Slowing Down or Speeding Up Time As Needed
by TE Mark – Writer (Mark Thomas)
07/03/2025
AT THE MUSEUM
You walked here sad but didn’t want to be sad. Not with her leaving tomorrow for an entire year. You knew this day was coming – dreaded but also planned for it. The British Museum, dinner then a stroll down Oxford Street to do some shopping.
The important thing now? Slowing down time – making this day last. If you didn’t – just accepted the default (objective) clock time, it’d be over in a blink, and you’d be home watching her pack. Or worse… it’d be tomorrow morning and you’d be on your way to the airport.
Once inside, you stop and pull out the AE-1s (Adjusted Neural Experience Eyewear) from your pack. You see others doing the same. Hardly surprising. The Rosetta Stone – The Assyrian wall reliefs – lots of cool Greek and Egyptian stuff. Who wouldn’t want this to last?
‘Here,’ you say handing her the ultra tech glasses you ordered the day she broke the news – a research fellowship in China.
She takes hers with only slight hesitation and starts putting them on. ‘They must have cost you a fortune.’
You smile while putting yours on – realising how thankful you are you met such a sweetheart while also thanking those neuro-tech geniuses who came up with a way to slow down time. For those days when that default tick-tick-tick just wasn’t going to fit your needs.
WELL, NOT REALLY SLOWING DOWN TIME
We haven’t gotten around to slowing down or speeding up time, yet. Not for everyone. Still a couple of details to work out with that. But there is a premise here for adjusting it locally – as in privately, subjectively. As in for you.
Though you’d probably rather we didn’t, let’s consider…
THAT CAR CRASH
Remember the crash you were in? The one that lasted hours (probably only seconds) with you spinning helplessly in that intersection after getting creamed by that yellow cab with the baseball hat cabbie in an Arsenal Jersey texting, not paying attention, implausibly unaware the light had turned red when he blasted through it and into your environmentally responsible Renault EV challenging elemental physics while changing the course of your day?
Afterwards, maybe even days later when recounting it to friends, you probably said something like: “It seemed to take hours.”
In a way, it did take hours. But, just for you.
“The perception of time slowing down during an accident is likely due to the brain entering a heightened state of awareness during stressful situations, causing a rapid influx of sensory information that gets encoded into memory making it seem like time passed more slowly.” (Arstila, V 2012)
What Dr Arstila at the Univ of Turuk in Finland is talking about is one’s subjective experience – your altered phenomenology of an event increasing the data input rate thus recording the memories of a much longer experience. Though the clock time never changed, time passage for you kind of did.
Researchers attribute it to the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. Your adrenal glands driving Adrenaline and Cortisol into your bloodstream increasing your heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.
Our biology and neurology will need to be addressed if we’re going to tap into this hormonally induced evolutionary function with augmentation. We’ll want a relaxing time-adjusted session. We won’t want to be sweating with heart palpitations in the museum or while chatting over dinner. And we probably won’t want to perceive our experience in slow-motion.
“When faced with danger, the brain becomes highly alert, taking in more details from the environment, which creates a richer memory of the event, making it feel like time stretched out.” (Wittmann, M 2017)
That time Louis Bronski the Neandertal with the brain power of a mountain bike pounded you behind the Annex at school. Startling how vivid your memories are of those clever kids cheering him on – and how long it took each punch to land adjusting your subjective time experience while propelling you towards theorising this thought experiment, wouldn’t you say?
OBJECTIVE vs SUBJECTIVE TIME
If our subjective experience of time passage is all about the memories we’re laying down, the input rate and quantity of sensory data, could we conceivably control it? Change the input and neural processing speed? Accelerate or decelerate the rate at which we encode memories thus altering our subjective time experience?
BACK AT THE MUSEUM
An hour (clock time) has passed. But not for you and your girlfriend. During that clock time 60 minutes you spent strolling through that new exhibit – watching the girl you love marvel at those intricately detailed Assyrian wall reliefs, it was hours for you.
With your Adjusted Neural Experience eyewear accelerating the data input through your eyes, adjusted to the 10 – 1 Phenomenology setting, you weren’t anxious, checking your watch, dreading the end to this. You were in a blissful state of increased cognitive consumption. Memories – hours of richly compressed memories were being encoded – making this that day you wished would last forever – feel as if it did.
OUR INPUT MECHANISMS
Let’s go back to the accident. Though the sounds and the acceleration as you were pressed into the seat, thrust forward or thrown up against the door, were part of your accelerated cognitive processing / slowed phenomenological event, the input data was mostly visual; heavy amounts of data were pouring into your Visual cortex through your eyes.
Your eyes transfer information to your brain at about the same speed as a fast Ethernet connection. (10 to 100 Mbps) This may sound fast, but scientists say it could be faster – without perhaps the physiological sensation of threat or perceiving things in slow motion.
“Our neurons could move data a lot faster,” says physicist V Balasubramanian at the Univ of Pennsylvania. “Each neuron is capable of firing close to once a millisecond – average activity is only 4 times a second.”
This would mean our brains are capable of processing data 250 times faster. Imagine if we could conquer it. Speed up the visual input data with augmentation eyewear while simultaneously increasing the rate of memory encoding – all while inhibiting the biological fight or flight mechanism.
A LITTLE SPECULATION ON OTHER USES
10 or more hours of strenuous study effortlessly, technologically condensed into one. No longer would putting off study for that Monday morning exam until Sunday night be a bad thing.
Watching Dr Strangelove at the outdoor cinema in Coal Drops with your girlfriend. The wine and cheese. The sun, the sounds and smells. An amazing two-hour cinematic treat stretched into a perceived weekend.
Plays – concerts – parties – dates you never wanted to end. Preparation for that presentation on your company’s expansion plans – gathering and organising your data – but doing it one hour in advance.
Vacations that once went by too fast magically slowed – brought down to a satisfying, expense-justified, infinitely less deplorable pace.
Someone old or infirm given six months to live and share with loved ones. Unless agony – severe pain or enfeebling dementia were involved, how delightful it’d be to stretch that six-months into a year – or even ten years of perceived time.
WHAT ABOUT SPEEDING UP TIME
Though I’ve chosen to focus on slowing time, or our subjective experience of time passage, there would also be the opportunity to accelerate it by slowing that input rate and subsequent memory encoding. For those 8-hour days you want to fly by.
That excruciating Sunday you spent moving house. 87 times down your old stairs with boxes then 87 more up your new ones. It’d be lovely to condense that into an hour of perceived time.
That plane flight to Los Angeles. Nine hours in a seat designed by a theoretical accountant with only the vagaries of human anatomy. Yeah, I could lose that one without concern I may have missed something fundamental to life, the universe and everything.
How about for someone doing that unrewarding, perhaps menial job to make ends meet. The opportunity to speed up the experience by slowing the memory encoding could make life perceptually more tolerable.
Adjusting time, or your perception of time passage to fill and fit your needs. I wonder.
HOME NOW – WHAT A DAY
You’re home now. And it truly was a fine day. Actually, it seemed more like 10. You’re tired. You think about tomorrow: waking with the girl you love – driving her to the airport. A feeling of loss coupled with deep sadness creeps in.
But it passes when she appears at your side having finished packing for her trip. She takes your hand, gives you a slight, precocious smile – and a seductive nod to the bedroom.
And though clock time will continue inexorably ticking away those final moments you’ll spend together; you rise from that sofa while adjusting your AE-1 (Adjusted Neural Experience) eyewear to their highest setting: 250 to 1. Now smiling, you send an arm around her waist and start across the floor for a night you have absolutely no intention of ever allowing to end.
Mark Thomas (TE Mark – Writer)
07/03/2025
If you’ve enjoyed today’s post, leave a comment. You may also like my newly published (Jan 2025) book INTERFACE.