Session 15: Distortion in Perception of Time

Distortion in the perception of time. This is an overwhelmingly well-known and well-reported natural reaction. There are plenty of people who have researched this especially in military and law enforcement environments and there's even many, many, many many more people who have experienced this in situations like traffic accidents, where you have a change in the way you perceive time as having passed. There are two versions of this, two phenomenon. One is tachypsychia.

or literally the idea is the brain speeds up processes information analyzes data faster, forms memories faster and the perception is that time slows down, right? This is when you were in a traffic accident and you know that there was, you know, intellectually you can do the math. You're one 60 miles an hour, 86 feet per second, there's 40 feet of skid marks. You had less than a second from when the deer came out to when you hit the deer. And normally less than a second goes by in your daily lives and you barely form any memory about it at all, right?

If there's a memory formed it's about that 10 minutes, that included the one second. Oh yeah, I was reading a book when somebody knocked at the door, that one second, right before you hit the deer you might have incredible detail memory of the deer coming out, looking at you, trying to move, hitting the hood, coming into the windshield, and then jump to next thing you knew I was stopped. But there's an incredibly high amount of detail that's being collected in the center of our field of vision. And the way the brain processes that information that's coming in from the threatening stimulus, changes. It gets processed faster, that's tachypsychia.

The other thing we hear about is bradypsychia. which is where the brain is not as capable of detailed level information or any recollection of information and those are the time jumps. That's where people say I don't even remember drawing my gun but I was shooting. That's where people will report that they shot two or three times but there's nine pieces empty brass on the ground. That's where people will say I got my gun out and next thing I knew I was at slide lock.

The phenomenon of hitting the brakes, right? Nobody says, oh, a deer came out and I took my heel and lifted my foot up off the gas and I turned my foot 45 degrees and bent my knee about 30 degrees and drove it out towards the brake and felt it, you know people don't say that, right? People don't talk about reaching for the gear shift when they stopped that manual transmission car, right before they hit the deer, or when the kid runs out in the road. You talk about the kid, right? A kid stopped and looked at me and his eyes were this big.

You know, you have detail about that stuff. You don't have detail overwhelmingly about the stuff you do. Why? Natural reactions, automated learned responses, or intuitively improvised responses. The stuff that you're doing isn't nearly as important to the brain as the stuff the bad guy is doing or the bear or the thing you're about to hit.

The stuff that you're doing is automated. You've rehearsed it. You've trained it. You learned it, or it's being improvised. In which case, there is no pattern to follow, and the details don't matter.

I believe that what you'll see when you read some of the research you'll see that, someone might say, well 80% of the time police officers involved in shootings report tachypsychia, slow motion, detail imagery. 15% of the time police officers report bradypsychia, time jumps and a lack of detailed recognition. Well, what I've found very very interesting in my theory is this. Both of those things are happening overwhelmingly during these incidents, true incidents of ambush true incidents of being caught off guard. They're both happening.

What's more important for you to tell the police psychologist about after your shooting, what you did or what the bad guy was doing. What's more imperative in your brain? Drawing your gun and shooting what you've done a 10,000 times or the guy who one guy who was trying to kill you. Or was stabbing the person that you shot to defend. What's more imperative moving your foot from the gas to the brake or the deer that jumped out in the road and ruined your car and caused you to get scars and you're late for your kid's basketball game or whatever.

It makes sense that the brain is focusing on the actions of the threat. It makes sense, especially in the case of police officers that what they're talking to the people we're interviewing them about is what the bad guy was doing. It makes sense that the brain is collecting information about what the bad guy is doing so that it can react and respond as opposed to detail level memory of doing something that's supposed to have been automated and learned so that it could be done without conscious thought anyway. So I really do think that overwhelmingly we're seeing both sides of the distortion and the perception of time in almost all of these critical incidents. High level recollection of detail about what the threats doing, time appears to slow down.

We have more details than we normally get in that period of time. And very low-level recognition or of sorry recollection of the things that are done through the power of recognition, our expertise, I need my gun, my gun comes out. I need to stop the car, my foot goes to the brake. I don't have to think about that stuff. So memories aren't formed.

One of the aspects of the distortion in the perception of time has to do with the processing of visual information. Remember what we said, we wanna minimize our reliance on the processing of visual information about the things that we're doing, because we know our eyes are gonna be focused on the threat. So if that's the case, think of it this way, if you normally get three pictures per minute, or sorry three pictures per second of something happening, right? I'm gonna take a step, take two steps. One, 1000, you get three pictures of me completing those two steps, one pace one, 1000.

And you see a million pictures of people taking a million steps, and every time the pacing is the same. You always collect that data the same way. I collect the data that when people step they get two steps in for each second. Then you get startled by somebody walking, hyper-focus hypertension. You're collecting more information.

The brain is processing information differently and you now get six pictures per second. Or instead of one, two, three, you now have three pictures. One, two, three, four, five, six. You have three pictures of the first step. Well, three pictures normally represents how much time, one full second.

Now you're getting three pictures in half a second but nobody tells the cognitive analytical part of your brain. So the memory recollection, and in the moment the processing of that information, makes you believe your perception, your awareness combined to tell you the extra perception would help the cognitive awareness of the change, makes you think that person is walking incredibly slow. That's good if a bad guy is trying to stab you in the face that's really cool that he's stabbing you in slow motion and your hand might get in the way, right? But if you're looking at your reload, how many of you have ever screwed up, how many of you have ever screwed up a well-rehearsed mechanical skill because you were rushing? Everybody, right?

Who's missed the shift when they were rushing through the gears trying to set a new zero to 60 record. And there were four cylinder or something. It was a Datsun 200 SX for me, okay? Who is, is, who is couldn't get the key in the lock when it is cold out you had to go to the bathroom and get in the house? Something simple that you just screw up.

So do I wanna be the guy, who is in the fiddle of my reload, looking at my gun, thinking I'm doing it in slow motion in the middle of a fight, and now trying to rush my reload and screwing up the timing? Something that I was doing in my normal perfect, executed, learned response way, if I hadn't been looking, I'd have been fine. And overwhelmingly, we're probably gonna be focused on the bad guy anyway. But even if we could choose to take our increased visual acuity and turn it to our reload, if our reload looks like we're going in slow motion, and we try to speed it up and we screw it up because we're rushing because our cognitive brain sends a message to our hands that says, hurry up, move faster, rotate quicker, jam that thing in there. And we screw it up.

Now we actually hurt our ability to perform what was a well-rehearsed mechanical skill, that we didn't need visual information to complete. That's the effect on our training. This is another reminder that we need to stay focused on the threat. We need not to rely on visual information, or plan on using visual information when we don't need it. You don't need to look at your gear shift to get from second to third gear.

You don't need to look under the dash to go from the gas to the break because you rehearse it, you learn it. You don't need to look at your reloads. You don't need to look down at your holster to get your gun out. You don't need to count rounds to know when to reload. You're gonna feel that slide lock.

Don't worry about expending, cognitive energy on what you're doing. You need to learn your skills in an automated way. And that the physiology of this is pretty deep brain physiology. And the idea here is that in the brain, there's gonna be an increase in the processing of visual data, the raw processing of visual data in the occipital lobe. There is an increase in activity in the limbic region that cingulate gyrus, right?

The amygdala is working over time. The cingulate gyrus is looking through this processed information for learned patterns. What's I learned how to do something, I learned what to do when that happened. I tied my learned response to a learned stimulus. But what isn't happening, is there is not a commensurate increase in capacity for work in the analytical part of the brain.

Because the analytical part of the brain isn't working over time, it may misunderstand the data that's being forced fed into the brain from the center of our field of vision. That's where the distortion occurs. This part of the brain is on hyper-drive this part of the brain isn't. And what we have to understand is that motor cortex that sends the messages down to the hands to do things, is still connected to the analytical part of the brain. So the analytical part of the brain can still interrupt what would otherwise be a smooth execution of a skillset by interfering because of a distortion in understanding what was going on.

That's the deep part of the physiology.