Why do flies see in slow motion

Question

Why do flies see in slow motion

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Answer 1

From my limited understanding on the topic, there are 2 reasons.

1. Scale: The smaller you are, the greater the distance between things. This effects your perception of movement. Time doesn’t change, but the way you perceive it does, I think this even works in reverse. A baseball traveling at 100 miles per hour just looks faster than a car traveling at 100 miles an hour. So larger objects appear to move slower at the same speed. No idea if this is relevant or not but on a purely intuitive level you can even see it in a lot of video games. When 2 characters of very different size have equalized speed, the bigger character feels significantly slower.
2. Wiring: Flies and other insects don’t have the kind of complex nervous system and brain hardware we do. Whereas if a human see’s an object moving towards us, we have to process it, determine if it’s a threat, conclude the best course of action (whether blocking or dodging) then send the signal to our bodies to carry it out. Flies are pretty much hardwired with responses, no thinking is actually involved.

Answer 2

They process images at a higher rate than we do due to both their higher metabolism and a different ocular system. Imagine if you processed twice the frames in the same amount of time. It’d feel like the world was moving slower.

Answer 3

The square cube law means that things happen faster for tiny creatures. Insects, particularly flying ones, need very fast reflexes to cope with their environment.

Just ask model plane pilots about how easy it is to fly very small models as compared to larger ones; the smaller they are, the quicker reaction times are required. Today’s tiny drones are only flyable because they have in-built automation to handle the fast controlling and humans are only choosing the broad direction of travel.

Since flies have fast visual systems, that can be considered seeing in slow motion. Of course they’re actually seeing in real time, but for humans to handle the same visual tasks, time would have to be slowed down for us to cope.