Every once in a while, JB, you make an comment about personal experience that is exactly in line with my own...and yet we seem to consistently draw completely different conclusions from those experiences.

I've also experienced many minutes worth of thinking in a very short time. There was a time when I thought I was slowing my heart down, because I could make this shift in which the span of time between heartbeats became huge.

One of the first times this happened I found myself suspended in time, wondering when my next heart beat would come... just waiting for my heart to beat... then thinking about something else, planning some future events, recalling some past events, dwelling on something else, and damn, hasn't it been minutes already? when is that next heartbeat going to come? Am I dead? I can still feel my body... and then eventually my heartbeat would happen and it would go so slowly, like it took several seconds for the first set of contractions, then another several seconds for the next set.

Later I did this in the presence of a ticking clock found the span between clock ticks would also become huge. So it wasn't my heart slowing down, it was my experience of time.

But just because my experience of time slows down tremendously, doesn't mean that time itself slows down. Thats key, and I think its the critical difference between how you and I interpret our experiences.

I looked into it and I think I found that certain naturally produced chemicals in the brain can change how we experience time. As for all those many minutes worth of thoughts I had... maybe I normally have those anyway, and just don't notice. Maybe it wasn't time that changed, nor my thinking that changed, but only the granularity with which I was able to observe my thoughts.

I didn't read this part until after my post above. ( The 'speed of light' doesn't make sense to me in this context; are we comparing a pace of the occurence of thoughts that are being observed, with... a measurement of unit distance per unit time? )

Maybe 'this skill' might benefit from a more precise phrasing (ie, are we even discussing the same thing?), but I believe the 'time dilation' experience I described can be learned, and can be turned on, but I'm not sure its desirable.

I think that having a skill like that would be very "desirable" as long as you don't get stuck in that state.

The reason I brought up the speed of light is because that is how we measure time. If our brains can think and calculate fast enough to alter our perception of time, then there must be some kind of processing going on that is close to the speed of light.

The feeling is one that makes you feel as though you are suspended in time. Frozen in time is what it feels like.

In the sci-fi series I saw years ago, it was a skill called "time-stalling." It simply allowed a person to speed up their own thought processes and cram a lot of thinking into a nano-second.

In our own consciousness we have a feeling of how much time has passed, we think about things, we plan stuff, etc. - and it is all in sync with our own experience of this space-time reality.

With no clocks, no heartbeats, no sun or moon, we can actually guess or estimate how much time has passed because time seems relative to our thoughts.

But if thoughts can speed up like a computer calculates things, then that makes time seem to stall.

People with autistic problems can often do mathematical calculations faster than a computer, so we know that the brain is capable of doing this kind of 'thinking' very quickly.

It is possible that our mind always works at this speed but we just don't know all that it is doing. It could be that most of the time it is processing information about our surrounding environment and fabricating (creating) our perceptions as the reality we see.

Imagine if our thinking is equal to the speed of light. (Which could be possible)- (I think that outside this warped space-time light has no speed -across space-.) (Its 'speed' is a frequency or vibration. It's Just an idea, most people don't agree, I understand this.)

But imagine if our thinking was faster than the speed of light. If that were true, then we could know things that were about to happen before they happened.

Perhaps about 10 minutes before they happened.

I think there is a range of 'time' which is flexible and changeable. It is only a 'range' inside of this warped space-time that we operate.

A kind of "time travel" perhaps, is possible within this range. (about twenty minutes) I am thinking it could be ten minutes into the future and ten minutes into the past.

The travel is not a physical being or going there, but a seeing and knowing what is about to happen.

This phenomenon has happened to me about three times.

The important one showed me that I was about to be killed in the next second as I was about to make a left turn. I saw the accident in a series of flashes. And there was no doubt that I was going to be killed.

I decided to look over my left shoulder, but I spent what seemed like minutes talking myself into doing it and looking at the accident.

It only took a second to save my life.

What does that even mean? The primary useful way we measure time is using oscillations of atomic clocks; the frequency of the oscillation is used, but the speed of light (3*10^8 m/s) has nothing to do with it.




Why? That sounds naive - as if we are just associating 'speed of light' with 'something that happens very fast' and 'time dilated thinking' (if that even exists, or means anything) with 'something that happens very fast'.



It sounds, maybe, like you are assuming that qualities attributed to this fictional process would also be found in yours or my thinking during our respective subjective experiences. I don't see any cause to make these connections.



I don't believe that this is the method we use for estimating time: knowing how fast we think, and knowing how much we have thought in a certain interval.

I believe there are other physiological events that help us to keep track of time without clocks.



Citation?



Well I would agree that it may be that the pace of our actual thinking may be unchanged regardless of the apparent time between clock ticks, and that we are probably unaware of most of our thoughts.

How the speed of light relates to time:

In physics, the Planck time, (tP), is the unit of time in the system of natural units known as Planck units. It is the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, a distance of 1 Planck length.[1] The unit is named after Max Planck, who was the first to propose it.

Also: Light years.

At this point it doesn't even make sense, as stated. Its like saying: imagine our thinking is more green than it is warm. Its just a collection of words that don't make sense. If you come across speakers or authors who talking casually about our 'thinking' being 'faster' than the 'speed of light' without a careful explanation of what they mean, there is a good chance you've come in contact with a charlatan or someone who doesn't really understand science.




So... you are looking for a scientific validation of precognition? A scientifically valid mechanism explaining how precognition works?





Wait... so was there actually an accident, which you avoided being effected by, but which still effected other people? Or are you saying that the accident would have happened, but as it went, it didn't happen?

Being aware of our thoughts in the form of words and ideas, and conversations, and events --- that would normally take minutes, and yet they happened in a nano-second, is what I am talking about.

If we have thoughts we are "unaware of" then we are unaware of them.

But if we have thoughts that contain words, sentences, events, etc. and we are aware of them and we remember them and then we discover that they all took place inside of a nano-second, that is something that is not an everyday thing.

If that kind of thinking can save your life, if it can be done, if it can be learned or repeated, I would certainly love to have that ability.

I see no reason why it can't be repeated. My speculation on how it happens is not something I care about debating. I am simply trying to figure it out. I would love to hear what method you used to repeat the event to see if I could learn to do that at will.

There definitely would have been an accident, and it would have killed me and my little brother riding with me if I had not seen the accident and convinced myself to look over my shoulder.

The vehicle was in my blind spot going about 90 mph.

I was about to turn.

Then I experienced being suspended in time, where I saw the accident in a series of flashes.... about ten flashes. Then I had a conversation with myself where I convinced myself that I should look over my shoulder even though I had looked in the mirror and I had not seen any vehicle there.

I agreed to look.

Then returned to normal time, and looked.

That second allowed the truck to pass.

There was no accident.

My little brother did not know how close he had come to getting killed. He was five years old. I knew how close I had come.

Um... and? What you are really talking about here is the basic and obvious fact that when we talk about speed, as a measurement of how far something travels in a period of time, then we use a measurement of speed that using unit distance / unit time.

That's it. s = d / t. This doesn't add anything to, or explain anything previously said about 'thinking as fast as the speed of light'.

So yeah, c is a unit of speed. Year is a unit of time. ly is a unit of distance derived from those two constant measurements. And?

When I try to imagine the thinking process, such as inside of a computer or a human brain, I see electrical things happening and moving through the brain and also through the processors in a computer. These electrical signals, I imagine, have a speed.

Do we really have cause to believe that our brains don't actually form what-we-would-normally-perceive-as-minutes-worth of words and ideas in fractions of a second (not nanoseconds, 10^-9, but some larger fraction) - without us normally being aware of it?



I agree.




That's fine; I don't insist you discuss it further. I'm sure you understand that when you state your speculations on a public forum, especially in the science section, people are going to critique them.



I still have the impression that by 'the event' and 'do that' you may be attaching ideas, beliefs, and concepts that I do not attach to my experiences. The techniques I used to induce those experiences all require that you first put yourself in a kind of trance, and induce the completely atonal state (wrt your muscles) that you have during sleep. This was a side effect of a practice I engaged in for years and at the peak of that practice it would still take 5 or 10 minutes minimum to induce that state, and sometimes I spent an hour engaged in related mental activities without experiencing that state.

So how useful is that? Takes years to develop? Minimum 5 or 10 minutes to induce? Can only induce if lying on the floor, eyes closed, immobilized?

Even if one can actually think faster (vs appear to) in that state (which I do not believe) - what useful thing are you going to do with all that thinking if you've first induced a paralytic trance on yourself?

I hear there are drugs that can induce this experience with far less effort.


There have been real life situations where I had a similar subjective experience of time occurring at a slower pace, like a bike accident in which it seemed that I spent a very long time deliberating on exactly how I ought to meet the ground. I have never induced that kind of experience at will, or had any reason to believe it was possible.

Same thing happened to me, only I was falling off of the monkey bars in jr high. Time actually seemed to freeze when I was one inch from hitting the ground. It was weird.

I imagined all sorts of things, including wondering if I might be in a wheelchair for life.

Then I wondered how long I would be suspended in time.

I searched for a way out. (out of my frozen in time body..)

I turned my attention inward. There was nothing but darkness.

Anything is better than the darkness.

I decided to finish falling and face what ever injury I was about to get.

It was just painful, no injury.

That's fine. I'm looking for answers and ideas though, not ridicule, which is what I usually get.

I am not apposed to speculation.

For every question there is an answer somewhere. If science does not have it, then look elsewhere, even speculation or imagination. It won't kill ya.

Okay, cool! You are correct that the brain (lets leave computers out of it, it almost always causes confusion, misunderstanding, false parallels when people discuss brains and computers together, unless they have a really solid grasp of both). So yes, the brain does function with nerve signals propagating along nerve cells, reaching the end of an axon where it contacts another nerve cell, and possibly (or not) stimulating that cell into firing along its axons.

There are several different physiological events here, whose pace or speed can be considered. One of those is simply the speed (distance/time) at which a the signal propagates along an axon. While its true that changing electric fields play a role here, and in other circumstances electric fields can propagate information at the speed of light (afaik), but in this case the signal still requires chemical events to occur along the axon as the signal propagates. This is the fastest (in terms of distance/time) part of the process of nerve signal propagation (with the events at the beginning and end of the process being slower, in terms of distance/time), and it has been measured - repeatedly, and in many organisms - to be considerably slower - orders of magnitude slower - than the speed of light. I'll see if I can look it up. Also, we have a really good understanding of the mechanism, and we know that its impossible for it to happen at the speed of light. The protein gates have to open! This is not the same as conducting electricity along wire.

And back to the point of 'meaningfulness' - yes, yes, the propagation of a signal along an axon has a speed, but measuring that speed is different than 'measuring the speed of thought'. What is the speed of thought? I subjectively experience myself 'thinking faster' when I've had a solid night of good sleep, and a smoothie. I see others seeming to think faster when they've had coffee. "Thinking" is a far more complex process than a single nerve signal running along a single axon. One process depends on another, but they are are two totally different kinds of processes, that should be measured in completely different ways.

Mammal nerve cell signals propagate at a range of speeds - with some frog cells as slow as 7 m/s, and some cat nerve cells as fast as 120 m/s. It looks like nerve cells generally propagate a million times slower than light - and the physiological events that mediate this require that they do so.

I am annoyingly fond of speculation, and I love imagination - but you don't find actual answers there, only potential answers.

This, by itself, is not scientific evidence... but its very interesting, and suggestive.

Plus, I like how they changed the music for cocaine rat and marijuana rat.

http://www.snotr.com/video/1004/Can_time_slow_down

Hmmm. I used to know how fast the central nervous system operated but I've forgotten. It's not very fast compared to the speed of light... about 700 miles per hour rings a bell. The processing speed is a whole different matter. The neurons fire and branch. The branches fire and cause hormones to to release which changes the sensitivity of additional neurons firing. At some point, a conclusion is reached but the process is nothing like a digital computer. Much of the activity occurs in the subconscious.

I used to lucid dream in the mornings in that grey area between awakening and being awake. I taught myself to control the dream, stay asleep (it was more of a meditative state) and I could process a lot of information in a very short amount of time.

Time perception is much different that time itself. Studies have shown that birds' perception of time is slowed to the point where they can make amazing maneuvers in intricate ways far beyond the ability of any human. In periods of high stress, humans can sometimes operate during a period of slowed perception of time. It seems to be a side effect of the body pumping a large dose of adrenaline into the bloodstream.

The military has learned over many years the value of training to reduce reaction time. Some call it "muscle memory" to reach for the stickshift after years of driving a standard even though you are now in a column shift car. The military cause the same type of recognize reflex where the soldier can do under stress many things automatically without spending much time to think about it.

Physically, what is happening is the number of branch neuron firings and refirings has been reduced to a minimum. The absolute minimum would be reflex or muscle memory (the muscle does not actually remember).