Glossary
Tachypsychia: Symptoms, Causes, and Stress Examples
What is tachypsychia?
Tachypsychia is a term for an altered sense of time during an intense or stressful event. People often describe time seeming to slow down. That feeling is different from evidence that their perception or thinking actually became faster.
What does it feel like?
A frightening event may seem to have lasted longer when someone looks back on it. The subjective experience is the issue: a slow-motion feeling does not mean the outside world slowed down.
A free-fall experiment
Stetson, Fiesta, and Eagleman studied people undergoing a frightening free fall. Participants later judged their fall as longer, but did not show improved visual temporal resolution on the experiment's test. The authors proposed that the way the event was remembered helped explain the result.
Causes and related experiences
The finding distinguishes remembered duration from perceptual speed. It does not establish one cause for every stress-related time distortion. Nor does altered time experience alone establish dissociation or another clinical condition.
Why it matters
The free-fall experiment shows why researchers distinguish how long an event seems in memory from how precisely someone perceived it while it happened.