People commonly think of time as a fixed, linear, objective structure. But our own experiences belie this belief. We’ve all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up, and there are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster.
As my guest Steve Taylor will explain, time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize. Steve is a psychologist and the author of Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. Today on the show, he unpacks the four laws of psychological time. He discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older and what factors slow down and speed up time. We delve into the way time particularly expands in accidents and emergencies, giving people the ability to take life-saving measures. And we discuss why some people are more likely to have time expansion experiences than others, and what you can do to slow down time and make your life feel longer as a result.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- AoM Article: Be a Time Wizard — How to Slow Down and Speed Up Time
- AoM Article: More Footage — Take the One-Month “Do Something New Every Day” Challenge
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. People commonly think of time as a fixed, linear, objective structure, but our own experiences belie this belief. We’ve all been in situations where time has seemed to drag on or speed up, and there are even whole periods of our lives that seem to have gone by slower or faster. As my guest Steve Taylor will explain, time is a lot more fluid and moldable than we often recognize. Steve is a psychologist and the author of ‘Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time.’ Today on the show, he unpacks the four laws of psychological time. He discusses the theories as to why time speeds up as we get older and what factors slow down and speed up time. We delve into the way time particularly expands in accidents and emergencies, giving people the ability to take life-saving measures. And we discuss why some people are more likely to have time expansion experiences than others and what you can do to slow down time and make your life feel longer as a result. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/timeexpansion. All right, Steve Taylor, welcome to the show.
Steve Taylor: Hi Brett, it’s great to be with you.
Brett McKay: So you are a psychologist who has spent his career studying time expansion experiences. What is a time expansion experience?
Steve Taylor: It’s a moment when time stretches out way beyond its normal speed. So a second or two could stretch out into maybe half a minute or a minute or even longer. They often happen in accidents or emergency situations, but also in other unusual states of consciousness. So really it’s a massive expansion of one second or 10 seconds or any period of time which seems to be much longer than it really is.
Brett McKay: Okay. And we’re gonna dig deep into this. It’s incredibly fascinating, the research you’ve done on this. How did you get interested in researching time expansion?
Steve Taylor: Well, I actually wrote a book about time maybe 15 years ago, and I felt as though I kind of worked out time and I didn’t really need to focus on it anymore. But then 10 years ago, I had a car crash. I was driving along the highway, or the motorways we call them here in the UK, just outside my home city of Manchester. And it was quite a busy afternoon. Lots of cars around me traveling at maybe 60 miles an hour. And I was in the middle lane. I was preparing to overtake a truck on the inside lane, but the truck didn’t see me. And he tried to move out into the middle lane and he clipped the back of my car and I started to spin round. He clipped the car again so we were spinning around even faster. And immediately, as soon as I heard the sound of his truck hitting my car, everything went into slow motion. I remember saying to my wife, who was in the passenger seat, “What was that noise?” And then it seemed like there was a long, long pause, and then the car started to spin. It seemed like it was spinning slowly, even though it probably wasn’t.
And I remember looking behind and I saw the frightened faces of the drivers behind me stretching way, way back along the lines of cars. And everything became very clear. I had this very heightened perception. And I was also incredibly calm. You know, in my mind, I knew this was a very dangerous situation. I thought, well, maybe we’re gonna be seriously injured, maybe even killed in this situation. But I started to think very methodically, you know, is there anything I can do? I tried to shunt the car to the left, towards the shoulder. I tried to pull the handbrake and press down on the other brake. And maybe it was because of my actions, but fortunately, the car began to spin towards the left, towards the shoulder. Then we crashed into a barrier at the side of the road. And then everything seemed to go back to normal speed. I seem to go back into a normal state of consciousness. So in reality, this whole incident probably lasted maybe three or four seconds. But in my mind, it seemed to last for much, much longer, maybe half a minute or 45 seconds, because I had so much time to perceive the situation, to think about what to do. And it was my first personal experience, what I called it, a time expansion experience. So then I began to do research on them as a psychologist, and I found out that they’re actually very common.
Brett McKay: Okay, we’re gonna talk about some of these heightened time experiences where time really slows down. It’s almost like bullet time in the Matrix. But in the book, you not only talk about how time can slow down, but how it can also speed up. And you unpack four laws of psychological time, and the first one is, time seems to speed up as we get older. And I’m sure most people listening to this probably agree that as they’ve gotten older, time just seems to be going by faster and faster. In your research, how common is that experience?
Steve Taylor: It seems to be a fairly universal human phenomenon. About 90% of people feel that time is getting faster as they get older. And, you know, research in different countries has shown the same that it doesn’t matter whether you’re living in the Middle east or Asia, everybody in the world seems to experience this phenomenon. And people try to take some measures against it. You know, everybody kind of regrets the fact that time is moving quickly. But, yeah, it does seem to be a natural human phenomenon.
Brett McKay: And this is something that philosophers and psychologists have been grappling with for nearly two centuries. What have been the different theories put out there as to why time seems to go faster and faster as we get older?
Steve Taylor: The first philosopher to speculate about this was a French philosopher called Paul Janet in the 19th century, the mid 19th century, and he was the first person who put forward a theory, and I refer to it as the proportional theory. It’s the idea that as you get older, each period of your life is a smaller part of your life as a whole. So that when you’re five years old, for example, a year is 20% of your whole life. Therefore, it seems like a massive period of time. But when you’re 50, a year is only 2% of your whole life. So it seems correspondingly insignificant. That seems to work quite well. It explains why time seems to speed up in a kind of mathematical way. You know, the older you get, the faster it seems to go. So that’s one theory. But there was a later psychologist called William James, an American psychologist, who suggested that it was maybe related to new experiences as well, that when you’re a child, your life is so full of new experience, and all of this new experience stretches time. So that’s the theory that I lean towards, that it’s to do with new experience.
Brett McKay: I think I agree with William James and you on that one. I’ve noticed, I think other psychologists have studied this, but a lot of our memories, most of our memories are from adolescence or young adulthood. Like, I don’t remember too much about my childhood, but I remember a lot about my high school years, my college years. And it just seems like there’s like this time at a time where it just seemed expansive. And I think it’s because there was just so much going on during that time. When you’re a young adult, ’cause you’re making these big, important decisions. You’re doing new things with friends, you’re going off to new places. And then once you hit, I don’t know, your 30s, life’s, for a lot of people kind of set. You might be married, have kids, have a career, and it just it’s the same thing over and over again. So it just goes by faster and faster.
Steve Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s a lot to do with it. When you’re young, you are literally experiencing everything for the first time. But as you get older, your life becomes a repetition of those experiences. So there’s corresponding less newness in your life. And you know, by the time you’re maybe 70 or 80 years old, you’re living in a world of familiarity. Every experience has been experienced many times before. So, yeah, there’s less newness in your life. I think fundamentally it’s about information processing. There’s a strong link between time perception and information processing so that the more information you process, the slower time goes. So if you’re having a lot of new experiences, there’s so much new information going into your consciousness and that seems to stretch time.
Brett McKay: Oh, and that leads us to the second law, which is time seems to go slowly when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences. What’s been the research on this law?
Steve Taylor: Well, it’s anecdotally, you know, it’s a well known human phenomenon that when you go to a new place, if you go abroad for a few days, particularly to a place which is very different to your home environment, it makes time stretch so that when you come back you feel, “Wow, have I really just been away for a few days? It feels more like a few weeks.” I had that when I went to India for a few weeks many years ago. I came home and I felt like I’d been away for about six months rather than six weeks because I’d had so much new experience. And again, this seems to be to do with new information processing, you know, because when we were in a new environment, there’s so much newness around us. Everything is unfamiliar and strange. So our consciousness just expands and time stretches. And there have been some experiments where psychologists have found that new information seems to stretch time. People estimate longer time periods when they’re exposed to new information and also varied information. If you repeat the same information, time contracts. It can be, for example, auditory information in a laboratory, noises, unfamiliar noises, they seem to stretch time. Whereas familiar noises, which are repeated again and again, people estimate shorter time periods.
Brett McKay: With this law where time seems to go slowly when we’re exposed to new environments and experiences, is this people remembering like it’s a retrospective or does it feel slower in the moment? ‘Cause I’ve heard this theory that part of the reason why time seems to go more slowly when we experience new environments and have different experiences is that your brain is like a camera. And when you do the same routine stuff, your brain’s like, I don’t need to turn on and film this ’cause I’ve already seen this a bunch of times. But then when you do something new, your brain thinks, I may need to remember this. I’m gonna remember this later. So it takes a lot more metaphorical footage so that later when you look back, there’s more footage to unspool, which makes the experience seem longer when we remember it.
Steve Taylor: I think that’s a factor because new experiences do create more memories. So when we look back, you know, we have a lot of memories to draw on. But I think it’s also a present tense phenomenon. I mean, all our experience takes place in the present tense. So the information that we process, that happens right now, our consciousness is open in that moment, and it’s taking in that information in the moment. So I think it is mainly a present tense phenomenon. But obviously, you can only really measure time in retrospective. We’re living through time in the moment, so we can’t really get outside and measure it. So usually our measurements of time take place retrospectively when we get home from a journey or at the end of a brief period of time. But that doesn’t mean that the actual time stretching doesn’t take place in the moment. I think it does take place in the moment. And maybe there is also an effect from memory. But I think fundamentally, it is a present tense phenomenon.
Brett McKay: Okay. The third law is about time speeding up. It says time seems to speed up in states of absorption. What do you mean by absorption?
Steve Taylor: Absorption is when our attention is immersed in an activity, or it could be entertainment. It’s when we were so immersed in the activity that we forget our surroundings, we forget ourselves. We kind of lose ourselves in whatever we’re doing. So it could be when we’re playing a sport. It could be when we’re watching a film. It could be just when we’re in a social situation with friends. But all these situations tend to contract time because they lend themselves to absorption.
Brett McKay: And I’m sure people have experienced that. Maybe they get involved in a really… If they play video games, there might be a video game that was just really enjoyable. And then they look back like, “Oh, my Gosh, it’s been three hours. It felt like 45 minutes”.
Steve Taylor: That’s right. That’s a very common phenomenon, actually, video games, ’cause they lend themselves to such intense absorption. Generally there is a proportional effect. The more absorbed you are, the faster time seems to go. And I guess, you know, particularly for young people, video games are incredibly absorbing.
Brett McKay: But for other people, it could be an intense bout of work, like something’s going on in the office, there’s a lot of action, and you have to get into the zone, you have to get locked in. And in that moment it just seems like time goes by really fast after you’re all done.
Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. In some ways that’s a good thing because people often report job satisfaction in relation to absorption. The more absorbed you are in your job, the more effective you are in the job, but also the faster the time goes. Whereas if a job which is kind of, you know, maybe it doesn’t engage your attention, maybe it’s a bit boring, or maybe there are lots of different things that you have to do and you have to switch your attention around so you can’t get into a steady focus of absorption. Those kind of jobs are less, well, they’re less absorbing and also they tend to bring less job satisfaction. And also, they make time pass very slowly, which is a bad thing.
Brett McKay: Well, and you also talk about, this is connected to this idea of boredom, our moods and emotions can affect absorption and thus our perception of time.
Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. Generally, negative states of mind tend to slow down our time perception, which is, you know, it’s quite weird in a way. It’s kind of as if a malevolent God is playing tricks on us because time goes quickly when we’re absorbed, which usually means fun and enjoyment. And time goes slowly when we’re bored. So it’s as if somebody’s playing tricks on us. And pain as well. Usually painful situations or painful states of mind slow down time. Depression, anxiety, any negative state of mind tends to slow down time. And I think that is again because of absorption. Because when you’re bored, you know, it means by definition that your attention is not absorbed. When you’re in pain, you can’t focus your mind, your attention keeps being drawn back to the pain, so you can’t focus on a book or a film or a conversation. So time tends to drag and the negativity of the situation tends to be prolonged.
Brett McKay: I imagine people who have had a family member or maybe themselves waiting for some sort of health diagnosis, they might have experienced that time slowing down and dragging because they’re just ruminating about, oh my gosh, what’s going to happen? Do I have cancer or is something bad gonna happen?
Steve Taylor: That’s right. So again, you know, you’re in such an anxious state, state of mind that you can’t get absorbed in anything. You can’t focus your attention away from the situation. There’s a similar situation if you’re on a long haul flight and you’re a person who feels a bit anxious when you’re flying, so you can’t absorb your attention in a film or conversation. You’re constantly looking at your watch or at the time to find out how long is left. So your anxiety is prolonged because you can’t absorb your attention, and therefore, the flight seems to last for much longer than normal.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and that’s what we do. If you wanna make the flight go by faster, you bring something to get yourself absorbed in, whether it’s a movie or a book or something like that.
Steve Taylor: That’s right. I mean, we subconsciously make use of these laws because we know that there are certain things we can do to slow down or speed up our time perception. And we know intuitively that absorption makes time pass faster. So yeah, you’re right. That’s exactly why we watch films, we try to get engaged in conversations when we’re on long flights.
Brett McKay: Okay, so the fourth law and what the bulk of your book is about is this. It’s time passes very slowly in intense altered states of consciousness when our normal psychological structures and processes are significantly disrupted and our normal self system dissolves. There’s a lot to unpack in this law. And I think the best way to unpack it is to give examples of times when people are put into intense altered states of consciousness. And this goes back to your experience with the car accident. One area that you research this altered state of consciousness happening is in emergencies and accidents. In what types of emergencies and accidents do people typically experience time expansion?
Steve Taylor: In my research, around 50% of time expansion experiences happen in accident situations. And that’s mainly car crashes, but also falls, many reports from falls, but also other situations such as under the effects of psychedelic substances, also in sports, but also general emergency situations when people are told bad news or when they undergo trauma of some kind. But yeah, the most prevalent situation which occurs is accidents of one form or another.
Brett McKay: Yeah, and it says the accident has to be unexpected, sudden and dramatic.
Steve Taylor: That’s right. So you know, you can’t recreate this situation. There was a famous experiment where psychologists tried to recreate an accident situation or an emergency situation where they asked people to do bungee jumps and they tried to measure their time perception while they were jumping, while they were doing bungee jumps, but the results weren’t valid. They didn’t find that people underwent time expansion. I think that’s because it wasn’t a genuine emergency situation. It wasn’t unexpected, it wasn’t dramatic or sudden. People knew what was gonna happen. So it has to be a completely unexpected situation.
Brett McKay: In your research, have you figured out like, how much does time feel like it slows down in an accident or in an emergency?
Steve Taylor: It varies from person to person. Most people experience a time dilation of maybe to the order of magnitude of 10 or 15. So that 10 seconds seems to be one and half minutes, or maybe five seconds seems to be something like a minute. That’s quite common. That’s the kind of time dilation which I experienced in my accident. But there are some situations where it becomes even more extreme. For example, there are some examples of falls. When a mountaineer, for example, falls off the side of a mountain and a two second fall can seem to stretch out into what seems like many minutes. Sometimes occasionally when people are close to death through drowning, that can also make time stretch in a very dramatic way. And also there are situations like near-death experiences when a person actually does clinically die for a short time, where there’s an even more dramatic time expansion.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But what’s interesting in regards to falls, the first person to start kind of studying time expansion in a fall, this happened a long time ago, this is like in the 1800s, is this guy named Albert Heim. He was a geologist and climber and he experienced a fall and he just, he noticed that, “Man, time seemed to slow down”, and so he started trying to figure out like what was going on there.
Steve Taylor: That’s right. He was the first person to study these experiences actually back in, I think it was 1885. Yeah. As you say, he was climbing a mountain. He fell off the side of a mountain. He fell about 20 meters or 60 feet. And in reality, a fall of 20 meters takes two seconds. But in his mind, those two seconds seem more like minutes. He described in incredible detail the thought processes which went through his mind in those two seconds. Incredibly detailed thoughts about his friends and relatives and how they would react to the news of his death and what was gonna happen to his career at university. He pondered over whether he should take his glasses off so that when he hit the ground, he wondered whether they would smash and hurt his eyes. He wondered about his friends who he’d been climbing with, and all of these incredibly detailed processes. And he also had a life review when his previous experiences flashed before his eyes. And he also felt incredibly calm, felt a strange sense of well being, almost as if he was outside himself watching the situation. Unfortunately, he survived. And afterwards, he began to ponder over the experience and he began to collect reports from other mountaineers and other people like builders or roofers who’d fallen off the roofs of high buildings. And I think he collected around 25 examples, and he studied them to work out the most common factors in these experiences.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned, besides in these accidents or emergencies where time expansion occurs, there’s other characteristics of it. People feel calm, they feel a sense of beauty sometimes. What are some other characteristics whenever people are having these very extreme time expansion experiences?
Steve Taylor: Yeah, as you say, the most common characteristic is a strange sense of calmness. I experienced that and Albert Heim reported on it too. And that’s kind of paradoxical. You know, in theory, we’re very close to death or very close to serious injury. So it seems strange that in these moments we feel a strange, powerful sense of, well being, a sense of detachment and calmness. But also, sometimes people report heightened awareness and that leads to a sense of beauty, so that they could be in a very brutal or violent situation, like a car crash. But they describe it as if it’s a beautiful scenario, a beautiful situation. There was one person in my research, he reported that the windshield of his car smashed. So he saw these tiny shards of glass floating in the sunshine. And he said that they were like diamonds, all glinting in the sunshine. It looked incredibly beautiful as they floated by. So that’s quite common, this heightened awareness that leads to an enhanced perception of beauty. People sometimes report a sense that noise has become muffled, external sounds seem to become silent, so that nothing seems to exist outside the situation. Almost as if they’re in a kind of cocoon of awareness. And another common feature is the ability to take preventative action. The feeling that they were able to use the extra time that they had to take some measures that would help to minimize the danger or would help to prevent injury.
Brett McKay: Yeah, that last one, you give lots of examples of that. I mean, in your own case, when you were in your car accident, you started thinking, like, what can I do to mitigate the damage here? And so you started taking preventative action. Other examples of people who fell, you know, just downstairs, there’s like a pregnant woman that fell downstairs. And the fall only took maybe a second, but in her mind it felt like it was going on for a minute. And so she was thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do with my body during this to protect myself and my baby?” And she was able to do it, like she was fine.
Steve Taylor: Yeah, that’s right. In fact, in my research, in situations where it’s possible to take some kind of action, because in some accidents it’s not possible, but in situations where it is possible, over 80% of people feel like they were able to take some kind of action. And often that means falling in such a way that they didn’t damage their body, maybe bringing their knees up to their chest so that their organs were protected. And yeah, it’s, you know, the woman you mentioned is a good example. She was able to fall in such a way that she didn’t damage her baby. And there was also another interesting example I collected from a man. He was waiting at a bus stop and there was an old lady next to him who started to fall to the ground. I think she had a stroke or a heart attack. And he immediately held out his arm to try to protect her, but her weight pulled him to the ground. It probably takes less than half a second to fall to the ground. But he described how that half second opened up and he described it as a strange slow motion choreography where he was able to fall in front of the woman and twist his body round so that she fell on top of him. And he was able to twist his body round so that he felt relaxed and didn’t damage his ribs. So it was, yeah, in half a second he was able to perform all these, all of these actions that minimize the danger.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. How have researchers tried to explain time expansion during an accident?
Steve Taylor: There have been a few different theories. One popular theory is that it’s related to a surge in noradrenaline to the brain. Obviously, when we’re in dangerous situations, our brains respond. And one of those ways in which it responds is to surge to increase noradrenaline in the brain, which creates a kind of flight or fight response. And that seems to make some sense, especially in accident or emergency situations. But it doesn’t explain why in these situations we feel such a sense of calmness, such a sense of calm well being. And that doesn’t fit with a fight or flight response. And also it’s significant that time expansion experiences don’t just occur in dangerous situations. They also occur in moments of intense calmness, such as in deep meditation or in moments of stillness or presence when we’re in natural surroundings, for example. So the fight or flight response or a surge in noradrenaline can’t explain that. There is another theory which I’m quite fond of, which I put forward myself, and that it could be a kind of evolutionary adaptation, because if you think about it, our ancestors were living in quite difficult circumstances. They had to protect themselves from wild animals and natural disasters.
So it would have been quite useful for them to switch into a different state of consciousness in which time slows down. It would have definitely helped to help them to survive. So maybe we inherited that from our early ancestors as a kind of survival response. But again, that doesn’t really explain why time expansion occurs in other situations, such as moments of deep calmness or deep presence.
Brett McKay: Okay, so it’s a mystery. We don’t know exactly what’s going on?
Steve Taylor: We don’t know exactly. But I think the key to understanding these experiences is that they always occur in altered states of consciousness. You know, we don’t normally think of accidents or emergencies as altered states of consciousness, but they actually do put us into a different state of consciousness. The shock of the situation or the drama of the situation jolts us into a different state of consciousness. And we also know that psychedelics slow down time because they dissolve our ego boundaries, they heighten our awareness. We also know that sports people experience time expansion in their highest moments, in the moments of peak performance, and they also experience altered states of consciousness. So I think the key to understanding them is these altered states of consciousness. And it makes us realize that the kind of time that we normally perceive, our normal time perception, is really just a product of our normal consciousness. It’s really just a creation of our normal psychological processes and our normal psychological functions. So as soon as we change our state of consciousness and shift into different psychological processes and functions, we also enter a different time space.
Brett McKay: And just to clarify, again, you think that based on all these antidotes you’ve picked up over the years, that people are actually experiencing slow down time in real-time. It’s not as if people are just remembering later, oh, it seemed like it was a long time. No, they really did experience slowed down time as they were falling or having an accident.
Steve Taylor: Yeah, I think if anybody listening to this has had a time expansion experience in an accident or in another situation, people are almost always convinced that it was a real experience which happened in the now. I did a survey of 200 time expansion experiences, and I asked people whether it was a real experience in the present or whether it could have been an illusion due to an increased number of memories. And only 3% of people felt it could have been a memory illusion. 10% weren’t sure, but 87% of people were convinced it was a real experience in the moment. But also the fact that people are able to take preventative action, People are actually able to accomplish things which would normally be impossible. They’re able to perceive and to think in much more detail than would normally be possible in such a period of time. To me, that does show that it’s a real experience in the present.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned another area where people experience time expansion is in sports. When athletes experience time expansion while playing, how do they describe it? What is the subjective feeling of time expansion while playing a sport?
Steve Taylor: They often describe having more time to position themselves, having more time to anticipate their opponent’s actions. Sometimes there are sort of perceptual changes, like the ball seems to grow in size. Just like accidents, external sounds become muffled. So even if they’re surrounded by thousands of spectators, they don’t hear anything. So they’re usually moments of peak performance where they have a lot of time to, you know, position themselves or to take action against their opponents. And it gives them, obviously, it gives them a massive advantage.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One player you described having this time expansion experience was the great baseball player Ted Williams, the best hitter of all time. And he described, like, “Yeah, I could see the stitches on the ball that’s going 95 miles an hour. The ball seemed to get bigger”. And you suggest that maybe one of the reasons why he was such a great hitter is that he was able to, like, for some reason, able to slow down time when he was in the batter’s box.
Steve Taylor: I think so. I mean, he described his experiences quite eloquently. I think he was actually the first person to coin the term in the zone, which has become quite common now for sports people and athletes. Yeah, and he even said that when he was at home listening to music, in those days, it was 78 RPM records. So he said that in his perception, the record was moving so slowly that he could read the information on the label as it was playing. So, yeah, if you think about it, if you’re a baseball hitter, to slow down time gives you such an amazing advantage. You have a lot of time to wait for the ball and to put yourself in the right position. So I think that explains why he was the best hitter of all time.
Brett McKay: How does time expansion differ between sports and emergencies?
Steve Taylor: I think it’s essentially the same phenomenon. You know, I think the state of consciousness which athletes experience is essentially the same state of consciousness which people experience in accidents. I think the only difference is how it arises. I think in accidents, it occurs due to the shock and drama of the situation. And obviously, sports can involve shock and drama, too, so maybe that’s a factor. But I think the important factor in sport is that people get into a very incredibly intense state of absorption. I know we said earlier that absorption tends to speed up time, but I have this concept which I call super absorption. And it’s when absorption becomes so intense, it becomes much more intense than normal over a long, long period of time, or maybe just during a very intense period of a game. When absorption becomes especially intense, time seems to open up. We seem to enter a different space in which time suddenly becomes panoramic, almost as if we pass through a portal or a gateway, and suddenly we’re surrounded by this vast expanse of time. So I think that’s what happens in sports. People get so intensely absorbed that they shift into this very intense alter state of consciousness in which time opens up and they have a lot more time to play the game.
Brett McKay: In your research, this is kind of a question with all these time expansion experiences, is there a type of person who’s more likely to have them? ‘Cause not everyone has them. Most people who play sports probably don’t have time expansion experiences. People, even in accidents, don’t have them. I think you talked about in your accident you had a time expansion experience, but I think your wife didn’t have one.
Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah, my wife didn’t have a time expansion experience. In fact, she was terrified. She was in a state of panic. Well, I was sort of, you know, quite calmly and serenely observing the situation. So, no, you’re right. Certain people do not have time expansion experiences even in accidents. And most sports people, no matter how good they are, they don’t experience these moments. Or at least I think many sports people experience them very occasionally in the greatest moments of performance. But I think there are a few very elite athletes who have this ability to switch into a mode of time expansion quite easily. And if you look at the great athletes who’ve been able to do this over history, like Lionel Messi, the soccer player, for example, Ted Williams. There was also an Australian cricketer called Don Bradman, who was by far the greatest cricketer who’s ever played cricket. You know, he’s just at a level way above everybody else. Even somebody like Diego Maradona, the famous Argentinian soccer player. They are or were quite unusual people. Many people have suggested that Messi may have traits of autism. Ted Williams was quite an unusual guy, kind of neurologically diverse person.
So they tend to be quite unusual people. And I think that’s related to altered states of consciousness. I think there are certain people who live quite close to an altered state of consciousness, or maybe they’re in an altered state of consciousness all the time as their normal mode. So these are the people who tend to be the most elite athletes, and these are the people who are prone to time expansion. So I think going back to accidents, whether you’re prone to time expansion in an accident or emergency, it probably depends on how liable you are to shift into an altered state of consciousness. Some people, you know, their kind of mental boundaries are quite solid or fixed, and it’s more difficult for them to switch into a different state of consciousness. So that’s probably the main factor.
Brett McKay: So another area where time expansion occurs and that you researched and you mentioned it earlier, is near-death experiences. Before we talk about that, how do researchers define near-death experiences?
Steve Taylor: Well, usually it’s used in two senses, the term near-death experience. The first sense is just when a person comes close to death, when they have a close brush with death, for example, when they come close to drowning or when they fall off the side of a mountain. So that’s one meaning. But I think the more specific meaning which researchers use is when a person does clinically die for a short time before they are resuscitated. So a common situation when this occurs is a cardiac arrest, and it could be a few seconds or a few minutes before somebody is resuscitated. And in that space of a few seconds or a few minutes, many people report a conscious experience while they were apparently dead. They report very detailed and complex conscious experiences. They report feeling that they left their body. They were traveling through a very peaceful darkness towards a light. Occasionally, they meet beings of some form, even deceased relatives, and then, they are resuscitated and then they report back on these experiences. So that’s the most specific meaning of near-death experience.
Brett McKay: Okay. And in near-death experiences, time seems to slow down a lot. Based on your research, how much does time slow down for someone during the near-death experience?
Steve Taylor: It seems to be the most dramatic kind of time expansion of all, so that a person may be clinically dead for maybe a few seconds, but in that small space, they may experience hours of conscious experience. They sometimes report incredibly detailed and complex series of events and experiences that take them hours to record. People have written whole books about near-death experiences which lasted just a few seconds because there’s such an incredible time expansion. Sometimes they have a life review in which the events of their lives are replayed within the near-death experience. And sometimes people feel that time disappears altogether so that there is no time at all.
Brett McKay: Yeah, this is, you call it time cessation, that’s what that is.
Steve Taylor: That’s right, yeah. I also investigated what I call time cessation experiences, where time disappears or dissolves away entirely.
Brett McKay: You also talk about people who had near-death experiences. They describe that not only does time slow down or just disappear entirely, but sometimes they describe time as being spatial. What do you mean by that?
Steve Taylor: This is quite a common report from near-death experiences. These experiences are quite hard to describe because our whole language is built on time. You know, our language is based on different tenses and different verbs in time. So people find these… They do find it quite difficult to describe these experiences that they often say that somehow the past and the future became part of the present. It was almost as if time became a spatial landscape, almost as if you’re on top of a mountain overlooking a landscape all around you. So rather than time being linear, somehow it became spatial, as if it was all around them.
Brett McKay: Yeah. But when I read that, it reminded me, have you seen ‘Interstellar?’
Steve Taylor: I did. I watched it recently, actually.
Brett McKay: Yeah, well, that part where the Matthew McConaughey character, like, goes to the fourth dimension and he’s just kind of floating in that weird area and he’s able just to go to different places in time. Maybe it’s like that. I don’t know.
Steve Taylor: I think it is. I mean, that that film was solidly based on physics. So, I mean, there are ideas in physics which suggest that time is like that, the time is spatial rather than linear.
Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s talk about some practical takeaways from your research, ’cause a lot of this is just really interesting. I love talking about this, thinking about it. I’m sure we’ve provided a lot of fodder for people at their next get-together with their friends. But let’s talk about practical takeaways from your research. Since you’ve done that, how can we become, in essence, time wizards and speed up and slow down time at will?
Steve Taylor: Well, we spoke a little earlier about how even on an unconscious level, we manipulate time. You know, we change our time perception by, for example, on a flight, we get into a state of absorption to make time pass quickly. And I think this is one reason why we like vacations, is because when we go on vacation, it slows down time. All of the new experience stretches our consciousness and stretches our time. So we can do things like that. We can mitigate the speeding up of time that seems to take place as we get older by introducing new experience into our lives, by making sure that our lives never become too full of routine and repetition. That we keep changing things around, you know, we keep traveling and we keep investigating new hobbies and new challenges and meeting new people. So I think, all of that will definitely slow down our time perception.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve been really intrigued by this idea that doing new things can slow down time and make your life seem longer. And I actually find it really motivating planning activities or vacations. Whenever I’m feeling that inertia, it kind of just gets me up and going and start doing things. And something we’ve done in our family is we’ve had periods where we’ve challenged ourselves to try to do at least one new thing a week. So like a new novel thing. So it could be small stuff, like just go to a new restaurant or go to a new park in town, and yeah, hopefully, it will kind of extend my life. But I mean it’s just also, just fun to do. I’m also curious about this. Is it possible to deliberately induce those extreme time expansion experiences that we talked about that people have during accidents or near-death experiences?
Steve Taylor: To a degree, I think it’s definitely theoretically possible. Now we spoke about sports people and they do this. Even if not consciously, they do manage to shift into a different state of consciousness in which time slows down. But interestingly, there are some martial arts from China or Japan or Korea where people consciously cultivate a state of consciousness, a kind of meditative state they call it in Japan, Mushin, or no-mind or empty-mind. And it’s taken for granted that when you’re in that state of empty mind, time will slow down. So you’ll have more time to anticipate your opponent’s actions or to take actions yourself. And obviously, it gives you a massive advantage in combat. So in theory we can cultivate a meditative state in which our minds are empty, in which the boundaries between us and our surroundings seem to fade away and that would expand time. And in fact there is research from scientists which shows that people who regularly meditate over a long period of time, long term meditators, in other words, that they do experience more expansive time than other people.
Brett McKay: Interesting. Well, Steve, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Steve Taylor: The best place is my website, which is www.stevenmtaylor.com. That’s Steven with a V, M for Mark. Stevenmtaylor.com, and there’s lots of information about my books and my activities and events and so forth.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Steve Taylor, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Steve Taylor: It’s been a pleasure, Brett. Thanks very much.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Steve Taylor. He’s the author of the book ‘Time Expansion Experiences.’ It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website stevenmtaylor.com, also, check out our show notes at aom.is/timeexpansion where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. And sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
