Man Living in Slow Motion

Neurologist Oliver Sacks described a New York patient named Miron V. whose sense of time had become so distorted that he could sit nearly motionless for hours while believing he was performing an ordinary action. Miron had survived the 1917 to 1928 encephalitis lethargica epidemic and later developed severe post-encephalitic parkinsonism, a condition that drastically slowed his movement. When Sacks asked about one of his frozen poses, Miron replied that he was just wiping his nose, and a sequence of photographs later showed that he really was doing exactly that, only about a thousand times more slowly than normal.

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