Brain Enhancement
Speed Up Your Brain – Slow Down Time?
By Simon Evans
Jan 28, 2008

When I was a kid, I remember watching a Twilight Zone episode where this guy ended up in a world where time was moving incredibly slow. The clock was taking hours (for him) to move a few minutes (for everyone else). Everyone around him seemed to be motionless, but instead, were just moving slow relative to him. Just think how much you could get done if you were moving way faster than anyone else. Of course, this is was just a science fiction show but it may be possible to speed up your brain a little bit so that you slow down the world around you.

When I was a young freshmen soccer player in college, I was talking to a friend of mine at soccer camp one summer. He was a couple years older than me, and an excellent player who went on to play a little in the pros. He was re-enacting a game situation for me, telling me how he had the ball in the corner when he was challenged by a couple of defenders. He told me how he waited for the defenders to shift their weight, watching their body movements before he made his move to beat them. All of this probably happened within 1 or 2 seconds.

What I realized when I was listening to him tell his story was that he was seeing things in slow motion. He was analyzing and reacting to his situation so quickly that he was effectively moving at a faster speed than the other players were. This is where many of his talents came from! Not only was he a skillful player athletically but his mind was moving faster in response to his surroundings. He could read and respond to the changing play a split second faster than the defenders.

Ever since then I have thought about that concept off and on. Another example would be people (that I’m sure you know) who are very quick witted in response to conversation. They react with appropriate comebacks instantaneously, almost like they had more time to process the conversation.

Often, we equate this with intelligence. But is it really that? Can people increase the speed at which their own brains work and effectively slow down the stuff going on around them? How would you go about that?

I just finished reading Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and this concept came up again. The book is mostly about the biology of stress but in the very back, he goes into an admittedly ‘half-baked’ idea similar to what I discussed above. He frames it in the context of having intense arousal and total calm at the same time. This would give you all the abilities to respond that you have when you are most alert, combined with the decision-making abilities that you have when you are most calm and focused.

How do you go about accomplishing this? I propose that you need a combination of several approaches. First, you have to optimize your brain as a physical organ, with proper nutrition, exercise and sleep. I have written about all of these relative to brain function in the past. Next, you need the ability to maintain calm under intense situations. This requires working on your reaction time through practice and experience, and believing in your own capabilities.

But does practice make perfect? – only if it’s perfect practice. How do you know when you are practicing perfectly? One strategy heavily used in high level sports and becoming increasingly used in medical practice, is biofeedback.

You can apply this strategy to any area of performance: Sports, school, work, and every day interactions with people.