[Waterluvian]

One subjective thing I discovered in a decade of playing ice hockey is that it seems like there are people where time slows down during high intensity situations. Sadly I'm not one of them.

Maybe I'm just describing something obvious related to adrenaline or fight vs. flight. But I wonder if some people are just physiologically better wired for these situations. Would that make them better at sports or warfighting?

It also reminds me of birds and other animals that seem to effortlessly perform incredible feats at high speed. But to their frame of reference and perception of time, maybe the world is just very very slow moving.

[version_five]

I'm reminded of something I once heard about a type of sea slug that follows another slug's trail and eventually overtakes and eats it. The whole thing happens at slug-speed but you can picture from the perspective of the slugs that they are in a high-speed life-or-death race

[NickRandom]

I experience what is known as 'Survivors Guilt' (in other words I wonder those exact same thoughts as you do except from the other side of lens with respect to the those that were 'able to / vs. not able to lens').

Those that can - survived, those that couldn't/didn't - died.

In terms of natural selection (for want of a better term) it often leaves me puzzling that very same thought late at night sometimes before I'm brought back to reality by the shrinks that relate it back to those that made the major league vs. those that faded into obscurity.

[Edit]: Sorry, the above comment makes war and death seem like a game of baseball which it very much isn't and trivializes the needless suffering of entire populations on behalf of the vagrancies of politicians across the globe.

YMMV.

[jvm___]

I wonder this about Messi. Does he just have better perception of his own body as well as another sense of where the competition is in the field and how best to adapt his play in light of their changes.

Can he perceive time better which is why he's so good at soccer.

[quacked]

He undoubtedly can for soccer-related visual, audio and physical stamina. I wonder if he can do it for other things, though.

[sjcsjc]

Wow. I was just discussing this exact point with my kids a few hours ago

[aiwv]

The experience of time has as much to do with focus and your capacity to take in information at a given moment. With sports, it is quite possible to play for many years and never gain enough skill to truly play well. When I have had a time slowdown experience, it has often come after a change of approach in which some aspect of the game that previously had been hidden to me is suddenly revealed. I'll never forget the time that I saw two defenders in front of me jumping up for a rebound and I was able to simultaneously see them and the trajectory of the ball and realize that they had jumped in the wrong direction and that I could easily swoop in and claim an easy offensive rebound that I wasn't even planning to go for. It was truly like bullet time in the matrix, but it was also a completely mundane event in a random pickup game with rather mediocre players (including me).

At the absolute highest level, the game plays you as much as you play it. I have the most experience with basketball, but I am certain what I'm going to say applies to other sports, including but not limited to soccer.

With a rhythmic sport like basketball, you can gain a huge advantage over most amateur players by simply learning to play with rhythm. If you can dribble rhythmically, then you free your mind up to focus on the game situation rather than the mechanics of dribbling. It becomes like improvising music. At your rhythm, the game has a pulse. In between beats of the pulse, aka your dribbles, you can analyze the situation and adapt your approach depending on the position of your teammates and the opposition. If your opponents are not playing in rhythm, then they are stagnant and it should be easy to get by them. Even if they are playing in rhythm, if you can play at a faster pace than they are, time effectively slows down for you relative to them because you can make more changes of direction than they can in a given unit of time. When you are at your best, you are simultaneously aggressive and completely passive. You are dictating the terms of engagement, but accepting whatever the game gives you, knowing that you will always have a good option (provided you have developed sufficient skills, which does take practice). This is what I mean when I say the game plays you. There is a reason why we describe great athletes as unconscious and they report having out of body experiences.

Just because you have never experienced this doesn't mean that you never will. I played basketball for more than 20 years before I had the above time slowdown experience. It only came after I had been focusing on rhythm while learning a musical instrument.