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Tap the instant the pad turns green. Five rounds, measured to the millisecond, then find out why a crash feels like slow-motion.
, ms
Here's the twist. Your reflexes are real, but that “everything went slow-motion” feeling in a crash isn't your brain speeding up. When researchers dropped volunteers into a genuine backwards free-fall, they still couldn't read fast-flashing digits any better than normal. The slow-motion is stitched in afterwards: fear lays down a much denser memory, so the moment only feels longer looking back, about 36% longer, in the study.
Our sources
// every fact this game reveals was checked before it went up
✓ A typical simple visual reaction time is roughly a quarter of a second (about 250 ms), varying with age, alertness and how the stimulus is presented.
, Jain et al., 'A comparative study of visual and auditory reaction times…,' International Journal of Applied and Basic Medical Research, 2015
✓ In a genuine free-fall test (a ~2.5 s backward drop into a net), participants showed no improvement in temporal resolution, they still could not read fast-alternating digits set just past their normal threshold, so fear does not literally speed up perception in the moment.
, Stetson, Fiesta & Eagleman, 'Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?', PLoS ONE, 2007
✓ Those same fallers retrospectively judged their own fall as about 36% longer than identical falls they watched others take, the 'slow-motion' is a feature of recollection, not real-time perception.
, Stetson, Fiesta & Eagleman, PLoS ONE, 2007
≈ The leading interpretation is that a frightening event lays down a denser memory, so in hindsight it seems to have lasted longer, the brain judges duration largely by how much it recalls.
, Stetson, Fiesta & Eagleman 2007; Eagleman, 'Human time perception and its illusions,' Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2008