This Radio Lab segment starts with Einstein’s relativity. It’s a good explanation, but nothing out of the ordinary. Then in the portion starting at 8:56 Oliver Sachs describes something that absolutely floored me.
Your Personal Time Can Be Affected By Disease
In the 1920s there was an outbreak of encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness. BBC Horizon postulates that it was an aftershock of the 1918 flu pandemic. The disease started with tremors similar to Parkinson’s disease, but eventually the patients would just seize up and remain motionless. In the 1960s Sachs began working with some of those patients.
One of his patients, Myron Z, was basically frozen in odd positions for hours at a time, but Sachs would sometimes notice that Myron had changed positions during these episodes. Sachs pointed this out to Myron, who said “That’s ridiculous. I was just wiping my nose.” Sachs then filmed Myron over 2 hours and replayed the film at a faster rate of speed. Sure enough, Myron had been moving in slow motion, so slow that it was imperceptible to people with normal time perception. However, Myron didn’t realize it. Another patient, Hestor Y, was the opposite. She was living at a greatly increased speed, but also had no idea.
The 1990 movie, Awakenings, was about Sach’s patients frozen from encephalitis lethargica. The movie is good, but it only tells the story of the typical encephalitis lethargica patients. When they were given the drug L-Dopa they would awake and have no idea they had been frozen for 40 years. Unfortunately the drug only worked for a few months, and they all returned to their catatonic states. The movie does not reference Myron or Hestor, who seem to be a subset of that group. I just ordered his book by the same name. Hopefully it will have more details.
Time Really Does Slow Down When You Are In a Wreck
Sachs goes on to talk about time slowing for people in mortal danger or for athletes in the zone. There was an experiment last year that seems to have proven that it’s true.
From a February 2006 BBC News Article:
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Mr Eagleman came up with a cunning device: the “perceptual chronometer”, a wristwatch-like device which flicked blindingly fast between two LED screens.
Normally the flicker would be so fast Jesse could only see a blur. But if time slowed down for him, he might be able to discern the two different screens and read a random number on one of them.
“There’s no way to fake this test,” says Dr Eagleman, “because if time is not running more slowly, they can’t see the sequence.”
All Jesse had to do was jump, and read. As he ascended the 33ft metal cage no-one seemed to believe this curious experiment might work.
It worked. Jesse could read the numbers. Not perfectly, but well enough to show that he was keeping up with the fast watch.
