Yesterday, as I went to check my hummingbird feeder, a male Anna’s hummingbird went zooming past my face and stopped a few centimeters from my nose, hovering and looking at me. Then, apparently reassured that I was not going to tamper with his food supply, he zoomed off to a nearby tree to sit and watch for intruding males that he could chase off with vigorous displays of speed.
I thought about how fast he can fly. His reaction time to obstacles in his environment is so much faster than mine. He can fly several rings around me before I can even lift my arm to my face, and he can change course before I can even comprehend where he is going. Apparently the processing time for incoming stimuli is faster in his brain than it is in mine. His physiological processes are much faster than mine as well. His heart beats around 600-1000 times per minute, while mine beats around 60 times per minute.
This led to me wondering if time is the same for all animals. We humans have an average lifespan of around 70 years. A dog’s lifespan is around 10 years. A hummingbird lives for perhaps 6 years. And adult honeybees live for 30 days. Do they all perceive time the same way that we do? Is a day for us the same as a day for a hummingbird, or for a honeybee?
Soon I will have to drop off my dog at a kennel, so that I can leave for a weekend speaking engagement. My dog will be there for only three days. But is his perception of time the same as mine? If a dog lives 10 years, then each of our years is the equivalent of 7 dog years, and each of our days is the equivalent of 7 dog days. Does that mean that it will seem like three weeks in the kennel for him, rather than three days?
And speaking of perception, I remember having one of the old-time vinyl records of animal sounds, where a whale song was sped up 20 times and sounded like a bird song, and a bird song was slowed down 20 times and sounded like a whale. Does that mean that birds can process sounds faster than whales? I know of course that low frequency sounds (such as those found in whale songs) propagate farther than the higher-frequency sounds found in bird songs, and this is an advantage for animals that communicate over long distances. But is that the whole story? Maybe whales live longer and perceive time as being slower than shorter-lived birds.
Einstein showed that time was relative to the speed that one travels. Maybe the perception of time is relative to one’s lifespan, the speed at which we live. For the Anna’s hummingbird, perhaps I am moving in extreme slow-motion, somewhere between dead-stop and barely-mobile.
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