Participants fell 31 meters wearing a perceptual chronometer on their wrist: a display cycling through numbers faster than the threshold of normal visual perception. If the fall produced genuine temporal dilation — if the brain's clock actually slowed — subjects should have been able to read the numbers. They could not. The fall felt 36% longer in retrospect. But no enhanced acuity was present during the 2.5 seconds themselves.
One hypothesis: the amygdala, during high-fear events, drives denser memory encoding. More frames per second of objective time. Retrospective reconstruction reads the frame count and infers duration — more frames, longer felt event. The slow-motion quality belongs to the memory, not the moment.
This simulation commits to that hypothesis. Both falls run for the same objective duration. The fear condition encodes frames at a higher rate. After each fall, the reconstruction bar shows what the frame count implies about felt duration. The chronometer flashes through numbers too fast to register. What the simulation cannot show is what happened during the fall before reconstruction began.
The "during" phenomenology. What was present in the 2.5 seconds of the actual fall — before reconstruction — is only accessible as memory by the time it can be reported. The simulation runs two falls and two reconstructions. It does not model what the fall felt like while it was happening, because "while it was happening" is not a state the reconstruction can access.
The simulation commits to one mechanism: frame-density encoding by the amygdala. It cannot show the alternative accounts (peripheral arousal signals, cortical attention modulation, post-hoc inference from body state) or remain agnostic between them. The clean bars at the end are a property of this model. Whether the retrospective hypothesis is correct is a separate question.
Eagleman's participants reported the fall felt longer. They could not read the chronometer. This simulation reproduces the first result by embedding it as a parameter. The second result — that nothing was different during the fall itself — is what the simulation cannot touch. The during/after distinction is the gap the experiment revealed, and the gap the simulation cannot close.