Speaker 1: Why do we love to watch slow motion in the movies?
Speaker 1: What do Bonnie and Clyde or Inception or the Matrix
Speaker 1: tell us about brains and time perception? And what does
Speaker 1: any of this have to do with unmasking hidden data
Speaker 1: or champion bicyclists or elementary particles or murderers or HG
Speaker 1: Well's time machine. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
Speaker 1: these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
Speaker 1: to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.
Speaker 1: Today's episode is about slow motion and what's going on
Speaker 1: in the brain and why we are attracted to it.
Speaker 1: So we all know that if you go to any
Speaker 1: random blockbuster, you're really likely to see some of the
Speaker 1: sequences in slow motions gets employed to accentuate the choreography
Speaker 1: of gun battles or sword fights, and of course it
Speaker 1: doesn't even have to be fighting. You might see it
Speaker 1: in a shot of a basketball dunk, or a flipping car,
Speaker 1: or sprinters crossing the finish line, whatever the shot. What
Speaker 1: we get to witness is fluidity and elegance in a
Speaker 1: visually captivating spectacle that has become a hallmark of Hollywood,
Speaker 1: and it goes even beyond action movies. Even in dramas
Speaker 1: and romances. We see slow motion get leveraged to capture
Speaker 1: intimate emotional moments. We savor the subtleties of someone's eye
Speaker 1: movements or facial expressions or body movements. We understand something
Speaker 1: about the unspoken longing and restrained passion between two protagonists,
Speaker 1: or we watch a tear fall, or we see the
Speaker 1: moment that someone has an unexpected revelation.
Speaker 2: So we see slow motion all the time.
Speaker 1: But have you ever wondered from a neuroscience perspective what
Speaker 1: that's all about and why brains love it so much? Yeah,
Speaker 1: me too, and hence today's podcast. So let's start by
Speaker 1: zooming way out. When did slow motion really start in movies?
Speaker 1: You may be surprised to know that the era of
Speaker 1: slow mo didn't really begin until nineteen sixty seven. And
Speaker 1: what stuns me about this is that by nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: seven we already had supersonic flight and bionic limbs and
Speaker 1: credit cards and digital music, and the space race was
Speaker 1: in full swing, but nobody was using slow motion until.
Speaker 3: I thought, I have an idea about the end that
Speaker 3: should be like a spastic ballet, and that was the image.
Speaker 1: That's Arthur Penn, the director of the nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: film Bonnie and Clyde. This was a big Hollywood blockbuster
Speaker 1: that dramatized the real life crime spree of Bonnie Parker
Speaker 1: and Clyde Barrow, and the stars were Fade, Done Away
Speaker 1: and Warren Batty. So Bonnie and Clyde were a young
Speaker 1: couple who became bank robbers during the Great Depression, and
Speaker 1: in the movie, they travel across the country with their
Speaker 1: growing gang and their crimes escalate, and this attracts the
Speaker 1: relentless pursuit by law enforcement, which culminates in a violent ambush.
Speaker 3: And then so I came to the technicians and I said, look,
Speaker 3: this is what I want to get.
Speaker 2: They said, you can't do that.
Speaker 3: I said, I want four cameras. I want them running
Speaker 3: at different speeds, I want them ganged together, and I
Speaker 3: want to roll them all at the same time.
Speaker 1: And so that's what happened. In the final scene, the
Speaker 1: cinematography decelerates into a balletic slow motion as Bonnie and
Speaker 1: Clyde meet their bloody end. Under a hailstorm of police bullets,
Speaker 1: so as they experience their final moment, the audience is
Speaker 1: given some extra seconds to be witnessed to it. Now,
Speaker 1: this really shocked a lot of people. Critics called Arthur
Speaker 1: Penn's slowed down death scene gratuitous and callous, but.
Speaker 2: The idea caught on.
Speaker 1: Bonnie and Clyde had opened the door to slow motion
Speaker 1: and it's never been shut since.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: By the way, it's not that the technology was new.
Speaker 1: The method for slow motion movies came into being in
Speaker 1: nineteen o five four when the Austrian physicist August Musker
Speaker 1: invented the technique. So what's the technique. You just speed
Speaker 1: up the recording camera so you're capturing more frames per second.
Speaker 1: In this way, what you're doing is capturing faster changes.
Speaker 1: The time in between each picture is shorter than normal.
Speaker 1: So then when you play the film strip back at
Speaker 1: regular speed, like twenty four frames per second, then the
Speaker 1: scene appears to be in slow motion because the change
Speaker 1: from one frame to the next is very small. This
Speaker 1: was initially just getting used for scientific purposes to slow
Speaker 1: down processes that you can't see well with the naked eye,
Speaker 1: but eventually slow motion was adopted by filmmakers to enhance
Speaker 1: visual storytelling. Now, before we go on, I want to
Speaker 1: make sure we have a clear distinction between slow motion
Speaker 1: in movies and the impression that you might have if
Speaker 1: you have experienced a life threatening situation and it feels
Speaker 1: like the event took a long time. Is this because
Speaker 1: the frame rate of your brain changes.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Ninety nine episodes ago, I talked about the impression we
Speaker 1: have of very frightening events having taken a long time.
Speaker 1: This is something I first experienced as a child when
Speaker 1: I fell off of a roof. I have very clear memories,
Speaker 1: and it feels like the whole thing took a few seconds,
Speaker 1: even though I can calculate that it only took point
Speaker 1: six seconds to get from the top to the bottom. Now,
Speaker 1: it turns out that this observation about scary events seeming
Speaker 1: to last longer. This is at least one hundred years
Speaker 1: old in the scientific literature, although I imagine that people have
Speaker 1: noticed this from time immemorial. But my laboratory was the
Speaker 1: first to run experiments on it to see if it
Speaker 1: was an issue of a faster perceptual frame rate, which
Speaker 1: again is how a movie camera captured slow motion or instead,
Speaker 1: does it happen to us? Because of the laying down
Speaker 1: of denser memories and the retrospective estimate of how much
Speaker 1: time had passed. We ran experiments by presenting information at
Speaker 1: a faster rate than a person could normally see, and
Speaker 1: then we put them in a very scary situation where
Speaker 1: we dropped them from one hundred and fifty foot tall
Speaker 1: tower and they were caught in a net below. If
Speaker 1: a person is like a camera speeding up its frame rate,
Speaker 1: then they would be able to easily see the information
Speaker 1: we were flashing at them. But our results indicated that
Speaker 1: the slow motion effect was a.
Speaker 2: Trick of memory.
Speaker 1: In other words, when you're in fear for your life,
Speaker 1: your brain writes down dense memory. It's capturing everything it can,
Speaker 1: whereas normally your memory is very leaky. So when your
Speaker 1: brain then asks what just happened? What just happened and
Speaker 1: reads it out all those dense memories, it estimates that
Speaker 1: the event must have taken longer. Your brain has all
Speaker 1: these rich memories, let's say, the hood crumpling and the
Speaker 1: rear view mirror falling off, and the expression on the
Speaker 1: other driver's face and so on, And given that opulence
Speaker 1: of memory, your brain calculates that the whole event must
Speaker 1: have represented a slightly longer duration. In other words, what
Speaker 1: happens during a scary event is a totally different mechanism
Speaker 1: than slow motion video. Now, when I published our findings,
Speaker 1: some people said to me, Hey, I don't think your
Speaker 1: conclusion is correct because I had a life threatening car
Speaker 1: accident and I know what I experienced. So I said
Speaker 1: to them, Okay, but the guy in your passenger seat
Speaker 1: who was yelling watch out, did it actually.
Speaker 2: Sound like he was saying.
Speaker 1: Because if not, that means that time is not actually dilated.
Speaker 1: Because if you are recording something with a faster frame rate,
Speaker 1: then when you play it back out, everything is stretched.
Speaker 1: So with your experience of time dilation, it's not an
Speaker 1: issue a faster frame rate like a movie camera, but
Speaker 1: instead of denser memory. Please listen to episode one of
Speaker 1: this podcast for much more about that. And the reason
Speaker 1: I'm telling you about this now is because we're going
Speaker 1: to return to this in a few minutes. For now,
Speaker 1: let's get back to filmmaking, where the mechanism is very straightforward.
Speaker 1: You just take more frames per second. Now, I said
Speaker 1: that Bonnie and Clyde was the first major movie to
Speaker 1: use slow motion, but there were actually experiments with it
Speaker 1: before that. One of the earliest uses in cinema was
Speaker 1: in an epic silent film called Intolerance in nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: This was made by a director named D. W. Griffith,
Speaker 1: who was experimenting with all millions of techniques of filmmaking
Speaker 1: and used slow motion just a little bit to accentuate
Speaker 1: dramatic moments and heighten emotional tension. But two World Wars
Speaker 1: that over half a century passed before I was used
Speaker 1: in Bonnie and Clyde, in part because the technology had
Speaker 1: to advance to make slow motion more accessible and versatile.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen sixties, people were building high speed cameras
Speaker 1: which were capable of capturing hundreds of frames per second
Speaker 1: and eventually thousands, and this is what allowed filmmakers to
Speaker 1: push new boundaries of representing time and creating effects that
Speaker 1: audiences were captivated by. And the nineteen sixty nine film
Speaker 1: The Wild Bunch, two years after Bonnie and Clyde, really
Speaker 1: helped popularize the technique. And now, of course we don't
Speaker 1: even think about it much because it's a staple of
Speaker 1: modern filmmaking. For example, I recently watched a movie called Wanted,
Speaker 1: which uses super slow motion every time there's a gun battle.
Speaker 1: Where you may remember Christopher Nolan's movie Inception, which has
Speaker 1: these beautiful slow motion dream sequences, especially in the kick
Speaker 1: moments where they're transitioning from one reality to another. So
Speaker 1: increasingly since nineteen sixty seven, movies use time warping all
Speaker 1: the time, and the success of this approach has overtaken
Speaker 1: commercials and music videos, and it's a standard tool on
Speaker 1: our cell phones. And in fact, you can tell when
Speaker 1: something has become a staple because then it shifts into
Speaker 1: the focus of the comedians. Some years ago, the comedian
Speaker 1: Dave Chappelle did a skit in which he was proving
Speaker 1: that everything quote looks cooler in slow motion. So in
Speaker 1: the skit, he walks into the laundromat and says hello
Speaker 1: to a kindly middle aged woman who is preparing her laundry,
Speaker 1: and she takes off her sweatshirt so she can add
Speaker 1: it to her hamper, and it's all very innocent and laundromaty,
Speaker 1: and then he says, let's replay this video in slow motion,
Speaker 1: and now everything changes from mundane to sexy in the
Speaker 1: slow motion replay. The woman lifts the sweatshirt over her
Speaker 1: head and is suddenly replaced by a beautiful young model
Speaker 1: who tosses her hair in a vigorous breeze, and she
Speaker 1: and Dave Chappelle start dancing around each other as the
Speaker 1: wind blows. So this skit cracked up the audience. But
Speaker 1: this just underscores our question, what is the appeal of
Speaker 1: slow motion? Why do we find it so attractive? I
Speaker 1: propose four reasons. The first is the increased esthetic appeal.
Speaker 1: When you decelerate time, you can experience so many more
Speaker 1: details of this scene. And just like Dave Chappelle noticed,
Speaker 1: even ordinary moments get turned into extraordinary visual spectacles. And
Speaker 1: this is because by slowing down time, you highlight the
Speaker 1: intricate features of a scene. The human eye is naturally
Speaker 1: attracted to detail, and slow motion allows us to appreciate
Speaker 1: the subtle nuances of a character's movement, or the play
Speaker 1: of light and shadow, or birds exploding out of a tree,
Speaker 1: or the look on someone's face as they turned to
Speaker 1: see that their lover has left. So you remember the
Speaker 1: Matrix which came out in ninety nine, and you certainly
Speaker 1: remember this bullet dodging scene where Neo bends backward to
Speaker 1: avoid a series of bullets fired at him, and this beautiful,
Speaker 1: slow sweeping shot captures the fluidity in the wondrous precision
Speaker 1: of his movements. The scene could never have worked at
Speaker 1: normal speed because the key was how he was making
Speaker 1: a move that was not normally physically possible, and the
Speaker 1: otherworldly nature of this required immersing us to have time
Speaker 1: to really take it in. Just like Bonnie and Clyde,
Speaker 1: the slowness heightens the tension and the drama. We the
Speaker 1: audience get to squeeze every moment out of the scene
Speaker 1: rather than have it zip by.
Speaker 2: While we're reaching for our popcorn. And again, it doesn't
Speaker 2: have to be action scenes.
Speaker 1: Look at Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life or
Speaker 1: Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. The slow motion allows
Speaker 1: viewers to fully absorb the emotional weight of a scene. Okay,
Speaker 1: so increasing the aesthetic appeal, that's the obvious reason, But
Speaker 1: from a neuroscience point of view, I'm going to suggest
Speaker 1: there are deeper reasons why slow motion works. And this
Speaker 1: leads to my suggestion two, which is that slow motion
Speaker 1: film serves as a proxy for denser memories. So a
Speaker 1: few moments ago, I told you what happens during a
Speaker 1: life threatening situation. Although you don't actually see the event
Speaker 1: unfold in slow motion, the denser memories that you have
Speaker 1: make it seem like it must have been that way
Speaker 1: in retrospect, because there's a greater than normal amount of
Speaker 1: detail when the memory is read back out. And I
Speaker 1: suggest that slow motion film is a stand in a
Speaker 1: substitute for this extra dense memory. By watching a movie
Speaker 1: scene slowly, we get to enjoy a rich experience with
Speaker 1: plenty of time to dwell on all the details that
Speaker 1: would normally streak right past us. We have the opportunity
Speaker 1: to attend to the details and commit them to memory,
Speaker 1: just like we have after a real life high adrenaline moment.
Speaker 1: In other words, slow motion film recreates the sensation of
Speaker 1: grasping all the details, and this explains the natural partnership
Speaker 1: of slow motion videography.
Speaker 2: With high adrenaline moments.
Speaker 1: It's no accident that the first time it really got
Speaker 1: used was the ambush death scene of Bonnie and Clyde.
Speaker 1: The director Arthur Penn said in an interview quote the
Speaker 1: intention there was to get this attenuation of time that
Speaker 1: one experience is when you see something like a terrible
Speaker 1: automobile accident end quote. And giving the audience a heightened
Speaker 1: ability to catch and remember details worked well, and it's
Speaker 1: become a standard signature of high stakes moments. Arthur Penn
Speaker 1: went on to say in nineteen eighty nine, quote, God
Speaker 1: knows we've been imitated thousands and thousands of times.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Every time you see someone attempting violence, they go into
Speaker 1: that basics slow motion end quote. So my assertion is
Speaker 1: that when we witness a moment unfold bit by bit
Speaker 1: in the movies, we get to appreciate its import as
Speaker 1: though we were experiencing the high adrenaline moment ourselves. But
Speaker 1: not all interesting slow motion video involves high adrenaline situations,
Speaker 1: So there is more to our love of it. And
Speaker 1: this leads us to my third suggestion for the success
Speaker 1: of slow motion, which is that it extends human perception
Speaker 1: by unmasking hidden data. It allows the revelation of data
Speaker 1: that's hidden in the folds of time, just like a
Speaker 1: microscope allows us to appreciate the details of a fly's wing.
Speaker 1: And I'm not just talking about action sequences here or
Speaker 1: neo's unusual movements in the matrix, there's much more that
Speaker 1: can be unmasked. Consider something like microexpressions. These are fast
Speaker 1: movements of facial muscles that pass rapidly and unconsciously over
Speaker 1: people's faces. Now, everyone's face does this naturally all the time,
Speaker 1: but you can't really see someone else's micro expressions because
Speaker 1: they're too brief. You're not aware that you are making
Speaker 1: micro expressions, and someone watching you isn't consciously aware that
Speaker 1: you did it. But it turns out that micro expressions
Speaker 1: can carry information and can reveal secrets, including things like deception.
Speaker 1: For example, you may remember the story of Susan Smith,
Speaker 1: who claimed that her children had been kidnapped in a carjacking,
Speaker 1: when in fact she had drowned them. For several days,
Speaker 1: she was on the TV news pleading for help in
Speaker 1: finding her children, but some colleagues of mine claimed that
Speaker 1: a slowed down version of the video revealed micro expressions
Speaker 1: that suggested she was lying about the whole event. The
Speaker 1: idea is that slow motion video unmasks the world of
Speaker 1: these temporally hidden facial clues, and by unveiling things that
Speaker 1: are undetectable by consciousness, slow motion can allow not just
Speaker 1: temporal sleuthing but temporal intimacy. Consider this passage by the
Speaker 1: British sports writer Matt Rendell about the Tour de France
Speaker 1: winner Marco Pantani. Writing about the use of super slow
Speaker 1: motion cameras in sport, Rendell wrote, what I think is
Speaker 1: one of the most beautiful passages in sports writing. Here
Speaker 1: it is read by the actor Sean Judge.
Speaker 4: Now, as he arrives towards victory and the Giro Dtalia,
Speaker 4: the camera almost caresses him. The five seconds between the
Speaker 4: moment Marco appeared in the closing strait and the moment
Speaker 4: he crossed the finish line are extruded to fifteen and
Speaker 4: during seconds ba image frames his head and little else,
Speaker 4: revealing details in visible in real time and at standard resolution.
Speaker 4: A drop of sweat that falls from his chin as
Speaker 4: he makes the bend, the gaping jaw and crumpled forehead,
Speaker 4: and lines beneath the eyes that deepen as Marco rings
Speaker 4: still more speed from the mountain. Then, and it must
Speaker 4: be the moment he crosses the line. He begins to
Speaker 4: rise out of his agony. The torso rises to vertical,
Speaker 4: the arms spread out into a crucifix position, the eyelids
Speaker 4: descend and Marco's face lifts towards the sky. It is
Speaker 4: a moment of transfiguration visible only in super SlowMo or
Speaker 4: in still and only the best of the finish line
Speaker 4: photographers catch it. Super SloMo shows us something we could
Speaker 4: never otherwise see, involuntary gesture Marco never chose to reveal,
Speaker 4: perhaps because without super slow MOO technology he cannot know
Speaker 4: he makes them. The public knows more about Marco than
Speaker 4: Marco himself, a truth we are tempted to imagine, and
Speaker 4: one that has nothing to do with the race outcome
Speaker 4: as such, for the pictures frame out the finish line
Speaker 4: in the clock and show nothing of his work rate,
Speaker 4: muscular toil, or the relative positions of the riders that
Speaker 4: yield the race result. Instead, we find ourselves looking into
Speaker 4: Marco's face the way a mother and her baby might,
Speaker 4: or lovers at the moment their affection is first reciprocated.
Speaker 1: So slow motion allows us to pick up on the
Speaker 1: world that would otherwise rush past us. And in this
Speaker 1: slow world we get to luxuriate in the otherwise invisible
Speaker 1: detail with which we're always surrounded but we never see.
Speaker 1: And now we're ready from a fourth point. Slow motion
Speaker 1: video holds our attention by violating expectations. So during a
Speaker 1: lifetime of experience, your brain develops deeply wired expectations about
Speaker 1: Newtonian physics. So when a ball gets thrown to you,
Speaker 1: your brain unconsciously uses these internal models to predict where
Speaker 1: and when it's going to go, and you move your
Speaker 1: body in your hand to the right spot. These models
Speaker 1: are so ingrained into our nervous systems that if you
Speaker 1: lob a ball to an astronaut floating in zero G,
Speaker 1: she will move her hand to the wrong spot. She'll
Speaker 1: move to catch it as though she's in a normal
Speaker 1: one G environment. So part of the high level of
Speaker 1: engagement during slow motion comes from a violation of these
Speaker 1: expectations about physics. Imagine you're watching the matrix and you
Speaker 1: observe Trinity leap into the air to kick an agent.
Speaker 1: Your brain makes unconscious predictions about exactly when she's going
Speaker 1: to come back down. But to your brain's surprise, time
Speaker 1: slows down and Trinity hangs in the air longer than expected.
Speaker 1: Your expectations about when she's going to hit the ground
Speaker 1: have been violated, and this draws us in. Our brains
Speaker 1: zoom in on this because attention is maximally attracted to
Speaker 1: whatever we predict incorrectly. Conversely, when everything goes according to plan,
Speaker 1: we don't pay any attention at all. We are fond
Speaker 1: of slow motion video because it engages our attention. We
Speaker 1: constantly get the temporal predictions wrong, and so we are
Speaker 1: perpetually on alert. In fact, I did a very surprising
Speaker 1: experiment on this some years ago. I started with this
Speaker 1: hypoc prothesis that your internal model is always calibrating itself,
Speaker 1: keeping itself tuned up by comparing against the physics of
Speaker 1: the real world. So if it's running too slowly, it
Speaker 1: watches the ball hit the ground and realizes that its
Speaker 1: prediction was just slightly behind, so it speeds up its expectations.
Speaker 1: And the same if it watches the ball and it
Speaker 1: realizes that its prediction was just slightly ahead, then it
Speaker 1: slows itself down. So it uses the outside world as
Speaker 1: the ground truth to keep itself nicely calibrated. Now you
Speaker 1: might think, how would you ever prove a hypothesis like that, Well,
Speaker 1: here's how I had people compare the durations of two
Speaker 1: brief flashes on the screen. So on the screen you
Speaker 1: see a little circle that goes flash and then a
Speaker 1: moment later, another little circle that goes flash. And on
Speaker 1: every trial, I'm slightly tweaking the duration so that one
Speaker 1: is slightly longer than the other, and you just say
Speaker 1: which was longer than which? Okay, now here's the trick.
Speaker 1: I have people watch a video, for example, a camera
Speaker 1: that follows the cheetah sprinting across the serengetti. Now, if
Speaker 1: I just superimpose one flash and then the second flash
Speaker 1: on top of the video, you have no trouble saying
Speaker 1: which one was longer than which. But now I do
Speaker 1: something special. At some point in the video, it suddenly
Speaker 1: goes into slow motion. Then you might know that when
Speaker 1: cheetahs run, all four of their legs come off the ground.
Speaker 2: So now you're seeing this sleek.
Speaker 1: Animal floating in the air and you're waiting for his
Speaker 1: front pause to hit the ground. But now that we're
Speaker 1: suddenly in slow motion, your time prediction is off. You
Speaker 1: expected his legs to hit the ground, but they haven't yet.
Speaker 2: And because we evolved.
Speaker 1: In a world with no such thing as slow motion,
Speaker 1: your brain's only choice is to assume that the mistake
Speaker 1: is its own, and it compensates by slowing down its expectation. Now,
Speaker 1: how do I know the brain does this. It's because
Speaker 1: I can see how you judge the duration of a flash.
Speaker 1: During the sudden slow motion, the flash now appears to
Speaker 1: last a shorter time, about twenty seven percent shorter.
Speaker 2: Why.
Speaker 1: Roughly speaking, it's because your brain is forced to slightly
Speaker 1: tweak its estimate of the pace of time during the
Speaker 1: slow motion bit. Think of it like a clock ticking
Speaker 1: more slowly, and now the flash covers fewer ticks, and.
Speaker 2: So it is judged to last less time.
Speaker 1: I did various control versions of this experiment in which
Speaker 1: I shuffled the frames, or I shuffled all the pixels,
Speaker 1: or I ran the whole thing upside down, and in
Speaker 1: all these cases there was no distortion of the apparent
Speaker 1: duration of the flashes. It only happened when the future
Speaker 1: position of objects was predictable by physics. So let me
Speaker 1: just summarize this. When your brain is watching any scene,
Speaker 1: it's making predictions about where things will be, and if
Speaker 1: the scene suddenly changes speed, then your internal model will
Speaker 1: predict incorrectly. But I suggest the nervous system can eliminate
Speaker 1: these feedback prediction errors with a simple trick by modifying
Speaker 1: its estimated speed of the flow of physical time.
Speaker 2: It's a very subtle.
Speaker 1: Change, but it has measurable perceptual consequences which are exposed
Speaker 1: by this novel time distortion illusion. Okay, that was a
Speaker 1: little technical, but it's one of my favorite experiments. Now,
Speaker 1: we've been talking all about slow motion, but on the
Speaker 1: flip side of slow motion, there is a world unmasked
Speaker 1: by fast motion. Think about quickly blossoming flowers, or imagine
Speaker 1: the the arterial traffic patterns of cities, or watched the
Speaker 1: laminar rush of clouds across the sky, or observe the
Speaker 1: way that the sun drops like a ball behind the
Speaker 1: mountain and the world dims as though by.
Speaker 2: A dimmer switch.
Speaker 1: So fast motion reveals secrets not so much in the
Speaker 1: domain of human facial expressions, but instead in the dance
Speaker 1: of the very large. So let's take a look at
Speaker 1: the kind of descriptions you can generate when speeding up
Speaker 1: the world. In eighteen ninety five, HG. Wells published The
Speaker 1: Time Machine. He did this as a serial novel in
Speaker 1: a magazine. It's one of the earliest and most influential
Speaker 1: works of science fiction, in part because it introduced this
Speaker 1: concept of a time travel device, which became a staple
Speaker 1: in the genre. But it's beautifully written, and we can
Speaker 1: see the imagination of fast time when the unnamed time
Speaker 1: traveler builds this device and travels to the very distant
Speaker 1: future of the year eight hundred and two, thy seven
Speaker 1: hundred and one. Here's the part I want to share
Speaker 1: with you, when he cranks the lever down on the
Speaker 1: machine and gets going. This passage is read again by
Speaker 1: actor Sean Judge.
Speaker 4: As I put on pace, night followed day like the
Speaker 4: flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping
Speaker 4: swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute,
Speaker 4: marking a day. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by,
Speaker 4: too fast for me. Presently, as I went on, still
Speaker 4: gaining velocity, the palpitation of day and night merged into
Speaker 4: one continuous grayness. The jerking sun became a streak of fire,
Speaker 4: the moon a fa interfluctuating band. I saw trees growing
Speaker 4: and changing like puffs of vapor. Huge buildings rise up,
Speaker 4: faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface
Speaker 4: of the earth seemed changed, melting and flowing under my eyes.
Speaker 1: So in the same way, that slow motion allows us
Speaker 1: to see details that we would not otherwise catch. Fast
Speaker 1: motion plays that same game. It's no surprise, then, that
Speaker 1: a very engaging style of cinematography is to rapidly alternate
Speaker 1: between speeding and slowing. Think of the battle scenes in
Speaker 1: the movie three hundred. As the Spartans charge, the camera
Speaker 1: captures their ferocity in real time, the thunder of their
Speaker 1: shields clashing and the spears piercing, And then suddenly the
Speaker 1: world slows and every movement stretches into a balletic display
Speaker 1: of destructions. Sweat glistens, blood arcs gracefully through the air
Speaker 1: like crimson silk. The slow motion lingers on every ripple
Speaker 1: of flash, every grimace of pain, before snapping back to
Speaker 1: faster than normal speed. You see this explosion of chaos
Speaker 1: and bodies tumbling and dust swirling under the fury of combat.
Speaker 1: If you've seen this part of the movie, you know
Speaker 1: it's like an epic painting that's come to life. But
Speaker 1: the point I want to make is that by alternating
Speaker 1: between slow and fast, the cinematography continues to violate our predictions,
Speaker 1: and so it holds our attention throughout.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: One thing I find amazing is that HG. Wells wrote
Speaker 1: his passage before there was fast motion video to watch,
Speaker 1: so he did this the old fashioned way by imagining
Speaker 1: the whole thing. Now, it turns out, if you are
Speaker 1: sufficiently imaginative, you could really do an amazing job on this,
Speaker 1: even before witnessing it yourself.
Speaker 2: For example, five years before HG.
Speaker 1: Well's machine, the great psychologist William James wrote a book
Speaker 1: called Principles of Psychology.
Speaker 2: He has a chapter called the Perception of Time, and.
Speaker 1: In it he writes this strikingly poetic passage.
Speaker 4: We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly
Speaker 4: differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel,
Speaker 4: and in the fineness of the events that may fill it.
Speaker 4: Von Beher has indulged in some interesting computations of the
Speaker 4: effect of such differences in changing the aspect of nature.
Speaker 4: Suppose we were able, within the length of a second
Speaker 4: to note ten thousand events distinctly, instead of barely ten
Speaker 4: as now. If our life were then destined to hold
Speaker 4: the same number of impressions, it might be one thousand
Speaker 4: times as short. We should live less than a month
Speaker 4: and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If
Speaker 4: born in winter, we should now believe in summer as
Speaker 4: we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era.
Speaker 4: The motions of organic beings would be so slow to
Speaker 4: our senses as to be inferred not seen. The sun
Speaker 4: would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost
Speaker 4: free from change, and so on. But now reverse the
Speaker 4: hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one thousandth
Speaker 4: part of the sensations that we get in a given time,
Speaker 4: and consequently live one thousand times as long. Winters and
Speaker 4: summers will be to him like quarters of an hour.
Speaker 4: Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being
Speaker 4: so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations. Annual shrubs will
Speaker 4: rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs.
Speaker 4: The motions of animals will be as invisible as are
Speaker 4: to us the movements of bullets and cannonballs. The sun
Speaker 4: will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a
Speaker 4: fiery trail behind him, et cetera. That such imaginary cases,
Speaker 4: barring the superhuman longevity, may be realized somewhere in the
Speaker 4: animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.
Speaker 1: Now may well have read this passage from William James,
Speaker 1: and the descriptions in them are beautiful, so none of
Speaker 1: them actually needed to see a Hollywood movie to envision this.
Speaker 1: But I do think that it doesn't hurt to grow
Speaker 1: up around movie technology so that one becomes very comfortable
Speaker 1: in thinking about time in different ways by actually seeing
Speaker 1: the experience oneself, by directly learning new ways of perceiving.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. Some of you in your
Speaker 1: fifties or older will remember when your teachers showed eight
Speaker 1: millimeter films in school. Now, if you've never seen this,
Speaker 1: the way it works is that the film strip is
Speaker 1: on a reel, a big circular job, and as the
Speaker 1: movie plays, that reel is unwinding and the film is
Speaker 1: moving to a second reel, which is collecting the film strip.
Speaker 1: So the movie starts off wound up on the first
Speaker 1: and ends up wound up around the second reel. But
Speaker 1: of course the beginning of the movie is now in
Speaker 1: the middle of the second reel, and the end of
Speaker 1: the movie is on the outside, so you have to
Speaker 1: rewind the whole thing back onto the first reel. So
Speaker 1: when you're done watching the movie, you just pull the
Speaker 1: lever to set the whole thing in reverse, and you
Speaker 1: get to witness the whole movie backwards. People are walking backwards,
Speaker 1: bicyclists biking backwards, the train is reversing up the track,
Speaker 1: the diner is getting more food on his plate. The
Speaker 1: person who slipped on the banana peel now slips upward.
Speaker 1: So typically the teacher reverses the film at a much
Speaker 1: higher speed, so you see the whole thing running backwards quickly.
Speaker 1: But what I remember as a little kid in school
Speaker 1: was the delight this process always brought to the whole class. So,
Speaker 1: starting many decades ago, everyone got to see what backwards
Speaker 1: motion looked like. Now it's hard to prove this with certainty,
Speaker 1: but one possibility is that this helped people to think
Speaker 1: about things in a new way, to open up this
Speaker 1: new time domain of things running backwards. So take the
Speaker 1: Swiss physicist Ernst Stuckelberg. In the nineteen forties. He was
Speaker 1: chewing on a problem about elementary particles. His colleague Paul
Speaker 1: Durak had published a paper that unified a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of things in physics, but something came out of Diract's
Speaker 1: equation that was unexpected to everyone. The math suggested there
Speaker 1: should be a particle like an electron, but with positive
Speaker 1: charge instead of negative, and no one had ever seen this,
Speaker 1: but here was the math saying it should exist. Eventually,
Speaker 1: this came to be called a positron, but no one
Speaker 1: knew what could explain the existence of such a particle,
Speaker 1: And in nineteen forty one Stuckelberg realized that a positron
Speaker 1: and an electron are the same little particle, but a
Speaker 1: positron is just an electron traveling backward in time, and
Speaker 1: that made all the math work. Now it's impossible to
Speaker 1: know the answer, but the question is would Stuckelberg have
Speaker 1: had a harder time coming up with this hypothesis if
Speaker 1: he had never seen backward motion. Once you've seen a
Speaker 1: film strip run, once you've seen time run backward that way,
Speaker 1: then that door of possibility is opened up in your
Speaker 1: internal model, and once it's open, you can't shut it,
Speaker 1: and it's much easier to think about things like it.
Speaker 1: This is a specific case of a more general truism
Speaker 1: that new technologies allow us to experience things that we
Speaker 1: could not have experienced otherwise, and that really opens up
Speaker 1: our mental.
Speaker 2: Space to new ideas.
Speaker 1: And I'm very interested in seeing where future technology takes
Speaker 1: us because we can nowadays try out experiments in very
Speaker 1: simple ways that were impossible last century. For example, my
Speaker 1: son plays a VR game called super Hot in which
Speaker 1: you're fending off gunmen who are all trying to get you.
Speaker 1: But the key is that the speed of motion of
Speaker 1: the world depends on the movement of your own body.
Speaker 1: So if you stand very still, the world creeps along
Speaker 1: in super slow motion. But as soon as you make
Speaker 1: a move to lift your gun or move a little bit,
Speaker 1: the world speeds up. And if you're moving really fast,
Speaker 1: the world around you moves fast as well. It's an
Speaker 1: incredible experience to play this, and for the generation of
Speaker 1: children growing up, it's just part of the background furniture
Speaker 1: that you can play a game where the passage of
Speaker 1: time is variable and under your control. But for the
Speaker 1: rest of us, this is a whole new dimension of
Speaker 1: time to explore. The final thing we'll address today is
Speaker 1: why we're not attracted slow motion in an audio only format.
Speaker 1: I suggest it's because with words, we're only analyzing for
Speaker 1: the meaning. We're just working to capture all the words
Speaker 1: so that we can translate that into an understanding of
Speaker 1: the message, and in fact we all know from audiobooks
Speaker 1: and YouTube videos you can take in words at a
Speaker 1: much faster pace than I would be able to naturally
Speaker 1: produce them.
Speaker 2: And so there's no benefit in slowing them down.
Speaker 1: So that's why we don't do the speeding and slowing
Speaker 1: we see in the movie three hundred. If we were
Speaker 1: reading an audio book about the Battle of Thermopylae, like
Speaker 1: Leonides swung the broad sword and hit the Persian soldier
Speaker 1: under the ribs, and then Leonid stepped over the body
Speaker 1: and looked around until he saw his next target horseman
Speaker 1: charging him with a.
Speaker 2: Lance, and he spun and ducked the lance. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe we've just invented a new style there, but I
Speaker 1: doubt it. So we love to do slow motion with videos,
Speaker 1: but not text. But I think there's an interesting realm
Speaker 1: in between. Although video is just over a century old,
Speaker 1: I think there's a sense in which people have for
Speaker 1: millennia figured out how to dance in some way between
Speaker 1: slow motion and fast motion. And this is something I
Speaker 1: learned from my friend Tony Brandt. We were talking about
Speaker 1: these kinds of ideas once and Tony pointed out the
Speaker 1: difference in opera between the Aria and the recitative, and
Speaker 1: Aria spends several minutes on a single idea, like the
Speaker 1: love of the protagonists for the Beautiful Maiden. It's all
Speaker 1: about deep emotions and reflections, and it pauses the plot
Speaker 1: to focus on the character's inner feelings.
Speaker 2: But the restititive is the opposite.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's speech like, there's no rhythm, maybe
Speaker 1: just a harpsichord plays along, and the only job of
Speaker 1: the recitative is to crank the plot along. It just
Speaker 1: tells you about some big passage of time. So Arias
Speaker 1: explore something simple in great depth. The recititive moves the
Speaker 1: story forward. So Arias might be considered perhaps the medieval
Speaker 1: version of slow Moe in the cinema, really zooming in
Speaker 1: on the moment, while the restitative is the fast motion
Speaker 1: speeding up of the plot. Okay, so I've told you
Speaker 1: that we don't do fast and slow motion when there's
Speaker 1: only audio involved, and there's a sense in which we
Speaker 1: grasp at this speeding or slowing with opera. But it's
Speaker 1: different with visual scenes because here we're not just trying
Speaker 1: to decrypt a message, but instead we're watching the incredibly
Speaker 1: high bandwidth visual world and we're making predictions about the
Speaker 1: physics and getting feedback from what we're seeing. And if
Speaker 1: my hypothesis is correct, we're calibrating our own internal clocks
Speaker 1: to the world of.
Speaker 2: What we see.
Speaker 1: And that's why fast and slow motion, although they are
Speaker 1: relatively recent additions to the canon of cinema, this is
Speaker 1: why they grab our attention and are.
Speaker 2: Here to day.
Speaker 1: So let's wrap up beyond its esthetic and emotional appeal,
Speaker 1: slow motion serves a critical narrative function in filmmaking. By
Speaker 1: manipulating time, directors can emphasize key moments, They can reveal
Speaker 1: hidden details. They can grab your attention by violating your
Speaker 1: brain's expectations. Slow motion is more than just a visual trick.
Speaker 1: It's a way of stretching moments, suspending us in the
Speaker 1: gravity of an emotion or a decision, or a final
Speaker 1: breath before impact. It allows us to live inside the
Speaker 1: flicker of an instant, to taste the weight of time.
Speaker 1: Perhaps this is why our brains are so captivated by it,
Speaker 1: because in life, time generally moves at one relentless speed,
Speaker 1: but in film, we can linger in a moment. We
Speaker 1: can turns into minutes. We can reveal the invisible in
Speaker 1: the visible slow motion reminds us that buried in every blink,
Speaker 1: every heartbeat, every fleeting instant, there is a world of
Speaker 1: depth waiting to be discovered. Go to Eagleman dot com
Speaker 1: slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Speaker 2: Send me an email at.
Speaker 1: Podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and
Speaker 1: check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for
Speaker 1: videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time.
Speaker 1: I'm David Eagleman and this is the one hundredth episode
Speaker 1: of Inner Cosmos.