How The World SOUNDS To Animals

hey i think my new favorite format of video to make is one that i call at least in my head rabbit hole videos and it's where i take a simple question often one aimed at me that i find personally to have deep mind-blowing answers that can change your perspective of reality forever keeping it light and the question i'm going to try to answer for you today what does the world sound like to a dog let's go as you probably already know dogs have far more sensitive hearing than we do and they can hear higher frequencies than human beings can hear they have about 18 different muscles in their ear that allows them to hone in the correct direction and frequencies lucy look and if they're really interested in something they do the ever so familiar and adorable head tilt it's always amazed me that humans don't do the head tilt thing instinctively because it's actually a pretty smart trait to have evolved we're really good at hearing if something's to the left of us or to the right of us but not so great at telling if something's below us or above us in front of us or behind us in three-dimensional space you'd think that we'd have evolved to viscerally do this every single time that we sense danger but for some reason unknown to science we have not but what about the fourth dimension time this is something that a lot of us don't realize but all the animals that we share this planet with have evolved to experience time at a different scale speed and resolution than we do so while dogs hear higher frequencies they're experiencing a slow-motion version of our world and that includes sound so you hear me talking to lucy like this but lucy hears me talking like this so i'm gonna do some math and in this video to the best of my ability and budget i'm gonna show you what the world looks and sounds like to a variety of different animals come on wait a minute animals can't talk how do we know how they perceive things hey if you have epilepsy or if you are prone to seizures maybe just stare at your knee for the next 20 seconds here i have a standard energizer flashlight and here i have a standard stopwatch and next to this camera i have a camera that can slow things down by 41 times and let's do this that was fast but in real time any human being just sees a flashlight that is on and that's because your brain cannot keep up with more than 60 flashes per second so it just shows you the illusion of a steady on light the temporal resolution of your reality is essentially limited to 60 frames per second now this is actually pretty difficult maybe even a little bit meta to demonstrate on video because video uses a very similar temporal hack where you think that you're seeing me toss a flashlight in the air but what you're actually seeing is 24 consecutive images played in sequence to make it look like motion that's how all motion pictures work don't worry i'm done flashing lights at the screen but this is a stroboscope or a strobing tachometer and it's essentially a strobe light but you can very finely and accurately tell it how many times per second to flash a light and it's very useful in this genre of science and in this temporal genre of neurology this is referred to as the critical flicker fusion frequency or cff and the hypothesis is that this is essentially the fps of your brain by using something called an electro-retinogram and measuring electrical impulses we're able to take a close look at what speed of flashing is required to see when the eye stops trying to process each flash as new information thus just seeing the optical illusion of steady light and of course with varying degrees of difficulty we can also test this on animals who have wildly different cffs both using electro-retinograms and also simply studying behavior until it is reliably repeatable and by the way like a lot of science is dealing with perception this is still theoretical research and it's always contingent on emerging technology and we still haven't tested more than a handful of species and some living things can't see so we need to invent new methods of finding their cffs without using light and later in this video i'll show you how i've been trying to solve that puzzle a few years back i got my first phone that had a 90 hertz refresh rate which is considerably faster than 60 hertz and i noticed that all of a sudden lucy here started paying attention to videos on my phone and she would even growl and whine at videos of squirrels and things like that and the reason for that is because when it was at 60 hertz she just saw this dogs have a cff of about 80 which is 33 faster than humans which means that they perceive time about 33 percent slower dogs also see in what we would consider a low contrast washed out effect and they can only see the colors blue yellow and shades of gray let's view the world through the eyes ears and time perception of lucy and cora ready let's go [Music] [Music] um um [Music] all right [Music] [Music] wow good girl oh ready [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] so if dogs live in a little bit of a bullet time effect then one would assume that cats with their superior hunting skills would live in a much more extreme bullet time effect but surprisingly a cat's cff is only about 50 which is nine percent slower than ours which means that a cat's reality is actually a little bit sped up in comparison to human beings cats don't see many more colors than dogs do but the sharpness in which they see is superior to dogs and humans but nonetheless it still makes it impressive that they can always land on their feet considering that they have less time to process it ain't that right you want me to drop you and see if you land on your feet i don't want to do it i don't have the heart rodents often have higher cff numbers especially wild ones like chipmunks or squirrels this little guy clocks in around 120 hertz he looks pretty neurotic to us but his reality is half the speed of ours [Music] but some rodents are an exception to this for example a guinea pig cff is 50 a bit slower than ours and a brown rats is 39 meaning that it perceives reality 35 faster than we do which initially is pretty surprising but it kind of makes sense as these types of rodents have evolved to cohabitate with humans and eat our waste rather than existing solely in environment where they have to hunt for nutrients or constantly flee predators leaving the mammal world avians generally have much higher cff numbers my spoiled fat ducks here have a cff of about 105 about a 75 increase from humans meaning that they experience reality almost painfully slow for how chill their life is [Music] wow [Music] wild ducks on the other hand tend to use their perception of time much better i've known greg here for about three years and if greg doesn't want to be picked up greg is not getting picked up now smaller songbirds like this one on my back porch have a cff of up to 145. what is almost a bewildering speed for me is much more nuanced looking to them but what's more interesting to me is how they hear the world specifically their songs if i record them with a wide range microphone at 192 kilohertz and 32-bit i have a bit of freedom to slow them down and maintain decent quality here are a few calls that i've recorded over the years in this format so [Laughter] [Music] hmm [Music] as one might expect measuring the cff of insects can get really tricky but it's been done in a variety of ways and a house fly clocks in at an astonishing 270 hertz that's a 350 percent increase in time perception that us humans have allowing them to annoy us to no end while we try and swat them it must be pretty awesome to live in bullet time eh actually no it isn't a higher cff isn't necessarily any better than a lower cff these are optimal time scale resolutions that every species has evolved to have if humans could survive and reproduce better in bullet time then we'd likely have evolved to experience reality in bullet time an insect like a housefly might feel like a big fancy pants with its increased temporal resolution but if you were to move your hand slowly over a fly it would perceive your hand much like we would perceive grass growing or ice melting or paint drying it would be too slow to be visible so here is a good life hack if you ever want to catch a fly with your bare hands take your time don't do it with wasps elephants perceive time much faster than us they're herbivores and they have no natural predators so they benefit from a slower metabolism so being able to see a developing rainstorm or plants blooming gives it the information it needs to survive ideally the fact that other animals seem like a blur to an elephant doesn't really matter any more than finches moving too fast for us does more so than just seeing movement the ability to recognize patterns are contingent on our perception of time so it seems like most animals critical flicker fusion frequency is determined by the time perception of what we eat and what eats us now there are exceptions but generally smaller shorter living animals have higher temporal resolutions than larger longer living animals that house fly living in bullet time is really expensive to its metabolism so expensive that many insects require so much oxygen that there is no time for it to go through lungs and a cardiovascular system instead they have microscopic tubes going through their bodies that directly deliver oxygen to cells and even then with all that fine-tuning a housewise lifespan is only 28 days so like i said that bullet time comes at a hefty price but there are quite a few animals that have a hack for this since we can't exactly follow reptiles around in the wild with the stroboscope attached to their eyeballs this isn't entirely understood but in some research papers you'll notice that it's hard to get an accurate cff reading on a null wizards for example about once or twice a week i find one of these right here in my basement studio and i was hoping i could have one chill on my shoulder but no such luck as you may know a knolls and some other lizards can change their colors to blend into their backgrounds and many reptiles can change their metabolism body weight body temperature oxygen requirements and you guessed it time perception so an example a lizard could heat itself up in the sun slowing down its metabolism and speeding up its time perception and it could recognize insect patterns then it could go inside some shrub cool down its body temperature slow down its time perception blend in with its surroundings and grab its prey once they make the mistake of getting too close it is thought that this is a similar arrangement with crocodiles or alligators they typically will chillax in the sun and then hunt land animals from the edge of the water in cooler temperatures or an even better example that you may have witnessed yourself is in turtles or tortoises they crawl through a time-lapse reality on land and the moment you put them in water they swim away at high speeds my point is is that a lot of reptiles by changing their body temperature have a knob that changes the speed of everything they hear and see reptiles are keanu reeves so talking about the temporal perception of plants or fungi may seem a little bit silly considering that they don't have brains or eyes or ears but a lot of them can feel pressure and guess what sound is the next challenge though is communication how can you tell if a plant can perceive time at all much less the speed of which it might there is one type of plant that i could think of that under perfect conditions can reliably instantly respond to stimulus and that is dinoflagellates for the last few months a room in my house has been dedicated to cultivating growing and simulating a day and night cycle for oceanic algae connected to electrical stimuli audio transducers and pressure sensors and i have a long way to go before i write a paper on this but in the meantime enjoy a brief light show and finally this video has no sponsorships and was a little expensive to make but made possible due to my patreon members and if you want access to a community with audio assets unreleased music ambisonic field recordings monthly songwriting challenges and game servers then my patreon is for you and you can join for as little as a dollar see you soon bye you

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 2,271,541

Keywords: sounds for dogs, sound design, sounds of animals, biology, neurology, animal psychology, field recording, existentialism, nature documentary, wildlife, free documentary, nature, animal documentary, animals, wildlife documentary 2022, science documentary, science, animal, critical flicker fusion frequency, cff, animal brains, time perception, 1000 fps, slow motion, what dogs see, what dogs hear when we talk, what dogs hear, what cats see, what cats hear, bioluminescence, dinoflagellates

Id: Gvg242U2YfQ

Length: 15min 59sec (959 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 23 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/throwaway490215]

1:05

i vaguely recall hearing that the shape of our ears allow us to determine the height of a sound to some degree. Seems safer than having to shake our heads around.

[u/Baratuk]

I might be getting this wrong but doesn't seeing at a higher hz mean you just see more steps per second? That doesn't change the cognition of time (as in slowmotion) itself but how much of the movement you see clearly per second like how many slices (frames) you create of a thing you see. So if I got that right dogs don't see slowmotion but with increased motion-sharpness? If so that vid might be a bit misleading

[u/Alkpwn77]

2:28: "Your brain cannot keep up with more than 60 flashes per second" lmao

[u/DaRKVoi]

That was an interesting watch, thanks for that

[u/mengibus]

The flashbulb is a fucking genius, he's honestly on another level

[u/dontknowwhatiwantdou]

Hey, thanks

[u/PretentiousTeaTowel]

I can’t believe hummingbirds go “yeee”

[u/planktonfun]

catched 4 mosquitoes using the technique, summer is fun...