In the Slow Zone strong

Why do some athletes experience a dramatic slowing of time?

Time expansion is linked to altered states of consciousness, which athletes attain through intense absorption.

In 1994, a British racing driver named Mark Hughes had “one of the greatest days in my life” when he began a race right at the back of the grid, with 25 other cars in front of him. Somehow he managed to overtake 23 cars, finishing third. While driving, Hughes felt a strange sense of detachment, as if he was watching from outside his body. He also felt a peculiar sense of timelessness. As he described it, “It’s funny and it sounds weird but it felt unconnected to time … It’s not really time …You felt you could go back, analyse and have a look.”¹

Many racing drivers have reported similar experiences. The Finnish driver Mika Häkkinen reported that, when driving at his best, “Everything becomes like slow motion — even though you’re going at unbelievable speed around the Monaco track.”²The Scottish driver Jackie Stewart, who competed in Formula 1 during the 1960s and 70s, even suggested that time expansion is the essential prerequisite for success in racing. As he wrote, “At 195 mph, you should still have a very clear vision, almost in slow motion, of going through that corner — so that you have time to brake, time to line the car up, time to recognize the amount of drift.”³

Time expansion experiences, as I refer to them, or TEEs for short, are common in other sports too. The American sprinter Steve Williams — who equalled the men’s 100- and 200-metre world records in the 1970s — described how, when he was running well, “10 seconds seems like 60. Time switches to slow motion.”⁴

In my own research, I cite the experience of an ice hockey player for whom “The play which seemed to last for about 10 minutes all occurred in the space of about eight seconds [of measured time].” Similarly, a man described a game of table tennis that suddenly “turned into slow motion … I could see the ball and its flight and spin perfectly, anticipating its precise bounce, and position my body, arm, hands and wrist to hit perfect returns.”⁵

In my book, Time Expansion Experiences, I suggest that a tiny proportion of extraordinary athletes have easy access to time expansion experiences. One example is the baseball player Ted Williams, whose careerran from 1939 to 1960. Williams is usually regarded as one of the greatest hitters (if not the best) ever, with the highest on-base percentage in baseball history (.482). He claimed to be able to see the stitches on the seam of the ball as it flew toward him at 100 mph. He described how the ball sometimes appeared to grow, so that it seemed like a beach ball floating toward him in slow motion.

This may also be true of the contemporary footballer Lionel Messi, usually described as the best player of modern times. Messi is renowned for his “impossible” goalsthat seem to defy the laws of physics. He threads through tiny spaces between groups of opponents, curls the ball more acutely than any other player, accelerates and decelerates with impossible rapidity, all while keeping the ball fixed at high speed. As the ex-footballer Rio Ferdinand commented insightfully of Messi, “I just feel that in his own eyes and his own vision, the game just slows down for him. He plays in slow-motion because it comes to him so easy and so naturally.”

In my view, the key to understanding TEEs is altered states of consciousness. Our normal time perception is linked to our normal state of consciousness. In some mildly altered states (such as flow) time passes very quickly. But during intensealtered states, time usually expands dramatically, or seems to disappear altogether. This is why radical time expansion is a common feature of copyright drugs, and of accidents and emergencies. The sudden shock of an accident may disrupt our normal psychological processes and functions, causing an abrupt shift in consciousness.