Episode 155: The Rate of Reality

CW: Harm to Animals

What is it like to experience the world at 400 frames per second? How quickly can cats see the world around them? How does it change the perception of time? This episode tackles the speed of reality. How fast can you see?

This one dives into the weird science of when a flickering light tricks your brain into seeing steady glow, from its history with monkey brain experiments to practical uses spotting epilepsy, brain fog from liver issues, and even diver narcosis. It breaks down human fusion rates at 50-90 Hz, throws in speedy shrimp hitting 200 Hz for comparison, and links it all to EEG waves and cognition testing.

And of course, let’s link over to Wikipedia where you can also read about the Critical Flicker Fusion in a less scientific article format. This lays out the psychophysics of when flickering lights look steady, covering factors like intensity, wavelength, retinal position, and adaptation that push human thresholds to 50-90 Hz. It dives into tech like why old CRT TVs flickered for dogs but not us, fluorescent lighting headaches, and wild animal extremes.

We got into talking about a couple of different animals, so here’s a few pictures of the animals we were talking about!

This one breaks down the Galway study’s massive look at 138 species’ temporal perception using flicker tests. It explains why flyers and ocean predators see super fast and how energy costs keep slowpokes like herbivores chill.

This one into how even healthy humans of the same age show surprising differences in flicker fusion speeds, with most variation between people rather than day-to-day wobbles, and hints at possible sex differences. Perfect for wondering why some folks seem quicker visually.

This one also talks about the Galway study just like the link two above, but it stands out as it has the official press release from the researchers themselves, giving direct quotes from lead author and vivid species spotlights.

This one introduces biologist Jakob von Uexküll and his “Umwelt” idea: every animal lives in a custom sensory world (ticks smell sweat and feel heat, bees see ultraviolet flowers). It teases the radical notion that there’s no universal reality, just species-specific bubbles.

Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans excerpts the biologist’s 1934 classic rejecting machine-like views of animals, introducing Umwelt as each creature’s custom perceptual bubble. It flags his anti-Darwin influence and talks about the darker part of his life during Hitler’s reign.

This one probes whether CFF measurements across 70+ species hint at differences in felt time duration, unpacking evolutionary logic for why faster vision might mean more subjective moments per second (or not). It’s part of their moral weight series.

This one tackles the big puzzles of how we sense duration, succession, and time’s flow, from Augustine’s memory riddle to the “specious present” where motion gets perceived as extended yet “now,” plus debates on order, memory strength models, and whether time experience fits tensed vs. tenseless metaphysics. Brain-bender kind of stuff.

This one argues that animals with faster subjective time rates cram more moments into the same objective seconds, potentially amplifying suffering or pleasure and flipping moral priority rankings compared to brain-size metrics. It estimates ~70% chance of big interspecies differences using reaction times and neurology as clues, urging animal advocates to factor this into welfare math.