Why do we love to watch slow motion in the movies? What do Bonnie and Clyde or Inception or the Matrix tell us about brains and time perception? And what does any of this have to do with unmasking hidden data or champion bicyclists or elementary particles or murderers or HG Well's time machine. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe to understand some of the most surprising aspects of our lives. Today's episode is about slow motion and what's going on in the brain and why we are attracted to it. So we all know that if you go to any random blockbuster, you're really likely to see some of the sequences in slow motions gets employed to accentuate the choreography of gun battles or sword fights, and of course it
doesn't even have to be fighting. You might see it in a shot of a basketball dunk, or a flipping car, or sprinters crossing the finish line, whatever the shot. What we get to witness is fluidity and elegance in a visually captivating spectacle that has become a hallmark of Hollywood, and it goes even beyond action movies. Even in dramas and romances. We see slow motion get leveraged to capture intimate emotional moments. We savor the subtleties of someone's eye
movements or facial expressions or body movements. We understand something about the unspoken longing and restrained passion between two protagonists, or we watch a tear fall, or we see the moment that someone has an unexpected revelation.
So we see slow motion all the time.
But have you ever wondered from a neuroscience perspective what that's all about and why brains love it so much? Yeah, me too, and hence today's podcast. So let's start by zooming way out. When did slow motion really start in movies? You may be surprised to know that the era of
slow mo didn't really begin until nineteen sixty seven. And what stuns me about this is that by nineteen sixty seven we already had supersonic flight and bionic limbs and credit cards and digital music, and the space race was in full swing, but nobody was using slow motion until.
I thought, I have an idea about the end that should be like a spastic ballet, and that was the image.
That's Arthur Penn, the director of the nineteen sixty seven film Bonnie and Clyde. This was a big Hollywood blockbuster that dramatized the real life crime spree of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and the stars were Fade, Done Away
and Warren Batty. So Bonnie and Clyde were a young couple who became bank robbers during the Great Depression, and in the movie, they travel across the country with their growing gang and their crimes escalate, and this attracts the relentless pursuit by law enforcement, which culminates in a violent ambush.
And then so I came to the technicians and I said, look, this is what I want to get.
They said, you can't do that.
I said, I want four cameras. I want them running at different speeds, I want them ganged together, and I want to roll them all at the same time.
And so that's what happened. In the final scene, the cinematography decelerates into a balletic slow motion as Bonnie and Clyde meet their bloody end. Under a hailstorm of police bullets, so as they experience their final moment, the audience is given some extra seconds to be witnessed to it. Now, this really shocked a lot of people. Critics called Arthur Penn's slowed down death scene gratuitous and callous, but.
The idea caught on.
Bonnie and Clyde had opened the door to slow motion and it's never been shut since.
Now.
By the way, it's not that the technology was new. The method for slow motion movies came into being in nineteen o five four when the Austrian physicist August Musker invented the technique. So what's the technique. You just speed up the recording camera so you're capturing more frames per second. In this way, what you're doing is capturing faster changes. The time in between each picture is shorter than normal.
So then when you play the film strip back at regular speed, like twenty four frames per second, then the scene appears to be in slow motion because the change from one frame to the next is very small. This was initially just getting used for scientific purposes to slow down processes that you can't see well with the naked eye, but eventually slow motion was adopted by filmmakers to enhance
visual storytelling. Now, before we go on, I want to make sure we have a clear distinction between slow motion in movies and the impression that you might have if you have experienced a life threatening situation and it feels like the event took a long time. Is this because the frame rate of your brain changes.
No.
Ninety nine episodes ago, I talked about the impression we have of very frightening events having taken a long time. This is something I first experienced as a child when I fell off of a roof. I have very clear memories, and it feels like the whole thing took a few seconds, even though I can calculate that it only took point six seconds to get from the top to the bottom. Now, it turns out that this observation about scary events seeming
to last longer. This is at least one hundred years old in the scientific literature, although I imagine that people have noticed this from time immemorial. But my laboratory was the first to run experiments on it to see if it was an issue of a faster perceptual frame rate, which again is how a movie camera captured slow motion or instead, does it happen to us? Because of the laying down of denser memories and the retrospective estimate of how much
time had passed. We ran experiments by presenting information at a faster rate than a person could normally see, and then we put them in a very scary situation where we dropped them from one hundred and fifty foot tall tower and they were caught in a net below. If a person is like a camera speeding up its frame rate, then they would be able to easily see the information we were flashing at them. But our results indicated that the slow motion effect was a.
Trick of memory.
In other words, when you're in fear for your life, your brain writes down dense memory. It's capturing everything it can, whereas normally your memory is very leaky. So when your brain then asks what just happened? What just happened and reads it out all those dense memories, it estimates that
the event must have taken longer. Your brain has all these rich memories, let's say, the hood crumpling and the rear view mirror falling off, and the expression on the other driver's face and so on, And given that opulence of memory, your brain calculates that the whole event must have represented a slightly longer duration. In other words, what happens during a scary event is a totally different mechanism
than slow motion video. Now, when I published our findings, some people said to me, Hey, I don't think your conclusion is correct because I had a life threatening car accident and I know what I experienced. So I said to them, Okay, but the guy in your passenger seat who was yelling watch out, did it actually.
Sound like he was saying.
Because if not, that means that time is not actually dilated. Because if you are recording something with a faster frame rate, then when you play it back out, everything is stretched. So with your experience of time dilation, it's not an issue a faster frame rate like a movie camera, but instead of denser memory. Please listen to episode one of this podcast for much more about that. And the reason I'm telling you about this now is because we're going
to return to this in a few minutes. For now, let's get back to filmmaking, where the mechanism is very straightforward. You just take more frames per second. Now, I said that Bonnie and Clyde was the first major movie to use slow motion, but there were actually experiments with it before that. One of the earliest uses in cinema was in an epic silent film called Intolerance in nineteen sixteen.
This was made by a director named D. W. Griffith, who was experimenting with all millions of techniques of filmmaking and used slow motion just a little bit to accentuate dramatic moments and heighten emotional tension. But two World Wars that over half a century passed before I was used in Bonnie and Clyde, in part because the technology had to advance to make slow motion more accessible and versatile.
By the nineteen sixties, people were building high speed cameras which were capable of capturing hundreds of frames per second and eventually thousands, and this is what allowed filmmakers to push new boundaries of representing time and creating effects that audiences were captivated by. And the nineteen sixty nine film The Wild Bunch, two years after Bonnie and Clyde, really helped popularize the technique. And now, of course we don't even think about it much because it's a staple of
modern filmmaking. For example, I recently watched a movie called Wanted, which uses super slow motion every time there's a gun battle. Where you may remember Christopher Nolan's movie Inception, which has these beautiful slow motion dream sequences, especially in the kick
moments where they're transitioning from one reality to another. So increasingly since nineteen sixty seven, movies use time warping all the time, and the success of this approach has overtaken commercials and music videos, and it's a standard tool on our cell phones. And in fact, you can tell when something has become a staple because then it shifts into the focus of the comedians. Some years ago, the comedian Dave Chappelle did a skit in which he was proving
that everything quote looks cooler in slow motion. So in the skit, he walks into the laundromat and says hello to a kindly middle aged woman who is preparing her laundry, and she takes off her sweatshirt so she can add it to her hamper, and it's all very innocent and laundromaty, and then he says, let's replay this video in slow motion, and now everything changes from mundane to sexy in the
slow motion replay. The woman lifts the sweatshirt over her head and is suddenly replaced by a beautiful young model who tosses her hair in a vigorous breeze, and she and Dave Chappelle start dancing around each other as the wind blows. So this skit cracked up the audience. But this just underscores our question, what is the appeal of slow motion? Why do we find it so attractive? I propose four reasons. The first is the increased esthetic appeal.
When you decelerate time, you can experience so many more details of this scene. And just like Dave Chappelle noticed, even ordinary moments get turned into extraordinary visual spectacles. And this is because by slowing down time, you highlight the
intricate features of a scene. The human eye is naturally attracted to detail, and slow motion allows us to appreciate the subtle nuances of a character's movement, or the play of light and shadow, or birds exploding out of a tree, or the look on someone's face as they turned to
see that their lover has left. So you remember the Matrix which came out in ninety nine, and you certainly remember this bullet dodging scene where Neo bends backward to avoid a series of bullets fired at him, and this beautiful, slow sweeping shot captures the fluidity in the wondrous precision
of his movements. The scene could never have worked at normal speed because the key was how he was making a move that was not normally physically possible, and the otherworldly nature of this required immersing us to have time to really take it in. Just like Bonnie and Clyde, the slowness heightens the tension and the drama. We the audience get to squeeze every moment out of the scene rather than have it zip by.
While we're reaching for our popcorn. And again, it doesn't have to be action scenes.
Look at Terrence Malick's film The Tree of Life or Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream. The slow motion allows viewers to fully absorb the emotional weight of a scene. Okay, so increasing the aesthetic appeal, that's the obvious reason, But from a neuroscience point of view, I'm going to suggest there are deeper reasons why slow motion works. And this leads to my suggestion two, which is that slow motion
film serves as a proxy for denser memories. So a few moments ago, I told you what happens during a life threatening situation. Although you don't actually see the event unfold in slow motion, the denser memories that you have make it seem like it must have been that way in retrospect, because there's a greater than normal amount of detail when the memory is read back out. And I suggest that slow motion film is a stand in a
substitute for this extra dense memory. By watching a movie scene slowly, we get to enjoy a rich experience with plenty of time to dwell on all the details that would normally streak right past us. We have the opportunity to attend to the details and commit them to memory, just like we have after a real life high adrenaline moment. In other words, slow motion film recreates the sensation of grasping all the details, and this explains the natural partnership of slow motion videography.
With high adrenaline moments.
It's no accident that the first time it really got used was the ambush death scene of Bonnie and Clyde. The director Arthur Penn said in an interview quote the intention there was to get this attenuation of time that one experience is when you see something like a terrible automobile accident end quote. And giving the audience a heightened ability to catch and remember details worked well, and it's
become a standard signature of high stakes moments. Arthur Penn went on to say in nineteen eighty nine, quote, God knows we've been imitated thousands and thousands of times.
Now.
Every time you see someone attempting violence, they go into that basics slow motion end quote. So my assertion is that when we witness a moment unfold bit by bit in the movies, we get to appreciate its import as though we were experiencing the high adrenaline moment ourselves. But not all interesting slow motion video involves high adrenaline situations,
So there is more to our love of it. And this leads us to my third suggestion for the success of slow motion, which is that it extends human perception by unmasking hidden data. It allows the revelation of data that's hidden in the folds of time, just like a microscope allows us to appreciate the details of a fly's wing. And I'm not just talking about action sequences here or neo's unusual movements in the matrix, there's much more that
can be unmasked. Consider something like microexpressions. These are fast movements of facial muscles that pass rapidly and unconsciously over people's faces. Now, everyone's face does this naturally all the time, but you can't really see someone else's micro expressions because they're too brief. You're not aware that you are making micro expressions, and someone watching you isn't consciously aware that
you did it. But it turns out that micro expressions can carry information and can reveal secrets, including things like deception. For example, you may remember the story of Susan Smith, who claimed that her children had been kidnapped in a carjacking, when in fact she had drowned them. For several days, she was on the TV news pleading for help in finding her children, but some colleagues of mine claimed that a slowed down version of the video revealed micro expressions
that suggested she was lying about the whole event. The idea is that slow motion video unmasks the world of these temporally hidden facial clues, and by unveiling things that are undetectable by consciousness, slow motion can allow not just temporal sleuthing but temporal intimacy. Consider this passage by the British sports writer Matt Rendell about the Tour de France winner Marco Pantani. Writing about the use of super slow motion cameras in sport, Rendell wrote, what I think is
one of the most beautiful passages in sports writing. Here it is read by the actor Sean Judge.
Now, as he arrives towards victory and the Giro Dtalia, the camera almost caresses him. The five seconds between the moment Marco appeared in the closing strait and the moment he crossed the finish line are extruded to fifteen and during seconds ba image frames his head and little else, revealing details in visible in real time and at standard resolution.
A drop of sweat that falls from his chin as he makes the bend, the gaping jaw and crumpled forehead, and lines beneath the eyes that deepen as Marco rings still more speed from the mountain. Then, and it must be the moment he crosses the line. He begins to rise out of his agony. The torso rises to vertical, the arms spread out into a crucifix position, the eyelids
descend and Marco's face lifts towards the sky. It is a moment of transfiguration visible only in super SlowMo or in still and only the best of the finish line photographers catch it. Super SloMo shows us something we could never otherwise see, involuntary gesture Marco never chose to reveal, perhaps because without super slow MOO technology he cannot know
he makes them. The public knows more about Marco than Marco himself, a truth we are tempted to imagine, and one that has nothing to do with the race outcome as such, for the pictures frame out the finish line in the clock and show nothing of his work rate, muscular toil, or the relative positions of the riders that yield the race result. Instead, we find ourselves looking into Marco's face the way a mother and her baby might, or lovers at the moment their affection is first reciprocated.
So slow motion allows us to pick up on the world that would otherwise rush past us. And in this slow world we get to luxuriate in the otherwise invisible detail with which we're always surrounded but we never see. And now we're ready from a fourth point. Slow motion video holds our attention by violating expectations. So during a lifetime of experience, your brain develops deeply wired expectations about
Newtonian physics. So when a ball gets thrown to you, your brain unconsciously uses these internal models to predict where and when it's going to go, and you move your body in your hand to the right spot. These models are so ingrained into our nervous systems that if you lob a ball to an astronaut floating in zero G, she will move her hand to the wrong spot. She'll move to catch it as though she's in a normal
one G environment. So part of the high level of engagement during slow motion comes from a violation of these expectations about physics. Imagine you're watching the matrix and you observe Trinity leap into the air to kick an agent. Your brain makes unconscious predictions about exactly when she's going to come back down. But to your brain's surprise, time slows down and Trinity hangs in the air longer than expected. Your expectations about when she's going to hit the ground
have been violated, and this draws us in. Our brains zoom in on this because attention is maximally attracted to whatever we predict incorrectly. Conversely, when everything goes according to plan, we don't pay any attention at all. We are fond of slow motion video because it engages our attention. We constantly get the temporal predictions wrong, and so we are perpetually on alert. In fact, I did a very surprising
experiment on this some years ago. I started with this hypoc prothesis that your internal model is always calibrating itself, keeping itself tuned up by comparing against the physics of the real world. So if it's running too slowly, it watches the ball hit the ground and realizes that its prediction was just slightly behind, so it speeds up its expectations. And the same if it watches the ball and it realizes that its prediction was just slightly ahead, then it
slows itself down. So it uses the outside world as the ground truth to keep itself nicely calibrated. Now you might think, how would you ever prove a hypothesis like that, Well, here's how I had people compare the durations of two brief flashes on the screen. So on the screen you see a little circle that goes flash and then a moment later, another little circle that goes flash. And on every trial, I'm slightly tweaking the duration so that one is slightly longer than the other, and you just say
which was longer than which? Okay, now here's the trick. I have people watch a video, for example, a camera that follows the cheetah sprinting across the serengetti. Now, if I just superimpose one flash and then the second flash on top of the video, you have no trouble saying which one was longer than which. But now I do something special. At some point in the video, it suddenly goes into slow motion. Then you might know that when cheetahs run, all four of their legs come off the ground.
So now you're seeing this sleek.
Animal floating in the air and you're waiting for his front pause to hit the ground. But now that we're suddenly in slow motion, your time prediction is off. You expected his legs to hit the ground, but they haven't yet.
And because we evolved.
In a world with no such thing as slow motion, your brain's only choice is to assume that the mistake is its own, and it compensates by slowing down its expectation. Now, how do I know the brain does this. It's because I can see how you judge the duration of a flash. During the sudden slow motion, the flash now appears to last a shorter time, about twenty seven percent shorter.
Why.
Roughly speaking, it's because your brain is forced to slightly tweak its estimate of the pace of time during the slow motion bit. Think of it like a clock ticking more slowly, and now the flash covers fewer ticks, and.
So it is judged to last less time.
I did various control versions of this experiment in which I shuffled the frames, or I shuffled all the pixels, or I ran the whole thing upside down, and in all these cases there was no distortion of the apparent duration of the flashes. It only happened when the future position of objects was predictable by physics. So let me
just summarize this. When your brain is watching any scene, it's making predictions about where things will be, and if the scene suddenly changes speed, then your internal model will predict incorrectly. But I suggest the nervous system can eliminate these feedback prediction errors with a simple trick by modifying its estimated speed of the flow of physical time.
It's a very subtle.
Change, but it has measurable perceptual consequences which are exposed by this novel time distortion illusion. Okay, that was a little technical, but it's one of my favorite experiments. Now, we've been talking all about slow motion, but on the flip side of slow motion, there is a world unmasked
by fast motion. Think about quickly blossoming flowers, or imagine the the arterial traffic patterns of cities, or watched the laminar rush of clouds across the sky, or observe the way that the sun drops like a ball behind the mountain and the world dims as though by.
A dimmer switch.
So fast motion reveals secrets not so much in the domain of human facial expressions, but instead in the dance of the very large. So let's take a look at the kind of descriptions you can generate when speeding up the world. In eighteen ninety five, HG. Wells published The Time Machine. He did this as a serial novel in a magazine. It's one of the earliest and most influential works of science fiction, in part because it introduced this concept of a time travel device, which became a staple
in the genre. But it's beautifully written, and we can see the imagination of fast time when the unnamed time traveler builds this device and travels to the very distant future of the year eight hundred and two, thy seven hundred and one. Here's the part I want to share with you, when he cranks the lever down on the machine and gets going. This passage is read again by actor Sean Judge.
As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. I saw the sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every minute, marking a day. The slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by, too fast for me. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the palpitation of day and night merged into one continuous grayness. The jerking sun became a streak of fire, the moon a fa interfluctuating band. I saw trees growing
and changing like puffs of vapor. Huge buildings rise up, faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole surface of the earth seemed changed, melting and flowing under my eyes.
So in the same way, that slow motion allows us to see details that we would not otherwise catch. Fast motion plays that same game. It's no surprise, then, that a very engaging style of cinematography is to rapidly alternate between speeding and slowing. Think of the battle scenes in
the movie three hundred. As the Spartans charge, the camera captures their ferocity in real time, the thunder of their shields clashing and the spears piercing, And then suddenly the world slows and every movement stretches into a balletic display of destructions. Sweat glistens, blood arcs gracefully through the air like crimson silk. The slow motion lingers on every ripple of flash, every grimace of pain, before snapping back to
faster than normal speed. You see this explosion of chaos and bodies tumbling and dust swirling under the fury of combat. If you've seen this part of the movie, you know it's like an epic painting that's come to life. But the point I want to make is that by alternating between slow and fast, the cinematography continues to violate our predictions, and so it holds our attention throughout.
Now.
One thing I find amazing is that HG. Wells wrote his passage before there was fast motion video to watch, so he did this the old fashioned way by imagining the whole thing. Now, it turns out, if you are sufficiently imaginative, you could really do an amazing job on this, even before witnessing it yourself.
For example, five years before HG.
Well's machine, the great psychologist William James wrote a book called Principles of Psychology.
He has a chapter called the Perception of Time, and.
In it he writes this strikingly poetic passage.
We have every reason to think that creatures may possibly differ enormously in the amounts of duration which they intuitively feel, and in the fineness of the events that may fill it. Von Beher has indulged in some interesting computations of the effect of such differences in changing the aspect of nature. Suppose we were able, within the length of a second to note ten thousand events distinctly, instead of barely ten
as now. If our life were then destined to hold the same number of impressions, it might be one thousand times as short. We should live less than a month and personally know nothing of the change of seasons. If born in winter, we should now believe in summer as we now believe in the heats of the carboniferous era. The motions of organic beings would be so slow to our senses as to be inferred not seen. The sun would stand still in the sky, the moon be almost
free from change, and so on. But now reverse the hypothesis and suppose a being to get only one thousandth part of the sensations that we get in a given time, and consequently live one thousand times as long. Winters and summers will be to him like quarters of an hour. Mushrooms and the swifter growing plants will shoot into being so rapidly as to appear instantaneous creations. Annual shrubs will rise and fall from the earth like restlessly boiling water springs.
The motions of animals will be as invisible as are to us the movements of bullets and cannonballs. The sun will scour through the sky like a meteor, leaving a fiery trail behind him, et cetera. That such imaginary cases, barring the superhuman longevity, may be realized somewhere in the animal kingdom, it would be rash to deny.
Now may well have read this passage from William James, and the descriptions in them are beautiful, so none of them actually needed to see a Hollywood movie to envision this. But I do think that it doesn't hurt to grow up around movie technology so that one becomes very comfortable in thinking about time in different ways by actually seeing the experience oneself, by directly learning new ways of perceiving.
I'll give you an example. Some of you in your fifties or older will remember when your teachers showed eight millimeter films in school. Now, if you've never seen this, the way it works is that the film strip is on a reel, a big circular job, and as the movie plays, that reel is unwinding and the film is moving to a second reel, which is collecting the film strip. So the movie starts off wound up on the first
and ends up wound up around the second reel. But of course the beginning of the movie is now in the middle of the second reel, and the end of the movie is on the outside, so you have to rewind the whole thing back onto the first reel. So when you're done watching the movie, you just pull the lever to set the whole thing in reverse, and you get to witness the whole movie backwards. People are walking backwards, bicyclists biking backwards, the train is reversing up the track,
the diner is getting more food on his plate. The person who slipped on the banana peel now slips upward. So typically the teacher reverses the film at a much higher speed, so you see the whole thing running backwards quickly. But what I remember as a little kid in school was the delight this process always brought to the whole class. So, starting many decades ago, everyone got to see what backwards
motion looked like. Now it's hard to prove this with certainty, but one possibility is that this helped people to think about things in a new way, to open up this new time domain of things running backwards. So take the Swiss physicist Ernst Stuckelberg. In the nineteen forties. He was chewing on a problem about elementary particles. His colleague Paul Durak had published a paper that unified a whole bunch of things in physics, but something came out of Diract's
equation that was unexpected to everyone. The math suggested there should be a particle like an electron, but with positive charge instead of negative, and no one had ever seen this,
but here was the math saying it should exist. Eventually, this came to be called a positron, but no one knew what could explain the existence of such a particle, And in nineteen forty one Stuckelberg realized that a positron and an electron are the same little particle, but a positron is just an electron traveling backward in time, and
that made all the math work. Now it's impossible to know the answer, but the question is would Stuckelberg have had a harder time coming up with this hypothesis if he had never seen backward motion. Once you've seen a film strip run, once you've seen time run backward that way, then that door of possibility is opened up in your internal model, and once it's open, you can't shut it, and it's much easier to think about things like it.
This is a specific case of a more general truism that new technologies allow us to experience things that we could not have experienced otherwise, and that really opens up our mental.
Space to new ideas.
And I'm very interested in seeing where future technology takes us because we can nowadays try out experiments in very simple ways that were impossible last century. For example, my son plays a VR game called super Hot in which you're fending off gunmen who are all trying to get you. But the key is that the speed of motion of the world depends on the movement of your own body. So if you stand very still, the world creeps along
in super slow motion. But as soon as you make a move to lift your gun or move a little bit, the world speeds up. And if you're moving really fast, the world around you moves fast as well. It's an incredible experience to play this, and for the generation of children growing up, it's just part of the background furniture that you can play a game where the passage of time is variable and under your control. But for the rest of us, this is a whole new dimension of
time to explore. The final thing we'll address today is why we're not attracted slow motion in an audio only format. I suggest it's because with words, we're only analyzing for the meaning. We're just working to capture all the words so that we can translate that into an understanding of the message, and in fact we all know from audiobooks and YouTube videos you can take in words at a much faster pace than I would be able to naturally produce them.
And so there's no benefit in slowing them down.
So that's why we don't do the speeding and slowing we see in the movie three hundred. If we were reading an audio book about the Battle of Thermopylae, like Leonides swung the broad sword and hit the Persian soldier under the ribs, and then Leonid stepped over the body and looked around until he saw his next target horseman charging him with a.
Lance, and he spun and ducked the lance. I don't know.
Maybe we've just invented a new style there, but I doubt it. So we love to do slow motion with videos, but not text. But I think there's an interesting realm in between. Although video is just over a century old, I think there's a sense in which people have for millennia figured out how to dance in some way between slow motion and fast motion. And this is something I
learned from my friend Tony Brandt. We were talking about these kinds of ideas once and Tony pointed out the difference in opera between the Aria and the recitative, and Aria spends several minutes on a single idea, like the love of the protagonists for the Beautiful Maiden. It's all about deep emotions and reflections, and it pauses the plot to focus on the character's inner feelings.
But the restititive is the opposite.
First of all, it's speech like, there's no rhythm, maybe just a harpsichord plays along, and the only job of the recitative is to crank the plot along. It just tells you about some big passage of time. So Arias explore something simple in great depth. The recititive moves the story forward. So Arias might be considered perhaps the medieval version of slow Moe in the cinema, really zooming in on the moment, while the restitative is the fast motion
speeding up of the plot. Okay, so I've told you that we don't do fast and slow motion when there's only audio involved, and there's a sense in which we grasp at this speeding or slowing with opera. But it's different with visual scenes because here we're not just trying to decrypt a message, but instead we're watching the incredibly high bandwidth visual world and we're making predictions about the
physics and getting feedback from what we're seeing. And if my hypothesis is correct, we're calibrating our own internal clocks to the world of.
What we see.
And that's why fast and slow motion, although they are relatively recent additions to the canon of cinema, this is why they grab our attention and are.
Here to day.
So let's wrap up beyond its esthetic and emotional appeal, slow motion serves a critical narrative function in filmmaking. By manipulating time, directors can emphasize key moments, They can reveal hidden details. They can grab your attention by violating your brain's expectations. Slow motion is more than just a visual trick. It's a way of stretching moments, suspending us in the gravity of an emotion or a decision, or a final
breath before impact. It allows us to live inside the flicker of an instant, to taste the weight of time. Perhaps this is why our brains are so captivated by it, because in life, time generally moves at one relentless speed, but in film, we can linger in a moment. We can turns into minutes. We can reveal the invisible in the visible slow motion reminds us that buried in every blink, every heartbeat, every fleeting instant, there is a world of
depth waiting to be discovered. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at.
Podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is the one hundredth episode of Inner Cosmos.