Hi I'm Chris, and welcome to Earth Juice.
This week we have been reading all about how animals process time, and it got us wondering
whether an athlete sees the world differently to a couch potato.
Scientists from Trinity college in Dublin Ireland along with some from Edinburgh and
St Andrews University's in Scotland revealed, in the journal 'Animal behaviour', that an
animal's perception of time is related to their pace of life.
For example, if you've ever tried to... swat a fly and wondered why...
they always seem to escape...
That's all because they can observe motion on a much finer timescale than us.
Infact, they process the world around them up to seven times quicker than we can.
That means a looming newspaper is easy to spot.
By contrast the slow-moving leatherback turtle processes much less information per second
than we do.
Infact they see the world around three times slower than humans.
However, Dr McNally from Edinburgh University pointed out that "There's very little point
in gaining lots of information if you just don't have the speed to react to it".
That seems like an eminently sensible rule, however it doesn't seem to apply to the Tiger
Beetle who seems to live in a kind of visionary no man's land with eyes that can't keep up
with its lifestyle.
The Beetle hunts by chasing its prey around 5.6 mph, that's 9 km/h for those who prefer
to work in metric.
But the beetle's eyes can't process that much information forcing it to stop every now just
to check that it's still going in the right direction.
So what's the science all around this?
Well study leader, Dr Andrew Jackson from Trinity College Dublin revealed that smaller
animals with fast metabolic rate, perceive more information per unit of time than larger
animals with slow a metabolic rate.
Using a process called 'critical flicker fusion frequency' researchers were able to measure
the maximum speed of flashes of light that a individual could see before that light source
was perceived to be constant.
The researchers were then able to explain that typically more agile animals can see
the world at a higher speed, potentially making all the difference in a life or death scenario.
And Professor Graeme Ruxton from St Andrews University in Scotland added that while "Flies
might not be deep thinkers they can make good decisions very quickly."
So if a fly sees life at high speed, where as a turtle sees it at a much more ponderous
pace, are there differences in humans?
Can an athlete see the world quicker than a couch potato?
Well, first of all we have to understand how we see.
Now the eye acts like a light gathering organ.
Light comes in, hits the retina and that signal is then changed into an electrical one which
is passed to the brain to be processed as an image.
These images are essentially processed like a set of photographs, but we can only do about
10 or 12 per second.
Now, what you're watching is around 25 frames per second to if we slow that to around 12,
you may start to see a bit of flickering and if we do it to 6, hopefully you'll see a series
of still images.
Now of course humans are broadly similar, it's not like we're comparing the fly and
the leather back turtle here.
We do all process things at about the same rate.
However, there are some differences.
Athletes have been shown to track moving obstacles sooner and to have faster reaction times than
the average human.
As well as working on their physical condition, athletes are known to train their visual skills
as well.
They work on things like peripheral awareness, speed and span recognition and hand-eye coordination,
This allows them to process the world in about 240 milliseconds, compared to us mere mortals
who are likely to take about 330.
So while you'll never be quite as quick as fly, if you do get up off the couch, train
your eyes, next time you might just be able to swat one.
next time you might just be able to swat
one So that's the weeks Juice.