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Flies See the World In Slo-Mo, Say Researchers
An anonymous reader writes "'The smaller an animal is, and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes for it, scientists found. This means that across a wide range of species, time perception is directly related to size, with animals smaller than us seeing the world in slow motion.' No wonder it took so long to grow up!"
Here's the original paper.
Call the Judge Dredd!
Sitting in the left lane going ten under the speed limit while the world screams by.
This isn't exactly news. The speed at which they sample the world leads to time perception difference. Big surprise that when compared to our sampling speed it seems 'slow' but really it just means they sample faster -- their time perception of the passage of time is of HIGHER fidelity/resolution than ours is all this really means.
People have shown in humans that flicker fusion frequency is related to a person's subjective perception of time, and it changes with age. It's certainly faster in children.
What about differences in physical size between members of the same species? I've heard "He's pretty quick for a big guy." But nobody ever says that of smaller people. Its just sort of a given.
Have gnu, will travel.
I remember as a kid watching a sparrow fly through a chain link fence and thinking that kind of reaction time was impossible. Plus, when you look at the reaction time of smaller animals to a perceived threat (you trying to sneak up on one), we can't come close at our size.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
....I can't swat the damn things. They have an unfair advantage!
So, they can read the front page of the newspaper, before it squashes them. Handy!
By the time they've read it they probably *want* to die.
You practically have to be on meth to catch one. And then the problem is with the spiders in the corners of your eyes.
Then why is it ever possible to swat a fly?
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
Who would ever have thunk it. Time of flight of a signal is dependent on distance.
Next they will tell me that ping times are smaller for nearer nodes and I will be astounded and mystified.
I am looking forward to overclocking flies for super slo-mo, however.
Moments before a car accident, things seem to slow down and reaction times increase... because adrenaline would increase your metabolic rate
I read that as 'FILES'
Higher sample rate = more samples per second ~ more frames per second = slow motion. Shorter nerve lengths as well...
So an omnipresent being (everywhere, the size of everything), should have a time scale which relative to ours approaches zero.
I think you've got it backwards and Tolkien was right. As I remember, the Ents were complaining that the much smaller hobbits were being too hasty. Their Entmoot took several hours just to get through the meet & greet stage and it took them a day or two to come to a decision to do something.
Hey, don't judge...it was my week to chaperone the pre-teen girls on movie night.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Funny timing. I just had a "movie night" on Saturday with my kids and saw "Epic" for the first time, whose premise is based on this idea (insects and small things which live in slo-mo world, or rather, that they see themselves as moving normally while they see us "big people" as large, slow moving, bumbling idiots).
... at least I am convinced of that every time I try to sneak up on one and kill it...
As I remember, the Ents were complaining that the much smaller hobbits were being too hasty. Their Entmoot took several hours just to get through the meet & greet stage and it took them a day or two to come to a decision to do something.
ObligatoryFlameBait: So, the Ents work 10x faster than the US Congress?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I honestly though this was common knowledge already. Maybe I'm a little slow.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
And if so, by how much? It's one thing to say that flies perceive time differently than we do, but I'm curious as to whether: 1. Among many flies, there is variance from fly to fly (both independent and dependent of relative size), and if so, what that variance is... 2. For a single fly, whether there is variance based on age, environment, time of day, etc. It's always seemed to me like those with an extraordinary talent at something, esp. an athletic or musical talent, are able to slow down time when performing this talent. I'd tend to say that perception of time should more and more be considered a sense, like sight, sound, taste, etc.
... when I was a kid wondering how flies could so easily see the fly swatter or my hand approaching. My guess was that since their brain was smaller, signals didn't have so far to go, and could be processed faster ... and they would see the world from this faster-brain perspective as a slow world.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Fly neurons aren't terribly different from ours. There are just fewer of them, doing less sophisticated processing. So the amount of processing that is done can happen in less time. In other news, Gedit is smaller and faster (at simple text editing) than Libre Office.
This is one of those situations where the intuitively obvious is now scientifically established in a way that it wasn't before, I guess. But that's important, because a lot of intuitively obvious things are wrong, so they all have to be tested.
While size would matter, I don't see why metabolic rate should have anything to do with it. It's also funny to hear it described as 'time going slower.'
The nervous system pathways for flies are much shorter. Therefore, flies have lower lag. Go figure.
Just like an L2 cache on a computer processor, since the speed of information travel is pretty well fixed for the selected technology, using shorter path lengths yields faster response times provided the tasks are simple enough to benefit from it. Reflexes in people are like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex Detailed thinking has a lot more overhead. And while stimulus-response is more rapid for reflex type behaviors, the speed of thought is the same. (An L2 cache won't change the speed of light.) Using reflex is just a more efficient arrangement for certain types of tasks.
But.... [spoiler alert]... But wasn't the decision that took them all day to arrive at a decision to not do anything at all? In fact, they only really decided to do something after they saw what Saruman had done, and the decision to act then was made almost immediately.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It makes total sense. Think of it like shrinking a processor die - by bringing the transistors closer together you decrease the distance the signal needs to travel to be processed. Compare the size of a human brain to a fly's brain; 100,000 neurons and 10 million synapses that are packed into a space smaller than 1 mm^3 vs. a human's 87 billion neurons and 10^15 synapses for the entire nervous system, with the brain alone comprising 1250 cm^3 of volume.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I always remember a science teacher telling us about this at school (what year, I can't remember, but I left school in 1976), and his statement was; "If a fly watched a film, it would see a still frame for a few seconds, then the next frame etc., as time moves more slowly the smaller the animal".
Yes! I was hoping someone would make the connection. It's a rare day in life when you get to say that an idea in Terry Pratchett's fiction is scientifically validated!
The idea in the book was that there were little gnomes that lived around/among us but were so small that they lived their lives on a different time frame. They were so fast and so discrete that regular humans rarely noticed them.
Per Wikipedia there is a movie on the way.
Actually, creatures with a slow metabolism have slower perception of time as well, as the title of the paper says. The European eel, blacknose shark, and tokay gecko had the slowest, third slowest, and fourth slowest reaction times out of all animals surveyed, and they're relatively small but have very slow metabolisms.
Snails probably aren't that much better.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I wondered about this 30 years ago. It's more an issue of mass than anything else. You can move faster, so your brain operates more quickly to compensate. Whales and elephants even slower.
I would hypothesize an elephant brain in a vat tied in to a mouse body would speed up accordingly, and it would be less related to brain size (and intra-neural distances) than what it has to accomplish.
Similarly a human mind in a virtual world might speed up if the world's physics were sped up AKA had lowered mass relative to energy. This will be an interesting experiment for Occulus VR.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Flies eat it and you smoke it?
No brain, no pain.
Explains why those pesky drosophila are such artful dodgers!
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
This is probably why you can cup a fly with your hand if you do it slowly enough; any motion that seems slow to us will be imperceptible to the insect. It also makes it impossible for the fly to sense the air displacement.
:wq
very cool to see more empirical work on this!
I used the basic resonance model to figure this out for humans.. seems to work well:
https://sites.google.com/site/pablomayrgundter/mind
Cheers,
Pablo
Flies See the World In Slo-Mo? To them it passes at regular speed, we are just slow moving creatures to them. Watch an elephant. Or better if possible a big dinosaur. Do we see the world moving in Slo-Mo because we aren't the size of a dinosaur? It's only a perspective thing, every creature has the perspective of life moving at the "regular" speed of course.
Not buying it. Time waste due to traffic conditions literally adds up to cost lives in man hours lost. There are highway engineers who should be executed for their blunders under an eye for an eye system. Similarly, people with driving habits which create or exacerbate traffic are being the selfish ones, taking the most limited resource on this planet, other people's time.
I skimmed through the paper itself, and it seems like flies are only mentioned in passing. The paper mainly concerns itself with vertebrates, and their new result is that they have tested the hypothesis that smallness of body and high metabolism correlate with the flicker fusion frequency of the visual system, i.e. how fast a light has to flash before the flashing becomes invisible. They find the hypothesis to hold (like your teacher suspected).
The fact that flies have a very high flicker fusion frequency (270 Hz vs. 60 for humans under ideal lighting), has, however, been known for a long time, and is not a new result from this paper. In fact, houseflies have 2.5 times higher flicker fusion frequency than even the smallest and most active vertebrates tested in this study (actually, looking at their graphs, it seems like the housefly would be a huge outlier if they had included it).
The flicker fusion frequency is related to, but not the same thing, as how often an image needs to change in order to be percieved as motion. This difference is why 50-60 Hz CRT screens are annoyingly flashy to many, while 25 fps movies look fine. In the latter case, each image only changes slightly.
For a fly, watching a 25 fps movie would probably be similar to watching an 8 fps movie for a human.
My favorite one is having the on ramp of a freeway before the off ramp - so you have two streams of traffic trying to cross each other. Now if you swap them round, you clear one stream of traffic in time for another one to get on.
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I disagre. Statistics show your risk of being involved in an accident increase when you are travelling significantly less thn the limit.
The best speed to drive is the same speed as everyone else.
Fly: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets?
Morpheus: No. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to.
Now what happens when we take it to the other extreme? What about a massive life form the size of a planet, or a solar system? How would it perceive time? Its metabolic rate would by necessity be much slower than ours, so would most likely perceive time in very fast motion and, if the life cycle was anything like ours, could have a lifespan of millions of years.
Not terribly exciting, perhaps, until you consider this:
The speed of light in a vacuum is fixed in any given reference frame, and measured in distance over time. However if time is very large (but still perceived as "normal" from their point of view), they would never have to deal with relativistic issues when approaching c, such as requiring infinite energy. So, with adequate propulsion, they could achieve immense speeds (again, from their own point of view) across the universe.
I think that's kind of cool.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Bringing up midgets does indeed bring up interesting possibilities. One would think that experiments with time perception could be done comparing/contrasting midgets with larger size of people of the same age to further explore the possibilities of time perception relating to size of a creature.
So a small fly brain can convert visual processed data into action faster than we can, if the biology is based on the same basic neurotransmission chemistry. Not surprised here.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
They discovered this again? Haven't we known this for a long time? I remember seeing a show in the 80's. I think it was Blue Peter on the BBC - a childrens science show. Where they simulated what a Fly sees with a Slow motion camera and explained how perception of time is different for insects and humans.
This idea, that the perception of the passage of time is in direct relation to the size/mass of the observer, was a central theme of the science fiction novel Dragon's Egg.