eli5: Why do some insects react insanely fast when you try to whack at them and some insects didn’t even see it coming?
In: 53
It’s the rate of images per second their brains can perceive. We refer to this as the “flicker fusion rate” – which is how fast a light has to be turning on and off before it is perceived as a continuous light. If a light flickers on and off 60 times per second a human will see a continous light. For a fly this rate increases to 400 times per second. All this extra visual sensory information allows for a much quicker reaction time – as flies literally perceives time to go much slower relative to human beings.
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