Such experiences almost always accompany problems like epilepsy or stroke. Baker was only 39 at the time of his experience, which seems to have been caused by a weakened blood vessel that began bleeding while he was carrying some heavy boxes. The result was a relatively large patch of neural damage in the right hemisphere. “In the scans, it looks like there’s a cigar in my head,” he jokes today.

Yet why did this affect Baker’s time perception? Some clues could come from studies that have attempted to pinpoint the regions responsible for our perception of time. Of particular interest is an area of the visual cortex, called V5. This region, which lies towards the back of the skull, has long been known to detect the motion of objects, but perhaps it has a more general role in measuring the passing of time. When Domenica Bueti and colleagues at the University Hospital of Lausanne, Switzerland zapped the area with a magnetic field to knock out its activity, her subjects found it tricky to do two things: they struggled to track the motion of dots on a screen, as would be expected, but also found it hard to estimate how long some blue dots appeared too.

One explanation for this double-failure is that our motion perception system has its own stopwatch, recording how fast things are moving across our vision – and when this is disrupted by brain injury, the world stands still. For Baker, stepping into the shower might have exacerbated the problem, since the warm water would have drawn the blood away from the brain to the extremities of the body, further disturbing the brain’s processing.