Every living creature experiences time differently.

The Editors at Very Cool Facts
1 day ago
2 min read

Here is something worth sitting with for a moment

A study published this June found that every animal lives inside its own version of time.

Not faster or slower, exactly, but differently organized. Scientists have called it a “timescape.”

The fly’s timescape is finely grained, tuned by millions of years of evolution to detect the exact moment a threat is moving toward it. Every creature has one, shaped by biology, built for survival.

The fly you cannot swat is not being difficult. It is living in a different universe of time than you are.

From inside its tiny, furious existence, your hand is moving in something close to slow motion. Its nervous system detects motion at hundreds of frames per second. Yours manages about 65. By the time your palm is halfway through its arc, the fly has already assessed the situation, filed a flight plan, and left. It is not faster than you.

It simply inhabits a finer slice of the present moment than you do.

The swordfish takes it a step further.

Time perception, it turns out, is not a fixed feature, like eye color. For the swordfish, it is a tool: adjustable, purposeful, switched on the moment before it begins to search for prey.

Before it hunts, a swordfish sharpens its own perception of time by activating a heating system in a muscle alongside its eyes, warming its brain up to 15 degrees above the surrounding water temperature. This packs more visual information into each second, allowing it to track fast-moving prey with a precision that would otherwise be impossible.

Then, presumably, it goes back to being a regular swordfish.

Your own timescape is stranger than you think.

We humans are capable of our own version of the trick.

An hour is not always an hour. It depends entirely on who is living it. It turns out the answer is written into the same biology that governs every creature.

You can read about your timescape here.