That is to say, do these animals get more out a given time period than a human does? Does 15 (or so) years in a dog’s life seem like 75 years to him (let’s forget the 1 year/7 year nonsense)? How about those Mayflies that live for only 24 hours? Do we even have any idea?
Steve
Do animals even have a concept of time? I’ve heard that if you go out of sight of your dog & come back, he has no idea whether you were gone for 5 seconds or a month. Anyone know if that’s true?
Whoops, looks like the message board software doesn’t like double quotes in the title, which was meant to be:
Do animals with shorter life spans live “faster”?
BTW, I tried to edit the message, but I was told I wasn’t logged in or didn’t have permission, evern after entering my userid and password. Perhaps a moderator could fix this?
WAG’ing furiously:
Without getting into what animals can conceptualize, perhaps we should consider the speed of propagation of signals through the nervous system. If the signals don’t propagate any faster, I would guess the animals concious processes, whatever they might be, are at a roughly comparable rate to humans. Perhaps an animal’s reaction time is a good ballpark measure for how fast it is living it’s life?
I would also guess that if we could come up with a good way to measure it, we would find that “speed of life” didn’t correlate all that well to lifespan. So some animals would be getting a bonus, and some distinctly cheated. A good cynic would agree, and reverse the categories.
Well, I think they have a different kind of concept of time. But, I also think it varies from the kind of animal.
Bears, for instance, know when it will be winter, thus they know when to begin their hibernation (and also awake from it). But, a common house fly? I doubt they have any concept of time.
P.S. smw, only mods and admins are able to use that “edit” function.
OK, let’s look at it from a slightly different perspective:
A common housefly, average lifespan, what, a couple of weeks? Take a swat at him with your hand; unless it’s really cold or he’s really old, chances are you’re going to miss him. So is this fly seeing your hand move in (what to him is) slow motion, giving him plenty of time to move out of the way? Or does he just have incredible reflexes?
my WAG…
A second is a second is a second no matter what the species. They don’t feel time is passing any faster just because humans live longer any more than we humans feel time is moving faster because tortoises or trees live longer.
Having said that, I do seem to recall hearing that some animals have “faster” senses (or processing thereof) than we do. For example, flies that have apparently quick reflexes to avoid being swatted is due in part to a fast processing of the visual signal that something big is about to hit them. I don’t recall the documentary I saw that discussed this. So maybe other animals can think (or instinctualize) faster in the same amount of elapsed time.
I’ve heard the same thing, but I’ve never bought it for an instant. When I had a dog, if I stepped out for a while and came back, she would look up as if to say, “Oh, you again. How’ya doing?” On the other hand, if I was gone for several days on vacation or something, she would be, “IT’S YOU! IT’S YOU!! IT’S REALLY, REALLY YOU!!! I’VE BEEN SO WORRIED HERE, I THOUGHT YOU’D LEFT ME FOR THAT SKANKY CAT DOWN THE STREET!!!”
::sigh:: I miss that dog.
I think Isaac Asimov addressed this issue in one of his columns. He found that if he multiplied the average life span of these animals by the heartbeat rate that it came out to approximately equal values. This is interesting – using the heartbeat as a clock, we live about the same period of time.
On the other hand, this doesn’t address the question of how that time is EXPERIENCED. Does a dog experience more – have a longer subjective time – relative to human time? Somehow, I doubt it. That would mean that dogs spend EVEN MORE TIME sleeping than we think they do. I don’t dogs could live with themselves if that were true.
I seem to remember a Nova or Nature episode about this. They shot a room from the POV of a common housefly. From its perspective, we were all incredibly slow moving giants.
I’m guessing it’s just hardwired in: the eyes see something moving toward them (or, even more simply, the amount of light decreases–from an object blocking the light) and that fires a hardwired “takeoff” command. Considering how much swatting/eating (by nonhumans)/etc. of flies goes on, I think that would evolve pretty quickly into something as automatic as how to beat their wings.
I remember that item too. But I think he also said that people live about twice as many heartbeats as most animals. IIRC, animals get about 1 billion heartbeats and people get about 2 billion.
yeah, that seems to be the documentary that I was talking about. Pigeons too, right?
I guess it’s still an open question as to whether thinking/sensing faster means that time seems to pass slower.
I guess it would also be a matter of whether that extra brain capability is focused on one thing, or if it is spread out on multiple objects/tasks. (i.e., perhaps time is perceived as we do, until full attention is brought to bear on one danger…for that matter, when humans are in extreme situations, don’t we sometimes perceive things happening in slow motion?)
Well, I am not sure where this info fits in, but there are animals that live much longer in captivity than in the wild.
There was an experiment with bettas that ran for years and they still seemed happy. Part of it was that daily a grad student would chase the betta around the tank with a stick to encourage it to exercise.
Squirrels can live for 25 years in captivity. Apparently they do fine with this. The average wild squirrel life time is 2 years.
An aside: your success rate on flies will go up if you swat behind them - they take off backwards.
To me, that sounds like a good theory to test, at any rate. And most animals we’re familiar with may have quicker reactions than us, but they’re in the same ballpark. I’m inclined to guess that large mammals like dogs would have roughly the same sense of time we do, if equipped to think about it, which is a different question.
SF writers have had fun with this concept, of course. For an extreme case, read “Dragon’s Egg” by Robert Forward (intriguing premise, a pity Dr. Forward simply isn’t a very good writer).
Terry Pratchett once had an old-timer mayfly reminiscing to the young mayflies about how things were different that morning. At the other end of the scale were his “counting pines” …
Which leads to an interesting observation - if an animal DID “live faster” during a shorter life, it might very well think of day and night as “seasons” or “historical epochs”.
Did he do the calculation using humanity’s traditional lifespan (40 or so years) or their lifespan now in an age of good healthcare and proper diet?
I know that animals can live for remarkably long times when given proper care…
Incredible reflexes, probably. But I believe it has nothing to do with what a fly sees, and more to do with changes in air pressure. That is why fly swatters are more air than not. Well, that’s what I think I heard a long time ago, anyway…
The Asimov essay stated that the absolute ceiling maximum number of heartbeats for all mammals other than humans was about a billion, ranging from 700 million for blue whales to 1.3 billion for housecats. Humans, on the other hand, beat our billionth at about age 25, a third of our average lifespan. Our maximum, by contrast, is nearly five times that. As of the writing of that essay, it was not known why this was… Even gorillas and chimpanzees only live to about a billion.
As for flies, I’ve heard that the relevant sense organs are hooked directly to the wings, without passing brain or collecting $200. If it doesn’t even think about it, I can’t see that we can count that as living faster.
Aren’t we forgetting something important here?
Humans may very well have the longest “heartbeat lifespan” of any species, but this information is basically meaningless. Humans have been extending their lifespan through medicine, technology, increased sanitation, etc. for thousands of years. I would wager that the first Homo Sapiens had lifespans very close to that of chimpanzees.
Perhaps if we had spent the last few thousand years working on ways to increase the health of the house cat, they would have passed us in heartbeats long ago.
All I’m saying is that we should draw any conclusions from the fact that we get more heartbeats per life than any other species. We live long because we’re the dominant species on this planet, not the other way around.
Oops…meant to say “we should not draw any conclusions”