While time is continuous, our existence is made of distinct “ticks.”
Consciousness is made of the movements of the signals within the neurons as a whole. The movement of the signals paint a picture and that is our consciousness.
When your adrenaline is up (e.g. in a car crash), your brain ticks at a faster rate. The increase in tick rate apparently increases the speed at which memory is written, as people in trauma events come back usually saying “I could have done more.” I had similar experiences. But now I realized, the increase in tick rate only increases the speed at which the memory writes. It doesn’t increase how fast anything else goes, so the person couldn’t have done any better. It just feels to them that more time passed by in an event with adrenaline rush, but nothing else could have happened faster. The adrenaline rush overdrives the power of the muscles too, but it doesn’t seem to facilitate faster decision making.
With a higher “tick rate”, we are dividing time into finer segments to store into the brain (i.e. a smaller amount of time in an adrenaline rush would be perceived about as much as a bigger amount of time under normal heartbeat).
On the other hand, a lower tick rate means that the blocks of time in the memory will be longer. For example, when we go to sleep, it is a lower tick rate, and the time of sleep will be perceived as very short. On the other hand, thinking about alcohol abuse, when someone has a blackout from alcohol, alcohol apparently shut the tick rate down to zero, and therefore the time the blackout happened was stored in an infinitely small block in the brain.
Therefore, for a normal, gradual, peaceful death, as the power of the brain diminishes, everything that happens will feel faster, until the progress of time become unnoticable. In that sense, being in a blackout is actually a model for death.
So why can’t we feel other’s minds, even though everyone’s consciousness is similar? Perhaps because everyone’s consciousness ticks differently.
P.S.: My theory for memory is that memory is like a markov chain, where if you make an input to one node, the input will proliferate through a tree of nodes. That creates a movement of the signals in neurons, and it creates a recalling of the memory.