ALTERED REALITY STUDY

The BBC reported on a recent study that has LOST like aspects to altered reality, the observation of time and how certain people's brains may view time differently. It is something scientists refer to as "temporal trickery." The brain apparently freezes motion to make the world around you slow down.

The concept that certain people see things differently is not new. Professional athletes such as baseball players have keen eyesight and perception to pick up the spin and location of a 95 mph fastball within nanoseconds of release. Ballet dancers train their brain to allow them to perform pirouettes without feeling dizzy.

In a case reported in the NeuroCase journal, doctors recount the experience of a patient who one day had a headache, went to take a warm shower to relax but found himself staring at the water droplets hanging in mid air like something out of the Matrix movies. The patient said he could see each droplet hanging in front of him, distorted by the pressure of the air rushing past. The effect, he recalls, was very similar to the way the bullets travelled in the Matrix movies. “It was like a high-speed film, slowed down.”

The next day, the patient went to hospital, where doctors found that he had suffered an aneurysm. The experience was soon overshadowed by the more immediate threat to his health, but in a follow-up appointment, he happened to mention what happened to his neurologist, Fred Ovsiew at Northwestern University in Chicago, who was struck by the vivid descriptions. “He was a very bright guy, and very eloquent” says Ovsiew, who recently wrote about Baker in the journal article.

What authors, scientists, doctors and individuals observe in daily life is an assumption that time flows at the same rate for everyone; that time is a constant of nature and physics. But what if that assumption is wrong, or it has variables.

It’s easy to assume that time flows at the same rate for everybody, but experiences of the patient show that a person's continuous stream of consciousness is a fragile illusion, stitched together by the brain’s clever editing. By studying what happens during such extreme events, researchers are revealing how and why the brain plays these temporal tricks – and in some circumstances, they suggest, all of us can experience "time warping."

Although the journal's subject is the most dramatic case, a smattering of strikingly similar accounts can be found, intermittently, in medical literature. There are reports of time speeding up – so called “zeitraffer” phenomenon – and also more fragmentary experiences called “akinetopsia”, in which motion momentarily stops. Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke.

The question is why a person's condition affects time perception.  Some clues could come from studies that have attempted to pinpoint the regions responsible for our perception of time. Of particular interest is an area of the visual cortex, called V5. This region, which lies towards the back of the skull, has long been known to detect the motion of objects, but perhaps it has a more general role in measuring the passing of time. When Domenica Bueti and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland zapped the area with a magnetic field to knock out its activity, her subjects found it tricky to do two things: they struggled to track the motion of dots on a screen, as would be expected,  but also found it hard to estimate how long some blue dots appeared on the screen.   One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. For the journal patient, stepping into the shower might have exacerbated the problem, since the warm water would have drawn the blood away from the brain to the extremities of the body, further disturbing the brain’s processing.

Another explanation comes from the discovery that our brain records its perceptions in discrete “snapshots," like the frames of a film reel. “The healthy brain reconstructs the experience and glues together the different frames,” saysresearchers at the French Centre for Brain and Cognition Research, “but if brain damage destroys the glue, you might only see the snapshots.” We may all experience the normal smooth picture breaking down occasionally. For starters, if you’ve ever looked at overtaking cars on the motorway, their wheels appear to be standing still.   This happens because the brain’s intermittent snapshots fail to capture the wheel’s motion fully. If, for example, it has made a full rotation between each “frame," it will seem to be in exactly the same position each snapshot, giving the illusion that it is stationary.

And users of LSD often report “visual trails” following moving objects, a bit like the trails of bullets in The Matrix movie. VanRullen suspects this might arise because the brain "overlaps" so sensory snapshots,   rather than refreshing its picture anew to capture the actual motion.
 
Reports of time standing still are also common during a life-threatening accident; in one survey of people who had skirted close to death, more than 70% reported the feeling that the event occurred in slow motion. Some researchers claim that they are simply an artifact of memory, since intense emotions led people to remember more details,  so that we believe that the event lasted for longer only in hindsight. But the descriptions certainly sound close to those reported by the neurological patients, suggesting there may be some overlap. In stressful situations,  many subjects also report abnormally quick thinking. As one pilot, who’d faced a plane crash in the Vietnam War, put it: “when the nose-wheel strut collapsed I vividly recalled, in a matter of about three seconds, over a dozen actions necessary to successful recovery of flight attitude."  Reviewing the case studies and available scientific research on the matter concludes that stress hormones trigger an automatic brain mechanism that may speed up the brain's internal information processing to help it handle a life or death situation.   “Our thoughts and initiation of movements become faster – but because we are working faster, the external world appears to slow down,” researchers says. It is even possible that some athletes havetrained themselves to create a time warp on demand;  surfers, for instance, can often adjust their angle in the split second it takes to launch off steep waves, as the water rises overhead.
 
For the journal subject, the experience was a one-off, and after surgery to remove the damaged blood vessels, he has now made a full recovery. The experience of time freezing around him, meanwhile, has given him new wonder at the fragility of our conscious experiences. “It was a really concrete example of how something very localised in brain can change your whole perception of the world,” he says. “One minute I was fine, the next minute I was in an altered reality.”

All of the elements of time warping, slowing down events in a life or death situation, and medical conditions affecting the brain and its processing, were part of the fabric of the LOST story. Real science has opened up the possibility that the altered reality that the main characters experienced "on the island" may have been caused or contributed by brain trauma, illness and/or massive stress hormones released by a person. So the show could have been set in the time altered illusion inside someone's mind during a major stressful event, such as a plane crash.