Tachypsychia: The science of swift perception

Tachypsychia (from the Greek: TAC (ταχύς) — "quick, fast") is a psychological phenomenon in which a qualitative enhancement of perception occurs. The name itself comes from two Greek words, namely: tachys which means swift and psyche that means mind or soul. This refers to the state in which one perceives their mental processing, as well as external events being perceived at an accelerated rate. Such a change in perception of time and experience can happen during times of extreme stress, danger, fear or emotional trauma.

Though tachypsychia is usually related to increased levels of awareness, adrenaline secretion and fight-or-flight response, it can also be associated with particular altered states of consciousness: during intoxication or in psychotic and sleep-deprived state. This phenomena is complex and multi-dimensional to the extent that it contains a cocktail of neurological, psychological, and emotional workings often placing one’s subjective experience at odds with their objective reality.

The Neuroscience Behind Tachypsychia

Neuroscience may be able to figure out what happens inside our brain when we enter tachypsychia. The brain is constantly inputting information about the environments, and in ideal conditions, the functionality of processing sensory input and triggering response to stimuli are optimal. But when people are under extreme stress — or in danger — different areas and circuits of the brain light up.

The amygdala is one of the key players in this, a tiny almond-shaped area of your brain involved with emotion processing, especially fear and threat. If a human encounters a potentially life-threatening or otherwise stressful scenario, the amygdala sends signals to the hypothalamus and the autonomic nervous system, triggering the fight-or-flight response in the body. This response gets the body ready for fight or flight, raising heart rate, enlarging pupils and filling blood with adrenaline and cortisol.

Even the shock of physical exertion can produce adrenaline, that nasty-jawed motherfucker whose physiological effects are also a possible contributor to tachypsychia. It raises brain arousal and raises sensory sensitivity. This can lead to better concentration and precision that comes with a sense of slowing time for the person. This is because the brain, saturated with adrenaline at such moments, processes information more quickly and so we tend to perceive time as though slightly accelerated — more events occur within what would seem the same period of real time.

Tachypsychia in high-stress conditions

Tachypsychia is often seen during extreme high-stress situations, particularly in life-threatening scenarios. Time slowing down has been described by witnesses of accidents, people attacked in violent crimes, and soldiers on the battlefield. Sometimes, people claim that they are able to observe seek details unnoticable otherwise for instance the course of a bullet or the look of an assailant despite those events happened in split seconds.

In tachypsychia, the slow-motion appearance is believed to be due to an overactivated attentional process where the brain, under duress, concentrates on each and every passing moment. This allows the brain to store additional sensory data per real-world second, leading to a perception that more time has elapsed than truly has. In an example of a life-or-death nature, the human might take note of the color of a passing truck, the feel of ground or pavement below him/her, or perhaps a sound made by someone pursuing them whilst their body vigorously and diligently carried out behaviors to either flee from danger or prepare for defense.

The most frequent way to describe this phenomenon is to point out one or the other of combat and escaping feedback systems which prepare our bodies for one or the other form of action by activating one side of our sympathetic nerves. Continuing to hone this sense of time dilation could be advantageous in these high-pressure situations where more precision and awareness are needed from an individual. When irreversible stuff happens, it seems like time slows down in the brain which allows more processing to occur — bolstering an individual’s capacity for quick and mostly effective reactions even though things happen at a standard rate.

Tachypsychia and Trauma

Tachypsychia is commonly associated with trauma because the victim feels that an event lasted for significantly more time than it did.[2] One of those is trauma, specifically psychological trauma and how it can process memories of extreme experiences differently. Flashbacks, intrusive memories, and sensations of out-of-body experiences may then occur later on; this phenomenon might be linked to the special way in which time is perceived during the traumatic events.

Individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can develop warped memories of their trauma, such that it feels like the event happened in slow motion or with an increased level of detail. This phenomenon is known as "flashbacks," where the brain recovers a past experience in an often distorted, even exaggerated way, usually with a high degree of temporal disorienting. Experiences like that can leave you feeling "pinned" to a moment -- as if time is "frozen."

But intriguingly, this distortion of time doesn't just apply to traumatic experiences. The same effect can occur when we find ourselves in particularly stressful circumstances, even more so when it comes to extreme sports (think skydiving or bungee jumping), as the brain was processing lots and lots of sensory data that created this notion that time seems to extend or slowed down. In these cases, tachypsychia may serve the purpose of making the individual more efficient in responding to and processing events much like how athletes have reported being "in the zone," where they can take in fast pace sequences with enhanced precision.

Psychotropic Substances and Tachypsychia

Besides trauma and stress, tachypsychia can also be triggered by certain drugs (e.g. hallucinogenic or stimulant drugs). We can give them substances such as LSD, psilocybin (as present in magic mushrooms) or amphetamine-type drugs leading to a distorted perception of time where it feels like that time is slower or faster.

People high on LSD, for example, commonly experience a greatly stretching perception of time, where hours can seem like minutes or moments eternities. Likewise, meth gives you this manic high state of mind where your thoughts are feeling as though they are running at a million miles an hour. In either case, time becomes warped in the mind, and tachypsychic moments are given aerobatic leaps to one side of the tail-wind or another.

This alteration of time perception, from these substances is believed to be related to their effects on neurotransmitters in the brain. Dopamine and serotonin — are involved in mood, perception, as well as the body’s internal clock. Changes to the equilibrium of these chemicals induced by such substances can lead to warped senses of time passing that is tachypsychia.

Altered States of Consciousness

Other altered states of consciousness could also be linked to tachypsychia. That is, practitioners sometimes claim to be in a state that feels timeless (such as during meditative or spiritual experiences), where the concept and passage of time seems unimportant, suspended, or warped. When people enter these altered states—for example, deep in meditation or during a mystical experience—the ordinary boundaries of time can feel dissolved such that the perception of time becomes slow-motion or non-existent.

As a related phenomenon, tachypsychia can be found in different states of alteration like sleep deprivation, and thus someone may lose track of time based on the stressor or exhaustion cognitively. When sleep deprivation lasts for a long time, the hallucinations and false memories emerge—and so too the time flies differently.

Tachypsychia as an Element of Flow States

The other context where tachypsychia comes up regularly is in relation to the idea of flow — a mental state where one is fully immersed and focused on an activity that challenges (but does not overwhelm) your skills. When someone is in a flow state they can lose or feel short cuts of time depending on how immersed they are.

When athletes, artists and performers report they get “in the zone”, they are so immersed in the performance that distractions fade away – some describe it as time slowing down. In this state, tachypsychia, may represent the heightened concentration and immersion in the current activity that results in time distortion experiences.

What's Exciting about Tachypsychia

Whether through psychology, neuroscience, philosophy or psychology of trauma tachypsychia is a complex phenomenon which has undergone some study throughout many disciplines. It summarizes the sensation of slowed perception—when people feel as if time is passing more slowly, or that their cognition has sped up, and things are processing faster than normal. Tachypsychia, whether provoked by stress or trauma, psychoactive substances, or states of altered consciousness demonstrates how malleable our experience of time is revealing the inextricable link between mind and emotion to perceptions of temporal duration.