenon reveal insights into altering our sense of reality and time?

So what exactly is going on in the brain when time seems to stretch out during intense moments? The most obvious theory relates to the commonly known "fight-or-flight" response in the brain when it perceives a threat. This response triggers a cascade of physiological changes — the heart rate accelerates, adrenaline surges, and neural processing speeds up dramatically. This heightened state of awareness allows the brain to absorb and respond to external events with extraordinary speed, creating the subjective feeling that the world around us has slowed down.

As difficult as it is to replicate something like a car accident in a controlled and safe way, laboratory studies have attempted to recreate these temporal distortions in controlled environments. A 2008 study published in PLOS One, for example, demonstrated that images on a screen that appeared to move toward study participants were perceived as lasting longer than images that moved away from them. That movement caused the brain to experience signs of potential danger, leading to a sense of time dilation. Researchers observe a similar effect in images that provoke an emotional reaction, as is the case with images of threatening animals or sexually charged situations.

A 2010 study led by researcher Marc Wittmann utilized fMRI scans to monitor the brain's activity during these experiments. The results, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, showed that these stimuli activated the cingulate cortex, an area located near the center of the brain that is thought to be associated with self-referential thinking and personal relevance. Essentially, the brain responds to the threat of an oncoming stimulus to the conscious observer, supporting the idea that sensations of time dilation are related to brain areas crucial to a sense of self.

Scientists agree that the way we experience time stretching out during moments of stress, danger, or arousal isn't due to time actually dilating, but rather to the way we perceive it. Beyond that, though, there is plenty to debate. For example, scientists aren't convinced that danger is the only way for humans to experience time stretching out, and the most compelling evidence for this comes from testimonials of individuals who engage in regular meditation or who have taken psychedelic substances.

What could account for this? Some researchers have posited noradrenaline as a crucial component in the perception of time dilation during accidents. Taylor believes that our ability to experience time in this way might be an evolutionary adaptation to temporarily increase human intelligence and, therefore, our chances of survival during life or death situations. However, this explanation doesn't align with the testimonies of those who experience time dilation during calm moments of meditation, for example.

Taylor and other researchers suggest that these experiences aren't simply created "in post" in our memory like a film scene reassembled in post production, but that individuals genuinely have the ability to process thoughts in a condensed timeframe that would not normally be possible outside of these moments of intense focus, adrenaline-filled or not. If Wittmann's ideas about the sense of self being linked to our understanding of time are correct, then perhaps as our perception changes during moments of extreme focus, so does our perception of conscious experience. And if scientists can wrap their heads around this time-related conundrum, maybe they can tackle the major problems with time travel, too.