Accidents... time either stops or flies

I've been talking over the years to a number of people about their accidents. Many people said, I was riding along and poof I was on the ground. Other people said that time slowed down to an almost stop.

It seems that there is a relationship to how fast you were going when the accident started and what happens to time. Over 50mph time stops. Below 50mph time flies.

I think perhaps this is more tied to a mental response. The first phase of the accident happens quickly. If the slide is short you don't have time to think. If the slide is long, your mind is able to think and is in top gear thinking so fast it seems time has stopped.

I'll recount my slide.

Decellerating from top speed in 3rd or 4th gear. Slowing to near 60mph.
Cat. Increasing lean angle to narrow turn down.

Whump. Left palm into the road surface.

Time slows down.

Hip and side onto road

rolling onto back

tuck in head to protect neck (happened so quick that my head never touched the road)

Headlight

Shit!

Oh - that's my bikes headlight - ug - that's it rotating on the centerstand/exhaust...

Hey I'm stopped.

Put a foot down

PHUMMP! Now summersaulting over foot - I guess I wasn't stopped.

rolled around to other side don't want to burn through my gear

ouch - wacked my pinky on something

ok - stopped... am I?

OK - stopped - up and run for the bike. Hit the kill switch, picked it up and put it on the sidewalk.

And then time sort of resumes it's normal pace - with bits of plastic down a good stretch of road... a jogger had heard/saw some of it and was probably in shock. He absolutely couldn't beleive I just stood up and brushed myself off and got to business...

That slide felt like 10 minutes. I thought about alot of things. I didn't think about pain really - I just was thinking about doing the right thing, which in hindsight wasn't to put a foot down. I was able to recognize a light from my bike and realize it was pivotting on it's exhaust/center stand... I don't honestly remember sound. Maybe a bit of sound or the gear on the road but not clearly... just muffled scuffing sounds.

When was this accident? 2002... a long time ago for the detail I can remember it in.

So after a long ramble - how about you? How fast were you going at the time of the accident and did time slow down or not?

Woot.

 

I was going about 30 or 40 when I had a car turn left in front of me. Time definitely slowed down for me.

I saw the car start his turn,

I got on the brakes for a split second,

I leaned hard to the right, hoping to get around him,

He continued through the turn, and didn't stop until he had completely filled my lane, so going around him was no longer an option.

I straightened the bike up, and got on the brakes HARD.

Locked up the back for a second, released it and got on it again.

Saw the driver's face. I think he looked more scared than I was.

My front wheel hit right behind his right front wheel,

The back end of the bike popped up into the air, but I managed to hold myself from doing an endo.

Before the rear wheel fell back down onto the pavement, I had swung my left leg over the saddle, and both of my feet landed on the ground when the rear wheel did.

Unfortunately, the bike was leaning a bit, and I was unable to keep it from falling over and breaking the clutch handle and some other bits.

Ran to the sidewalk to avoid the still-flowing traffic.

Those 2 seconds felt like an eternity. I hit his car so hard that my front fender was smashed against the headers and prevented the wheel from turning.

I'll tell my other accident story soon.

 

For me, it was kind of the opposite of Woot's experience. It was night, I was making a gentle right-hander out of a turnabout and was just rolling on the throttle doing about 20MPH. The ass end sliding out (I'd hit a patch of oil and/or diesel from some demolition equipment) felt like slow motion. I had tons of time to realize 'something's not right,' though the brain must have been slow, too, because I couldn't think of how to correct it. My view over the front of the bike kept turning to the right instead of straightening out of the turn as intended, and I heard the engine rev out of synch with my groundspeed.

The next thing I saw was sparks coming off my right case guard. The slide was quick. Bang, spark, stop.

Before I fully realized what had happened, I'd already stood the bike back up. It died out on its side, and I remember cranking it a few times before it would get going again. Once I got it started, I shut it down and set it on the sidestand to take inventory. This was on a campus road, so traffic was a non-issue.

I broke off the right highway peg, scuffed the right pipe, the brake pedal, and the trim on the Vetter fairing. The fairing saved the mirror and brake lever. In the slide, which I paced at a mere 30', my right foot came off the peg and dragged behind my knee on my toe. I kept my left foot on the peg and my hands on the handlebars. I had scuffs on my right boot toe (Redwing Steel-toed work boots), and ripped through one of two layers on the elbow of my Army surplus field jacket (I have leather now). It did not appear that my helmet hit the ground.

Body damage was a cherry and bruise on my knee, bruise on my elbow, and sore shoulders from dead-lifting the bike while super-charged on adrenaline.

So, going down was slow, the slide itself was pretty much real-time, and picking up the pieces seemed like a few hours, but was likely a few minutes.

For the longest time, turns at night just didn't feel right.

And that was in 1995. It's something you don't readily forget - details and all.

 

I rear-ended a Chevy Spectrum in the early 90's, and totalled the Chevy.
My Fazer had to be cut out of the guy's back seat. As I was flying through the airlike some Ground_Seeking_Meat_Missile, I realized that is I cleared the second car, there was nothing left to hit but asphalt. I cleared it with room to spare, the Police report said that I stopped 150 feet from impact and they found my high-top sneakers in a yard over 100 yards away from me. I was so shocky that I tried to walk over to my bike and pick it up, next thing I remember was giving the police my statement in the ER. Morphine tends to cloud the rest.
It sounds stupid, but that wreck probably saved my life. It cured me of riding like a complete @ss.

 

Fortunately, I've not had to do a tango on my bike, but I do have a pertinent recollection from when I was a passender in one of the really old-style Honda Civics (back when they were like a tin can with two and half seats). I was in the back --umm, seat -- sitting in the middle so I could look between my the two front seats. On the right-front was a good friend of mine, and driving was his soon-to-be brother-in-law. We swung around a curving road and they both looked off to one side to wave at and talk about someone they knew in the neighborhood. Since I didn't know the subject of the discussion, I turned my attention back to the front, where I observed a 4x4 coming from the opposite direction. And just like us, he had swung into the center of the road. I found myself staring up the ever-expanding 100-foot tall shiney grill and realized, "So this is how my life ends." So resigned was I to the inevitable that I didn't even bother to tell the driver he might want to try to save our keisters. Time had begun to "slow down" for me, when my friend happened to glance forward and see the looming hulk about to run over us. He suggested to his future in-law that now might be a good to make a course correction. He sure tried, too. I distinctly remember the car leaning hard to the left as he swerved to the right, and just as the car began to recover and start leveling off, that giant grill came through the window to my left. One moment, the window was a solid piece of glass surrounded by smooth-if-somewhat-rusty tin. About an hour later, the glass was in a bazillion pieces, each slowly twirling through the air. I remember thinking, "Wow, that safety glass really does break into teeny, tiny cubes," and "Gosh, they're kinda pretty spinning through the air like that." About 45 minutes later, the car came to rest, still on all fours, but now shaped like a half-eaten donut. None of us were injured.

Now, being the college student that I am, and having had a bit of interest in computer graphics, I have learned that there is actually a name for, and an explanation for why time seems (for most people) to slow so much in event like this. The name for it is time expansion. (The inverse process also has a name: time compression.) The explanation goes like this. As a person goes through life, huge amounts of sensory input is received throughout the day. After a few years, our brain knows that the vast majority of that data is really redundant and repetitive. Yes, that's right. Redundant AND repetitive. So the brain begins to filter all that stuff out and we begin to be aware of only small amounts of sensory input.

But, when a major event like getting run over by a 10-story 4x4, laying down a bike, or getting married happens, our brain responds differently. It focuses on the immediate sensory input, providing to our conscious awareness much more instanteous data than we've seen in, oh, years upon years. The volume of data we receive in those few seconds is roughly equivalent to amount of data we usueally, consciously process in a period of several minutes to several hours. It is this correlative volume of data that makes it seem that time has slowed.

For those people who experience time compression in such events, what the psychs think happens is that the brain attempts to pass through the data, as in time expansion, but the conscious brain fails to process it, so the data get dropped. In this event, instead of receiving and processing the amount of data the brain usually deals with in minutes-to-hours, the brain simply ignores the data, so it is aware of drastically little data during the event. In that case the amount of data processed in those few seconds is roughly like the volume of data we see in somethingly like a micro-second, so time seems to jump forward.

 

I could not be bothered at the moment , but one day soon i'll sit in front of da comp with a rum and i'll get into some real spooky and scientific stuff relating to this posts matter.

A word , who do psykologists see , 70% of them are fruit loops.

Onya woot for the subject..