Why do brains love slow motion video?

What does The Matrix tell us about the brain and time perception? And what does that have to do with champion bicyclists, hidden data, elementary particles, secret murderers, or time machines? Today’s episode is about slow motion: what’s going on in the brain, and why we are so mesmerized by it. Whether watching a sword battle, basketball dunk, or sprinters, we’re pulled to slow motion like moths to flame… but have you ever wondered from a neuroscience perspective what that’s all about? Me too, and hence today’s 100th weekiversary episode.

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

Eagleman DM. Time perception is distorted during slow motion sequences in movies. Journal of Vision. 2004 Jun 1;4(8):491-.

Eagleman DM. Human time perception and its illusions. Current opinion in neurobiology. 2008 Apr 1;18(2):131-6.

Stueckelberg EC. Positron is an electron traveling backward in time. Helvetica Physica Acta. 1941;14:51-80.

Malpica S, Masia B, Herman L, Wetzstein G, Eagleman DM, Gutierrez D, Bylinskii Z, Sun Q. Larger visual changes compress time: The inverted effect of asemantic visual features on interval time perception. PloS one. 2022 Mar 22;17(3):e0265591.

Eagleman DM. Duration and predictability. In Attention and Time. 2010. Eds: Coull and Nobre.

Pariyadath V, Eagleman DM. Duration Illusions and what they Tell us about the Brain. InAdvances in Cognitive Science 2010 (pp. 196-206). SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd.

Eagleman DM, Pariyadath V. Is subjective duration a signature of coding efficiency?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 2009 Jul 12;364(1525):1841-51.

Eagleman DM. Brain Time. In What’s Next: Dispatches from the Future of Science, M. Brockman, Ed. Vintage Books.

Eagleman DM. Temporality, empirical approaches. The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. 2009.

Superhot VR game [in which the speed of time correlates with your motion] (PS4 or Meta)

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