Saturday, September 28, 2013

On time perception - depends who you are

I have not written in the last 12 days -- some of it were vacation in Eilat (a resort town in Israel near the Red Sea) and some just lazy time -- holiday period is over, tomorrow - back to work!   Back also to the Blog writing -- I was always fascinated by the notion of time, and wondered if everybody has the same perception of time.  Today I came across an article in the science and technology section of Economics - dealing with time perception within different animals.   It turns out that there is a metrics to measure the perception of time, which is called CFF-  critical flicker-fusion frequency that has to do with the frequency in which the eyes can refresh an image and thus determine the rate at which the information arrives to the brain.   The human CFF is 60HZ  (so 60 refreshes per second).    The movies and TV are adjusted to this frequency.   A dog's CFF is 80HZ, thus according to the article, it does not have interest in TV movies, since there is a mismatch which makes the movie to be out of sync.     A fly has  CFF of 250HZ which is a biological advantage, because a fly can react faster to threats and opportunities -- thus a movement we do towards capturing a fly seems as a slow motion movement to the fly and thus it can easily escape.   The different perception of time depends on the CFF, what we grasp as a second, a fly grasps as 4.15 seconds, and thus it subjective time perception is that it lives much longer than the time we perceive it living.   On the other side of the spectrum turtles have CFF of 15 HZ, thus one second in our time seems to a turtle like quarter of a second thus a turtle thinks that it actually moves fast...   Anyway -- can we take advantage of this to process events in different frequencies to provide different views of the universe?  I think that the potential of it should  be investigated..