Sunday morning. You’re sitting at your breakfast table reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee. Suddenly a housefly starts hovering around your face, as a result you get irritated by the constant humming noise. Then the time comes. It has finally sat down upon the surface of the table. This is the golden opportunity, you think. You roll up your newspaper into a neat roll, and then, smack, you bring it down on the fly with full force, expecting to crush it. But the fly has, as if by some supernatural sensory perception, dodged your blow right in time, and is humming about again.
The above incident is something which is a common occurrence across most of our homes. But have you ever wondered, what is the secret behind their superfast reflexes? Sciencemarvels would try to provide an answer to that. Keep scrolling!
Research has revealed that flies avoid being crushed the same way you dodge bullets in Max Payne, by perceiving time in slow motion. Incredible isn’t it? But a housefly is not alone to possess this ability. Turns out, across a wide range of species, time perception is related to the body size and metabolic rate of an organism. That is, smaller the body size, faster is the metabolic rate, and slower is the time perception.
Catch me if you can. Flies can perceive time upto six times slower than humans.
Dr Andrew Jackson, from Trinity College Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, who led the study, says it’s something related to Critical flicker fusion frequency, the frequency at which flickering lights from a source seem to merge, and present itself as a continuous image. Animals having a higher ability to differentiate one flicker from the next would have a slower time perception, and view the world in slow motion, hence their reactions would also be faster compared to those having a lower ability to differentiate such flickers.
“A lot of researchers have looked at this in different animals by measuring their perception of flickering light,” said Dr Jackson. “Some can perceive quite a fast flicker and others much slower, so that a flickering light looks like a blur.”
“Interestingly, there’s a large difference between big and small species. Animals smaller than us see the world in slo-mo. It seems to be almost a fact of life. Our focus was on vertebrates, but if you look at flies, they can perceive light flickering up to four times faster than we can. You can imagine a fly literally seeing everything in slow motion.”
So the next time you try to squash a fly, remember they can literally see your newspaper role closing on it in slo-mo. I have my respect for them. Do you?
Date: June 24, 2020
Author: Ditam Chakraborty