Ever wonder how an insect with such a tiny brain can thwart your attempts to catch it nearly every time? To find out how the common blowfly manages to process visual images more than four times faster than humans, researchers have built the bug a flight simulator.After immobilizing each insect with a fly-sized harness and attaching electrodes to its brain, biologists from the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology placed blowflies in front of a semicircular LED screen displaying various moving patterns. Compared to people, who can distinguish a maximum of 25 discrete images per second, blowflies can sense up to 100 separate images per second and respond fast enough to change their flight direction.
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2 comment(s):
Incredible ... swatting them may be difficult, but an insect spray never fails to miss .... lol
What about them dragonflies? Don't their brains process stuff like 1000 times faster?
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