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
I think you’re underselling how quickly human brains make the kinds of decisions you’re talking about.
Almost anyone in an office job can type 60 words per minute. If the average word length is 4 characters, plus a spacebar, with something like 30 muscles in each hand (and the nerve endings providing tactile feedback of when you miss a key or fail to press it hard enough). The actual selection of the letters, plus the finger coordination that goes into accurately pressing those keys, is something that’s probably pretty impressive when you break it down to the actual muscles and nerve signals that are being sent. But we essentially do it without thinking, once we’ve learned how.
Other physical activities like catching a baseball or kicking a soccer ball while running around a defender or throwing a spear at a deer requires many little decisions being made milliseconds apart, while calculating physical trajectories in real-time, even correcting for wind, spin, etc.
Animal brains are quite well adapted for agility, dexterity, coordination, etc. Humans are pretty good at these things.
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