Yeehaw!: Pulling A Fast One In Slow Motion

Bbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrpppp! You’re a snake slithering your way down a hill and ya just pulled the most cholesterol-filled, fatty, meaty, beastly, gigantor slide of your life—hoping someone laid witness to your steezery. You’re riding along on a cloud of stoke now, feeling like you’re in bullet-time: a fourth-dimension of slow motion. Every time you go for a slide, things slow down. Your brain feels like its working 110% as you focus all of your energy and balance on that one piece of a moment. You bounce from half-second to half-second as you meticulously choose your slide’s progression down the road. You later tell the tale to the homies about how you were in ‘slo-mo’ while all things sang in harmony with your screeching wheels.

This feeling of a perceived movement in slow motion can be explained by a study conducted by some gnarly neuroscientists at Baylor College. Their study found that the feeling of slo-mo you get when in some sort of extreme event—like a car accident, or a gnarly back-bending toeside check—does not occur in the moment of the actual event, but occurs later, in your recollection of it. What happens is that during that body-endangering-moment of full-focus-madness your brain’s amygdala goes into hyper-mode, noticing anything and everything during that intense moment. Upon recalling what happened, an individual feels like he or she is in slow motion—in down hill skateboarding, it feels like you are pulling a fast one in slow motion.

Although it ends up you can’t actually dodge bullets, the feeling of being super focused and involved with your skating is still a fantastic feeling of dopamine induced brain trickery. So when you’re at the bottom of the hill thinking you’re The One, and that Morpheus is looking for you to save humanity from the evil robots, think again. You my friend are actually just storing richer, denser, and more creamy-filled memories. No matter how ya slice it, it’s still an awesome feeling. Yeehaw!