*
You’ve probably seen written, her life passed before her eyes in a moment. I’ve almost paid the ferryman a few times. I’m still this side of the Styx not because I didn’t have exact change, but simple luck. Each time there was unnerving opportunity to consider the ferry’s approach. Not just moments; sometimes minutes were available. Ample time to watch cerebral movies with me in the lead role. But the show never started. I’m not irritated that I’ve been denied that experience, but have wondered just how much you can pack into a moment.
There are relaxed times that can occur almost anywhere – alpine meadow, seashore – when you are smelling, feeling, hearing, seeing things all at once. For a while I just enjoy the assault on my senses, but soon my butterfly mind starts flitting – how long can this last, how much will I store, will I hear more if I close my eyes? I think I would.
These questions all involve what is a moment. Are moments different in supermarket lineups than on the ocean shore; could your life pass before your eyes in just one? The questions expose some huge differences in how species perceive time.
The limits to a human moment make real movies possible. A film is just a long strip of still pictures projected at a speed at which we see smooth, continual movement rather than a row of individual pictures moving jerkily past us. The speed is typically 24 images a second because at that rate our eyes and brain fuse the images. Trained fighter pilots can distinguish much shorter images. For most of us, however, a human moment is about 1/24 of a second long; we can experience about 1440 moments every minute. Anything smaller, we cannot detect; anything longer contains several moments. It seems that only rather uneventful lives can pass before our eyes in even several moments. It also suggests that when going extremely fast, even a dark, heavy object could speed past us on a sunny day without us seeing anything pass. We might, however, feel it. We also have other ways of perceiving the environment. Consider hearing.
This lancetooth snail in Brooksdale forest is scraping groceries off a hemlock cone. It perceives things much differently than we do, and not just because it has poor eyesight.
Generally, humans hear sounds in the range of 15 to 15,000 hertz (vibrations per second). But we do not hear the individual vibrations of the air. They become blurred and determine whether the sound is high pitched (many vibrations per second) or low pitched (few vibrations per second). If we consider how many distinct sounds we can hear per second, it typically ranges from 15 to 20/sec. Shorter intervals yield only one steady sound. If you encountered a bear in camp and, inspired by adrenalin, pounded your cooking pot with a spoon 30 times per second, I don’t know what the bear would hear. But if your life then passed before your eyes, it would do so to one steady sound, not a rapid frantic beat.
We know different species detect ‘movement’s at different rates. Dolphins can distinguish sounds between 400 and 200,000 hertz. We record dolphins and slow down the tape to hear them. Snails, however, appear to detect 3 or 4 cycles per second and miss movements we see. Dragonflies and damselflies see about 300 images a second, at least 6 times faster than most of us do. They would perceive our movies as a series of static images and make good fighter pilots. These differences also suggest that each species is creating its own sense of time, but we’re the only ones that talk much about it.
It is enjoyable and insightful to let your mind wander, wonder and to let more of nature’s connections emerge. That dragonfly, for example, perceives things at twice the speed of the best trained fighter pilots. Its world is far more alive and full of movement than ours. Conversely, some changes we see are invisible to the snail. It doesn’t perceive the grass moving in the wind and the cars speeding past are not part of the moving world. If you were a snail, four taps on the back of your neck would be perceived as constant pressure. You can mask web-using spiders (yes, some have done so) and they go about living, mating, feeding and fleeing just as well as unmasked spiders in their webs. Web spiders inhabit a profoundly tactile world. They
‘phone’ their chosen mate or send young to safety by vibrating the web and can detect, without sight, whether it is a predator, prey or suitor that has entered the web. If the senses of the spider were those of the snail, the web would be still. A dull moment in a snail’s world is full of change and variation in the spider’s world. The dance of the honey bee that communicates so much to hive members looks like continuous movement to us until we film it, slow it down and parse out the jerky gestures, pauses and accentuations. Bees also sense air movements far differently than we do. Relative to us, they are tiny and easily buffeted by small drafts of wind we don’t perceive. But they have to communicate locations they have explored accurately. Wee gusts count. About 2,500 hairs in their eyes measure and interpret each tiny wind gust. Combined with their flying speed and direction, they can predict flowers’ locations remarkably accurately. We’d get there but only because we can see farther and are ponderous enough to plough strait through small wind gusts.
Reflection by Fred Bunnell (Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of British Columbia)
The worlds of other creatures unfold at far different rates than does ours, even when we are in nearly the same spot. Some of the changes they perceive are too quick for us to capture without technology. Their moments are different from ours. But if you take the time to watch, it is possible to grasp some of the differences and more of the wonder, beauty and variety of nature. It’s true that doing that requires patience. It may not take long to capture the wonder watching an inhabited spider web, but it is wondrous slow waiting for a slime mold to move. Yogi Berra was right – “You can observe a lot just by watching.” It may well be that to perceive much of this wonder it is best to heed more of Yogi’s advice. Specifically, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
* First image from “Dungeon Magazine #149 p. 83”
