Disrupting Research at Baylor College

David Eagleman's "Elongated Memory" Gets Disrupted By Duration Dilation and Marshall Barnes' new science of Technocogninetics

Critical Thinking and Time Slowing Down

Critical thinking in science is one of its most important features. The problem is that not all scientists know how to do it well. Instead, they rely too much on assumptions based on previous experience, established knowledge and personal biases. Many times these assumptions are not obvious and so they are referred to as "hidden assumptions". Hidden assumptions are particularly problematic due to the fact that they can lead to errors whose cause is difficult to determine. For a National Lab Day project at Bexley High School, Marshall decided to focus on a famous study that he himself had found to be invalid. That study was by one David Eagleman, PhD from Baylor College of Medicine and was titled, Does Time Really Slow Down During a Frightening Event? and dealt with the subject of duration dilation.

Falling At the Speed of Fright...

David Eagleman said he wanted to study duration dilation to see if people really did see time slowing down. To do that he placed his subjects into a device called a SCAD or Suspended Catch Air Device and had them wear monitors on their wrists with flashing numbers that flashed too fast to read under normal circumstances. The idea was that when the subjects were released into a free fall in the SCAD that they might be so frightened that they would experience duration dilation and be able to read the numbers. According to his study as published by the PlosOne online journal, however, no one did. In addition, his report stated that when asked to estimate how long it took them to hit the net after they had been released, all participants over-estimated the length of time that it took. Because of this, Eagleman claimed that duration dilation was actually a product of elongated memory, in other words, instead of the brain processing information faster during the experience, it was simply remembering the event in richer detail which made it seem in retrospective as if time had slowed down.

The students watched the video clip below to understand the experiment and prepare for the task of critical analysis.

The students next watched the video below to get a better view of the "Eagle Eye" monitor and other views of the experimental SCAD drops.

The students next task was to watch the first video clip again, this time timing the length of one the subjects falling and then at 3:51 watching to time the estimation of the length of time it took to fall by one of the subjects.

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Then the students learned that, by applying technocogninetic analysis to the experiment, Marshall could learn the effect of the landing in the net on a person's perceptions. He looked up information on the SCAD device and found out that a person can't tell when they've hit the net. That means that all estimations would be longer than they should have been and rendering the study' conclusions null and void. The class was stunned at this but had already begun to see other problems with it as well. rite a bio for each team member. Make it short and informative to keep your visitors engaged.