Time may indeed be relative for elite athletes

BBC : Peoples’ perception of time seems to slow as they prepare to make a move. Researchers at University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience came to that conclusion after studying test subjects who were asked to react to flashing and flickering disks on a screen. The researchers found that time was perceived as passing more slowly by those who were asked to perform an action when they noticed a change than by those who were asked to watch for changes but were not asked to make any move. “Our guess is that during the motor preparation, visual information processing in the brain is enhanced. So, maybe, the amount of information coming in is increased,” wrote Nobuhiro Hagura, one of the authors of the study , published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Hagura noted that the additional information processing may cause time to be perceived as longer and slower. If so, it would explain elite sports stars’ seemingly increased capacity to make critical split-second decisions that make the difference between winning and losing.