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
Lots of great answers here. However people often overlook the fact that while humans have an reaction time of 200ms+ on concious reflexes, automatic built-in reflex like balance is measured to be as low as 50ms. While a cat is shown to only have as fast as an 44ms reaction speed.
What this means is that more reflex and instinctual an reaction is, the faster it is, no matter the animal. So the better way to look at this is that more thinking required = slower reaction. Does that translate to perciving time faster or slower, proboly not directly as in “living in slow-mo” kind of way, but they most likely live a life where they are super twitchy and less controlling of themsleves, and more on “autopilot” (less thinking).
From what I understand a big factor is they *see* faster. Our eyes are like a screen playing at lower frames per second than most animals, especially small fast ones.
Instincts are a form of auto pilot, ever see a hummingbird hovering or in flight?
Instincts are an automatic firing system in the brain which are compressed in a part of the brain that the distance between synapses is shorter thus a faster response time than say conscience thought which can affect the instinctual movements for limited control but is slower.
N. S
Not a doctor/scientist or anything, but birds probably have a few advantages we dont have:
– smaller brain/body = less distance for electric signals to travel
– few neural pathways because they are more simple than humans, so those pathways are ultra-optimized to the things birds do
– evolution has favored birds that can react very fast and all the birds that cant dont survive
Obviously we have several *significant* advantages over birds that make our slower mammal brains better overall, but purely in terms of speed birds are really built differently.
There is three things here, reaction time, ability to perceive things, and thinking.
First of all reaction times are different for different animals and individuals. Most bird species probably have faster reaction times than humans.
Secondly how well we are able to react to things depends on how well we are able to perceive what is going on. Through practice we learn to pick up relevant information better but we are limited by our senses. Different animals sense the world differently. Birds see wider range of color or can see much further than humans. Bird senses that evolved to help birds to fly fast in dense forest help them to navigate in cities too.
Third there is thinking. If humans grew wings over night birds would most likely beat us in every flying competition. But humans would smash less into windows because we are better at thinking. Out ability to think lets us perceive things beyond our senses. It helps us to react better to things we had time to think about but thinking wont help us when we are just about to smash that window we thought was open.
To your question if birds think faster than humans, I would say no. How would you even measure speed of thought? To some simpler question you might come up with an answer faster. But thats just because the though process is shorter. Even the smartest birds come up with solutions to simplest problems slower than most humans. When we tell someone to think fast we are usually telling them to react without thinking.
tlrd. Thinking has little to do with how fast movements bird is able to do. They just have fast reaction times and are good at perceiving information relevant to doing bird things.
Think how fast your little solar calculator can add 1+1. Now how long does it take for your computer to render up and entire instance of Skyrim.
Same thing. Birds are stupid AF but they can be stupid really really fast.
There’s a few chapters in An Immense World by Ed Yong that goes into the different update rate/frame rate of different creatures you would find interesting, for instance flourescent lights that humans see as a constant light source are rapidly flashing for creatures with a faster frame rate.
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.
Birds are definitely quick on the draw.
One day I tossed a slice of stale bread, frisbee style, out the kitchen door.
At that same instant, a sparrow just happened to be flying through the yard and narrowly missed a midair collision with the airborne bread.
The bread hit the ground and rolled on edge several times, but before it came to a complete stop, that bird had gone into some acrobatic flight maneuvers, landed and was already pecking at its surprise meal.
Humans think faster than humans. Your brain processes auditory signals something like 100x faster than visual signals.
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