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
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.
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