ELi5 Why can flys see you coming a mile off when you try to swat them…but they can never seem to find their way back out of an open door?
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They don’t see it coming. They *feel* it coming. At that scale they are able to react in a time frame you can’t even comprehend.
A small pressure wave in front of your hand wiggles a hair ever so slightly and they are gone. Meanwhile, the sound of your swat hasn’t even had time to reach your ears yet let alone trigger a complex chain of chemical reactions that culminate in your consciousness reaction to everything that happened.
Step back and think about it. The fly could make 1000 decisions and change course 1000 times before you could send a signal across your nervous system to move your hand. Just because of how much farther the signal would have to travel.
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