The part where the phone was bouncing around on top of my hands, just out of my grasp, seemed to happen very fast. Even the part where my last attempt to gain control of it actually caused it to travel a couple of feet into the water bowl seemed to transpire rapidly. Seeing my phone sink immediately to the bottom of the bowl seemed instantaneous. However, when I took a couple of steps toward the bowl and looked directly down at it and gazed upon my smartphone emerged in four inches of water it seemed time stopped for a moment.
I've experienced this sensation before in my life, I imagine most people have. Unfortunately, it seems we are more apt to have this experience in times of distress instead of times of joy. One scientist I really enjoy following is David Eagleman. He fell off his roof when he was young and had this same experience, time stopping, on his way to the ground. It influenced him so much he's devoted much of his life to understanding our brain and how it perceives time.
What seems to pique my interest in this phenomenon is the potential we demonstrate to actually live in each individual moment. Our thoughts all run together and time goes by and it's all just a comfortable and convenient and familiar blur to us. We have thousands and thousands upon thousands and thousands of thoughts and information running through our brain at any given moment. If we choose to focus on any of them at any instance it appears we are quite comfortable selecting one of two of them to hone in on and identify with. Sometimes we are forced to deal with several or a bunch or many or a ton at some random moment and it feels as if time stops to us when this happens.
What trips me out mostly about human behavior is how content people are to not know anything about themselves. In every room in my house I have at least one light switch on the wall. When I flick the switch up then the light comes on. When I flick it down then the light goes off. I seriously don't know much more about how it all works. Sure, I know electricity is involved and the switch acts as some sort of lever that redirects the energy to the light, which is made of a substance that illuminates when the electricity runs through it. But, if someone with some sort of amnesia started probing me on the exact description of what's going on then I wouldn't get very far.
Person with amnesia: How does that work?
Me: This switch allows electricity to go to the light.
Amnesia: What's electricity?
Me: Aaaaahhhhhh.....
Amnesia: Does electricity come from some other place? How does the other place get it? Do they create it? Round it up? Store it? How do they get it to your place? What's it do when it's at your place but the switch is off? Why does the light just burn out after a while?
I know there are some people that truly do know the answers to all of those questions and understand this thing we all take for granted quite well. However, most people wouldn't do very well explaining how the light works and they use them all of the time. Having stated that, I think most people could explain electricity and the light better than they could how a thought works in their own head. That amazes me.
Memories are complicated things. A memory is not just one single thing that is stored in one single place in the brain. It's a collection of things that is stored in various locations throughout the brain. When we experience events that cause our brain to retrieve every memory it has about anything relevant to the situation at hand I believe we experience a stoppage of time.
It may seem like life is tough in today's hustle and bustle world where we all grind to make it to the next paycheck but life is pretty good when we step back and reflect upon the animal kingdom. Normal life allows us the security of knowing our most basic of needs are going to be met. We might have to earn them but we are allowed to choose our paths and feel confident that we will have food and shelter and our lives aren't in danger on a minute by minute basis. This has afforded our brain the ability to occupy our sense of self with truly meaningless things on the overall spectrum of important thoughts in the universe. However, every once in a while we are forced to observe a barrage of thoughts that our brain has to evaluate and consider in a split second prior to advancing to the next moment.
I've had more important and life threatening experiences that have created this sensation of time stopping, but that doesn't negate the fact I still had this experience again when looking down at my phone at the bottom of the dog bowl. Obviously, I was going to reach down and grab it out as quickly as I physically could but before that actually occurred it seemed like a gazillion thoughts entered my head in regard to that one phone.
Is my phone really sitting at the bottom of that water? How in the world did that happen? Remember the last time I dropped my phone in the toilet and vowed to myself to never have my phone around water at all? Yes, I do remember that and that's why I had the phone over there by the couch and not by the water bowl? Oh, that's right. Man that was nuts wasn't it? I tried to grab the phone and I fumbled it and fumbled it and fumbled it and then eventually slapped it all the way across the room and it land in that little area over there that just so happens to be my dog's water bowl. I know. And what's really nuts is there are times that it's empty and this could have been one of those times but it just so happens I just filled it up with water. Yes, she was very happy when I did that. She's such a sweet dog. What if the bowl wasn't all the way full, but only half way full? Would that matter at all? Is the phone still screwed either way? I don't know? I wonder how much the protection plan is to replace it? I hope it's not much more than fifty or sixty bucks? I can handle that? What a stupid mistake, a fifty or sixty dollar mistake. How am I going to call Verizon to get a new phone on the way? How long is it going to take to get here? Two days, three at the most? I can do that. You might like it. No, probably not. I hope it's two days at the most. Am I going to be one of those people that have to post I lost my phone on Facebook and have everyone message me with their numbers? That's going to suck to have to replace everyone's number. Will it shock me to reach in there and get it? It can't shock me. I've done this before, remember? I do remember and it's been a long time since I've done this. I'm so bummed this just happened. Do I have any rice? I don't think I do? Remember that big bag of rice I bought and never ate any of it for six months and then through it away? I have a nice steamer I never use, what's wrong with me? I bet they could make a water proof phone if they really wanted to.
All of that, and much much more, in less than half a second went through my head. That's probably not that rare at all. What made it unusual for me was my ability to observe them all in such a short amount of time. I suspect because the event happened so suddenly and my reality was dramatically altered (I know losing a smartphone is so white people problems but let's get real. Having no phone, especially when living alone, sucks.) then my brain began retrieving every memory it had about my phone. Some of those memories triggered other memories and the stream of information was all being sent to some area that allowed my "self" to observe the process. When my "self" normally entertains or observes this amount of thoughts it occurs over a longer period of time. Simply reading all of them probably took a couple of minutes for most people. However, when we observe more thoughts in a given moment then we're used to, especially a plethora of them, then our sense of time is disoriented. It's easier to believe time actually stopped than it is to conceive we are capable of operating like this and think about that many different things all in one instance.
Even though any of the specific thoughts and ideas that went through my head in that split second weren't really that Earth shattering, what seems to be of importance to me is the process that allowed this to happen. The potential that exists to observe this many thoughts more often and on a more regular basis and not just in times of stress is encouraging to me. As crazy as this sounds, I believe it's quite possible harnessing this ability can actually lead to a quieter state of mind. When things become normal or mundane or regular occurrences then we seem to take them for granted and pay little attention to them. When we experience tons of thoughts all at once that is out of the norm and seems like a weird sensation. However, if we could make this the norm then I believe it would be much easier to achieve the silence.
When I pulled the phone out of the water, a mere couple of seconds after it landed in it, it was still on. I pushed the buttons and they all worked. I tried to make a call and the other person couldn't hear me and I couldn't hear them but I could if I put them on speaker phone. That was the only hiccup at all and it only lasted two hours and everything was back to normal after that. True story.
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