https://www.livescience.com/can-time-stop.html
EXCERPT: . . . He described a well-known psychological illusion known as "chronostasis," in which a person places a clock at the edge of their vision and then stares at something else for a moment. Glancing back at the timepiece and focusing on the second hand will make it pause. (It can be a quirky way to stay entertained during fifth period math class in high school.)
"The second hand definitely hangs there a little bit," Callender said. "You can make time seem like it freezes."
The illusion has to do with tiny eye movements called saccades, in which your eyeballs rapidly flick back and forth to constantly take in their surroundings. To prevent you from seeing a chaotic blur, your brain actually edits what it sees in real time and creates the impression of a continuous field of view, Callender said.
The question then becomes, what is the relationship between our perceptions of time and the time physicists are talking about? Callender has written a number of books that attempt to explore the connection between the two, and as yet, there isn't much consensus on a final answer.
Regarding the ultimate flow of time, Callender favors a picture "where there's nothing flowing, but the story of yourself is flowing."
And what does he believe regarding the possibility of stopping time? "If we think of our subjective sense of time, then we can stop portions of it with chronostasis," Callender said. "But that's probably the closest we can do." (MORE - details)
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Cinematic stills and frozen consciousness (Jan 15, 2004)
https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/111F04/16882.html
Oliver Sacks: There is a rare but dramatic neurological disturbance that a number of my patients have experienced during attacks of migraine, when they may lose the sense of visual continuity and motion and see instead a flickering series of "stills." The stills may be clear-cut and sharp, and succeed one another without superimposition or overlap, but more commonly they are somewhat blurred, as with a too-long photographic exposure, and they persist for so long that each is still visible when the next "frame" is seen, and three or four frames, the earlier ones progressively fainter, are apt to be superimposed on each other.
[...] Finding no good accounts of the phenomenon in the medical literature—perhaps not entirely surprising, for such attacks are brief, rare, and not readily predicted or provoked—I used the term "cinematographic" vision for them; for patients always compared them to films run too slow.
[...] I heard strikingly similar accounts in the late 1960s from some of my post-encephalitic patients, when they were "awakened," and especially overexcited, by taking the drug L-DOPA. Some patients described cinematic vision; some described extraordinary "standstills," sometimes hours long, in which not only visual flow was arrested, but the stream of movement, of action, of thought itself.
These standstills were especially severe with one patient, Hester Y. Once I was called to the ward because Mrs. Y. had started a bath, and there was now a flood in the bathroom. I found her standing completely motionless in the middle of the flood.
She jumped when I touched her, and said, "What happened?"
"You tell me," I answered.
She said that she had started to run a bath for herself, and there was an inch of water in the tub...and then I touched her, and she suddenly realized that the tub must have run over and caused a flood. But she had been stuck, transfixed, at that perceptual moment when there was just an inch of water in the bath.
Such standstills showed that consciousness could be brought to a halt, stopped dead, for substantial periods, while automatic, nonconscious function -- maintenance of posture or breathing, for example -- continued as before... (MORE)