New Yorker Article Features IEET Fellow David Eagleman

Apr 23, 2011

How does the human mind subjectively measure time?

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Here is a short excerpt from a piece in the most recent New Yorker magazine:

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time… In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach…

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. [But] if Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time. As the head of a lab at Baylor, Eagleman has spent the past decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brain’s biological clocks…

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