alice in freefall

Partly because I wanted an excuse to build something in Three.js after a long gap, which is a very respectable way to avoid answering emails. Partly because once the idea arrived, it became extremely annoying to not build it. You know when two unrelated things in your brain suddenly make eye contact from across the room? That.

One of them was a neuroscience paper I read a while ago about fear and time perception after coming across it on a podcast. It asked the question everyone thinks they already know the answer to: when you’re terrified, does your brain actually speed up? Are you suddenly taking in more frames per second? Is the world going slow-mo because some emergency setting turns you into Neo?

The answer was no. Rude.

The other thing was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which I was rereading for, well... pleasure. It's fine. We all have our problems.

Anyways, so, I got to the rabbit hole chapter and there it was: Alice falling for ages. A long, weird, observant descent. She looks around, takes a jar off a shelf, reads the label, realizes it’s empty, and carefully puts it back because she doesn’t want to kill someone beneath her with marmalade shrapnel. She thinks about latitude and longitude. She wonders if she’ll fall through the earth. She gets bored enough to almost fall asleep.

And the interesting thing I noticed was that it was not unrealistic at all; it was closer to what the paper says than I’d have expected.

And I thought, wow. Lewis Carroll wrote this in 1865, with no neuroscience paper, no brain scans, no scientists throwing people off towers in Dallas. He just wrote a girl falling through a rabbit hole and somehow landed on the exact psychological texture of a long fall: too much noticing.

So let's say this project was inspired by that, and putting my 3js to practice. It was hard to capture the educational part but it's too cool to not have mentioned it for anyone that would make it till here. I tried putting the science inside the tunnel at first, but it kept turning the whole thing into an interactive homework assignment, which is among the more depressing genres of website. So, this is the explainer part.

Please do not treat this as a literature review. It is a fan letter to a coincidence, and I shall do my best to do the science justice. Sources at the bottom.

Apparently no, which is pretty inconvenient because it feels like it should. The obvious theory is that fear speeds up perception. More frames per second, more detail, more room to think between moments. The reason this feels convincing is that basically everyone who has been in a serious accident describes some version of it. The car came toward me so slowly. The fall took forever. I had time to think through ten things. I remember every detail.

A neuroscientist had his own version. When he was eight, he fell off a roof in Albuquerque. He stepped past the roof’s edge onto tar paper, which he did not understand was not roof, and dropped twelve feet onto his face. The fall took under a second, but his memory of it did not.

He grew up, became a neuroscientist, and spent some time trying to figure out whether his childhood faceplant had revealed something interesting.

Respect.

And so he started collecting stories: A police officer fires three shots during a chase and experiences them as separate, deliberate decisions, with lengthy, entire thoughts in between: ricochet angles, bystanders, his career ending. His partner hears the shots as one quick burst. A doctor gets thrown from a motorcycle at 45 mph and feels sure the tumble lasted fifteen seconds. Physics says five-ish.

The same pattern seemed to exist everywhere. Time changed during these situations.

The obvious next question: did it, actually?

Eagleman first tried roller coasters, which I love because the image of a neuroscience lab going to a theme park for “data” is already perfect. Unfortunately, roller coasters were apparently too fun. Not scary enough. The brain did not believe death was on the table.

So they found a 150-foot SCAD diving tower in Dallas. SCAD stands for Suspended Catch Air Device, which sounds fake in the way all real extreme-sport infrastructure sounds fake. You fall backward from a platform into a net, no rope, no pleasant view of your landing. Just sky, air, maybe regret.

Eagleman tested it himself three times before sending volunteers up, and he said it remained terrifying every time, which is... comforting.

Twenty-three people did the fall wearing a device he built called a perceptual chronometer. The device flashed numbers between positive and negative images faster than the eye can normally read. Under regular conditions, the number blurs. That was the trap.

If fear actually made perception faster, the volunteers should have been able to read the number during the fall. The world would slow, the flicker would separate, and the number would appear.

However, nobody read it. Zero people became Spiderman.

But hold on, the cool part is: when they estimated how long the fall had lasted, they said their own fall took about a third longer than someone else’s identical fall.

So the slow motion was real as an experience, it just wasn’t happening live. Very “I didn’t change anything during the event but I did edit the footage afterward.”

The weirdest part is that the brain doesn’t have one neat internal stopwatch keeping objective time for you. It has systems, signals, attention, memory, body states, guesses. When it needs to answer “how long did that take?” it often looks backward and checks how much got written down.

Dense memory feels long. Thin memory feels short.

We already know this, actually. Think: a boring highway drive can disappear even though it took three hours. The first day somewhere new feels enormous because your brain is filing every sidewalk crack like it will be examined later. Childhood summers felt endless because everything was new and dramatic and your brain had no templates yet. Adult summer is June, a confusingly expensive salad, two work emails, then September.

Fear does the same-ish thing with maybe worse lighting?

Under threat, your brain records more. The car hood. The tire sound. The angle of impact. The stupid irrelevant thought that somehow shows up, like “Did I leave the stove on?” or “Alice wondering, do cats eat bats or bats eat cats?” Then later, your brain reviews the pile and makes a very reasonable inference: wow, a lot happened. Must have taken forever.

And that is the magic trick. A densely-packed panic archive that makes it feel like a slo-mo button in retrospect.

The police officer and his partner heard the same three gunshots. One brain, in fear, wrote a novel while the other, not in fear, got a sound effect.

This is the part that made the Alice thing click for me.

The memory-dense version depends on attention. The danger has to arrive in a way the brain can register. You need enough warning for your attention to grab onto the event.

A car sliding toward you from across an intersection? Your brain has time to lock in. The moment swells. Details get sticky. If you never noticed the car and got hit, well, then, nope.

A pothole you don’t see before your bike flips? Nothing cinematic. No elegant slow fall. Just a missing chunk and then the aftermath.

Eagleman talks about being thrown over his handlebars into a pothole once and remembering none of it, which is almost funny after the roof story because the brain is apparently very picky about when it wants to become an experimental filmmaker.

This matters because it means the slow-motion feeling is not “fear” alone. It’s fear plus attention. The world has to present itself to you in time for your brain to start recording.

Which brings us back to Alice.

Yes, the coolest part! Alice’s fall is not a blackout, nor an impact and then memory gap and then aftermath. Instead, it is a long attentional event.

She watches herself fall.

That’s the whole thing. She is noticing and not merely dropping. She has time to inspect shelves. She has enough mental bandwidth to worry about dropping a jar on someone below, which seems very polite under the circumstances, I know. But it is surprisingly realistic under the circumstances, which makes it so cool. She thinks about geography. She gets lost in little theories. She becomes bored, which is such an incredible detail because boredom is what happens when fear has had too much page space and starts looking for hobbies.

Carroll probably wrote it this way because a quick fall would be boring on the page. Or maybe he fell too? Honestly, I am not sure. But I think he nailed it. A child drops into darkness, lands, chapter over. Terrible.

But accidentally, or intuitively, or through whatever strange private weather makes a writer good, he gave the fall the one condition that makes a fall feel long in real life: attention.

Alice’s descent is long because it is full, even if the physics would not say so.

The book is fantasy, yes, obviously. Sure, nobody is doing peer review on the talking rabbit. But the emotional mechanics of the fall are not exactly incorrect. Carroll certainly didn’t know that memory density could stretch retrospective time. Writers keep doing this, which is honestly very irritating for science, no? Someone makes up a scene because it feels right, and then 150 years later neuroscience arrives wearing a lab coat like, “Unfortunately, the whimsical Victorian was cooking.”

The fear stuff is dramatic, so it gets the tower and the wristband and the near-death anecdotes. But the same basic arithmetic is everywhere.

A day with novelty expands. A day with routine collapses.

This is why vacations feel long while you’re in them and then somehow short when you’re back. Why the first week in a new city feels like a whole semester. Why a terrible conversation can feel like three hours even if it was twelve minutes. Why months can disappear when every day has the same shape.

But it also means attention is almost literally a part of duration. The more you notice, the more time seems to have existed. Maybe not during the moment, maybe only afterward, but it still counts. Memory is where most of us live anyway.

The coincidence felt too good to leave as a note in my phone, you know?

A girl falls in a children’s book. She notices everything. A neuroscientist falls off a roof and wonders why it felt so long. Volunteers fall backward off a tower in Dallas wearing a device that tries to catch the brain in the act.

This was my little, albeit time-consuming attempt to put those things in the same room: the fantasy fall, the neuroscience fall, the strange human habit of turning attention into time.

Also I wanted to build something in Three.js. I am sorry, but sometimes the honest explanation is “I wanted the rabbit to move.” I’m just a girl.