It always amazes me how small birds change direction mid-flight and seem to do it frequently, being able to make tons of movements in small urban areas with lots of obstacles.
Same thing with squirrels – they move so fast and seem to be able to make a hundred movements in the time a human could be able to make ten!
So what’s going on here? Do some animals just THINK faster than humans, and not only move faster than them?
In: Biology
Is it thinking? That’s the real question. Birds are small and their nerves are shorter, so that’s a speed advantage. They aren’t thinking about flying any more than you are thinking about breathing. They are thinking about where they want to go, and instinctive muscle memory is moving their wings. Wings are quite agile, and a much bigger part of their body mass in muscles to power their wings.
Birds tend to follow air currents.
They aren’t thinking how best to fly, they ride the wind.
Squirrels run up trees. They don’t think about, they get scared and run up the tree.
Watch dancers dancing and martial artists fighting to see how fast humans can go through many motions.
They focused all their thinky thinky parts on super fast short term thoughts. Poor things can’t think ahead longer than a little bit though.
All their focus is on here and now, so they seem to be super fast when in reality it is you who is slow.
There is a lot of evidence that the faster a creatures metabolism, the faster they perceive time. Seriously.
Humans react to things in 150-200ms.
Birds have been measured to react in 74ms.
But that’s not because they have superior brains and nerve system, theirs is just simpler so there’s less overhead, which translates to speed.
Flies react in just 21ms for example, that’s why it’s so hard to swat them — what feels fast for you, they could notice/reconsider/react to it 12 times during that. So yes, they “think” faster than humans, time probably feels slower to them.
But, they’re not good at planning and it’s more about super fast instincts, so if you pick your angle right, they’ll still fly straight into the fly swatter.
Someone on Youtube made a great video roughly showing what certain animals see. Small creatures like birds and squirrels physically experience time differently.
They process it much ‘slower’ in the sense it gives them *more* time to react. If you had full bodily function, feeling fully normal, but time is x0.5, you can react much quicker due to everything around you being slower.
This is simply just due to them being much smaller. They’re just much simpler creatures, so there is just less going on. Human reaction time is like (much less commonly) 100ms all the way up to like 250ms. It’s still very quick, but some birds have reaction times of 70ms-80ms.
I guess a better way to think of it is like the flash or quicksilver. They go so fast and process so quickly that time slows down for them, but they still have complete normal function of their body.
Part of the explanation is reaction speed, and you’ve gotten a lot of responses about that, but there is also this, which people haven’t talked about:
> Same thing with squirrels – they move so fast and seem to be able to make a hundred movements in the time a human could be able to make ten!
This is different! The trick here is that how long it takes you do move a body part isn’t just about how fast your brain works, it’s also about how long it takes the nerve impulse to travel from your brain to your limb. Nerve impulses travel surprisingly slow, which is why smaller animals can react/move faster: their bodies are smaller, which means less distance between their brains and their limbs, which means more rapid movement/reactions.
Our relatively slow reaction speed can be so much of a problem in some cases that our bodies actually have a “hack” to sometimes work around it: the spinal reflex. You may have noticed that when you touch something very hot, your finger will recoil a moment *before* you consciously feel how hot it is. This is because heat activates your spinal reflex: the nerves from your finger transmit the “this is hot” message towards the brain, but this message is intercepted by your spinal cord, which is much dumber than your brain but is still smart enough to go “IMMEDIATELY PULL BACK” and transmit this message back to your hand. So the signal only has to travel to your spine and back, which is why this reflex is so fast.
They don’t think, they do.
Just think about the speed at which you close your eyes when something flies into it.
Well, I am no expert, but given proportionately differing body sizes, their nervous systems would react 4 times faster, than an animal 4 times it size.
New look at the Humming bird, some species of humming bird have wing beats of up to 200 times a second, and yes, their reaction times are heightened, where they would be able to see incoming threats and make changes to its flight.
Not to mention Humming bird is *EXTREMELY* agile, as the wings do not flap up and down in the traditional bird sense to generate lift, they flap like a Bee, in a Figure 8 pattern. At that beat speed they can make alterations to their wings mid beat allowing them to perform some INCREDIBLE feats that normal birds cannot, like flight, while Upside down (Inverted).
So part of this is just pure physics. A squirrel has very little mass, and therefore can change directions very quickly. Think of how a sports car can quickly turn compared to a bus.
Then there’s the neurological aspect. An electrical signal must travel from the brain (or spinal cord in some instances) to the muscle it’s communicating with to create movement. A squirrels foot is like inches from its brain. A humans is several feet.
Latest Answers