If Eagleman’s body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. In Baylor’s lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that’s suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island. Eagleman has puckish, neatly carved features, with a lantern jaw and modish sideburns. But it stiffened up eventually, and it’s hard to tell that it was ever injured. The cartilage was so badly smashed that an emergency-room surgeon had to remove it all, leaving Eagleman with a rubbery proboscis that he could bend in any direction. “He made a one-point landing,” as his father puts it. He did a belly flop on the bricks, he says, and his nose took most of the impact. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.Įagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. It’s a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. The brick floor floats upward-some shiny nails are scattered across it-as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it’s out of reach. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view-west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance-then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. The best example of that is the so-called oddball effect. “Time is this rubbery thing,” Eagleman said.
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