Why time slows down in altered states of consciousness

We all know that time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. For example, time appears to go slowly when we travel to unfamiliar places. A week in a foreign country seems much longer than a week at home.

Time also seems to pass slowly when we are bored, or in pain. It seems to speed up when we're in a state of absorption, such as when we play music or chess, or paint or dance. More generally, most people report time seems to speed up as they get older.

However, these variations in time perception are quite mild. Our experience of time can change in a much more radical way. In my new book, I describe what I call "time expansion experiences" — in which seconds can stretch out into minutes.

The reasons why time can speed up and slow down are a bit of a mystery. Some researchers, including me, think that mild variations in time perception are linked to information processing. As a general rule, the more information — such as perceptions, sensations, thoughts — that our minds process, the slower time seems to pass. Time passes slowly to children because they live in a world of newness.

New environments stretch time because of their unfamiliarity. Absorption contracts time because our attention becomes narrow, and our minds become quiet, with few thoughts passing through. In contrast, boredom stretches time because our unfocused minds fill with a massive amount of thought-chatter.

Related: 'Flow state' uncovered: We finally know what happens in the brain when you're 'in the zone'

Time expansion experiences

Time expansion experiences (or Tees) can occur in an accident or emergency situation, such as a car crash, a fall or an attack. In time expansion experiences, time appears to expand by many orders of magnitude. In my research, I have found that around 85% of people have had at least one Tee.

Around a half of Tees occur in accident and emergency situations. In such situations, people are often surprised by the amount of time they have to think and act. In fact, many people are convinced that time expansion saved them from their serious injury, or even saved their lives — because it allowed them to take preventative action that would normally be impossible.

For example, a woman who reported a Tee in which she avoided a metal barrier falling on to her car told me how a "slowing down of the moment" allowed her to "decide how to escape the falling metal on us."

Tees are also common in sport. For example, a participant described a Tee that occurred while playing ice hockey, when "the play which seemed to last for about ten minutes all occurred in the space of about eight seconds." Tees also occur in moments of stillness and presence, during meditation or in natural surroundings.

However, some of the most extreme Tees are linked to psychedelic substances, such as LSD or ayahuasca. In my collection of Tees, around 10% are linked to psychedelics. A man told me that, during an LSD experience, he looked at the stopwatch on his phone and "the hundredths of a second were moving as slow as seconds normally move. It was really intense time dilation," he said.

But why? One theory is that these experiences are linked to a release of noradrenaline (both a hormone and an neurotransmitter) in emergency situations, related to the "fight or flight" mechanism. However, this doesn't fit with the calm wellbeing people usually report in Tees.

Even though their lives might be in danger, people usually feel strangely calm and relaxed. For example, a woman who had a Tee when she fell off a horse told me: "The whole experience seemed to last for minutes. I was ultra-calm, unconcerned that the horse still hadn't recovered its balance and quite possibly could fall on top of me." The noradrenaline theory also doesn't fit with the fact that many Tees occur in peaceful situations, such as deep meditation or oneness with nature.

Another theory I have considered is that Tees are an evolutionary adaptation. Maybe our ancestors developed the ability to slow down time in emergency situations — such as encounters with deadly wild animals or natural disasters — to improve their chances of survival. However, the above argument applies here too: this doesn't fit with the non-emergency situations when Tees occur.

A third theory is that Tees aren't real experiences, but illusions of recollection. In emergency situations, so this theory goes, our awareness becomes acute, so that we take in more perceptions than normal. These perceptions become encoded in our memories, so that when we recall the emergency situation, the extra memories create the impression that time passed slowly.

However, in many Tees, people are certain that they had extra time to think and act. Time expansion allowed complex series of thoughts and actions that would have been impossible if time had been passing at a normal speed. In a recent (not yet published) poll of 280 Tees, I found that less than 3% of the participants believed that the experience was an illusion. Some 87% believed it was a real experience that happened in the present, while 10% were undecided.

Altered states of consciousness

In my view, the key to understanding Tees surrounds altered states of consciousness. The sudden shock of an accident may disrupt our normal psychological processes, causing an abrupt shift in consciousness. In sport, intense altered states occur due to what I call "super-absorption."

Absorption normally makes time pass faster — as in flow, when we are absorbed in a task. But when absorption becomes especially intense, over a long period of sustained concentration, the opposite occurs, and time slows down radically.

Altered states of consciousness can also affect our sense of identity, and our normal sense of separation between us and the world. As the psychologist Marc Wittmann has pointed out, our sense of time is closely bound up with our sense of self.

We usually have a sense of living inside our mental space, with the world "out there" on the other side. One of the main features of intense altered states is that sense of separation fades. We no longer feel enclosed inside our minds, but feel connected to our surroundings.

This means the boundary between us and the world softens. And in the process, our sense of time expands. We slip outside our normal consciousness, and into a different time-world.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.