Do animals sense time differently?

Have you ever wondered why flies are so good at dodging your hits? It's like they know where and when you're hitting them even before you hit!

Some studies suggest that the sense of time for some species is not the same for us humans.

In fact, the fly can evade slaps and strikes because it feels time much slower than we do.

Scientists tend to assume that time is the same for everyone, but according to research published in Animal Behavior, time has different speeds for different species.  The study found that small-bodied animals with rapid metabolism rates - whether it be house flies or hummingbirds - those organisms perceive a lot of information during the unit of time, which means that they perceive time more slowly than animals with large bodies with slower metabolism, including humans.  If we go back to the fly, we will find that it has the ability to monitor movement on timescales more precisely than our eyes can perceive.

If what you read now reminds you of a certain science fiction movie that you watched in 1999, then you understood the above, yes .. the fly here is similar to that scene from the Matrix movie when the protagonist was able to avoid the bullets coming in his direction.

Scientists also indicate that there is variation within the same species with respect to time perception, for example some human athletes can enhance the ability of their eyes to follow the moving ball during high-speed competitions.

Scientists have done a specific experiment to find out how different animals perceive time through flashing lights, and to prove that perception of time depends mainly on the speed at which the nervous system processes the information received by it, so the researchers shed a flashing light at certain speeds on species of animals until it reached the speed at which it could see it stably without flashing. The experiment included more than 30 different types of animals, ranging from rodents, pigeons and lizards to dogs, cats and sea turtles. They found that the animals that recognized the flash at high frequencies were the most able to perceive time in a slower and more accurate manner.  The researchers found that time passes relatively quickly for the group with large bodies, while small animals seemed to perceive blinking more slowly at high frequencies, meaning that they perceive movement more precisely, and they can make good decisions at great speeds.

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