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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.
Sitting in the left lane going ten under the speed limit while the world screams by.
I get the same slow perception of time when I get baked.
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!
You practically have to be on meth to catch one. And then the problem is with the spiders in the corners of your eyes.
I read that as 'FILES'
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.
Fly swatters flick faster than we can move our own hands. In other cases, we can strategically hit one step ahead of where we think they'll be.
Correct. For those who don't believe this, go out in a field and catch a rabbit bare handed.
.03sec. Or anywhere in between.
As for the bronto, it's not really possible to know because we do not know what type of myelin sheathing they had on their nerves. It could be that their nerves propagated signals at 2mph (Iow end) or 200mph (highest). We don't know.
If 2mph, a sixty foot animal's brain would get the signal in about three seconds, at 200 mph at
Not really relevant though as the bronts had ganglia along their spines that did the reactions. Say the tail was 25 of that 60 and you have a little under a second low end perception time.
just because their brain processes things faster it doesn't mean they can move fast enough to get out of the way. Consider the size of a flyswatter in relation to the size of the fly
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...
I honestly though this was common knowledge already. Maybe I'm a little slow.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Then why is it ever possible to swat a fly?
Why... that's elementary! The flys are so bored to death by watching you in slo-mo, some will fall asleep.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Not only are the distances involved much shorter but they are sampling much simpler images as well.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
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'
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".
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.
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
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.
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.