The quiet art of attention

What I think he meant is that time slows down for him in the way that time around him speeds up while he can stay focused on one thing.

Now of course I’m not the author so I’m not sure but yeah the way you’re describing it (real time flying when you’re locked in on something) is how I feel it goes for most people

Yep that’s my reading too. I like to see it from a dynamical systems perspective: as a system approaches an attractor, the phase flow slows down, while the wall time marches on steadily. If we consider the “perspective” of the system, which is wall time divided by phase flow, we get the time speeding up part.

I have experienced slowing of time in improvised couples dancing. I may have to react to very complex situations in a time frame that feels impossible.

For example, at the same time my follower can be so tense that she cannot feel leading/following signals as well as if she was relaxed, and she mis-interprets my lead and goes where I was not expecting her to go, her clothing gets stuck, another couple comes into the space I have directed our dance and we are about to crash etc. All this while I am interpreting live music in an interesting way. (This is an extreme example, most of the time things go smoothly.)

It may be unbelievable that it is possible to be able to solve such problems in split second, but it happens all the time in improvised couples dancing. The analytical mind is way too slow for it, however. If I am experiencing time that has slowed down, there is ample time to do everything. It does not even feel I need to rush it, but I can stay relaxed, and continue improvising go the music.

It might be that programming and other office jobs simply overtrain the analytical mind to the point that we mistakenly think that it is the best tool to ascertain reality with.

I think it starts already in school.