Watching birds in the garden, their reaction times and alertness suggest that their brain processing speed is quicker than ours. Is this correct?
Simon Potier
Foucrainville, France
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In general, the speed at which the eyes and brain acquire visual information over time – known as the temporal resolution of vision – is linked to the metabolic rates of an animal, its body mass and the type of food it forages.
Smaller organisms and those with higher metabolic rates perceive changes on shorter timescales.
Birds have high metabolic rates, so tend to be faster at discriminating details in a visual scene than humans. Also, as the body size of a bird decreases, its manoeuvrability and metabolic rates increase, as well as the speed of its information processing.
The type of foraging that a bird does is also important for the speed at which it picks up visual information from its surroundings.
It has been shown that species that catch quick-moving prey when flying (such as peregrine falcons, flycatchers and tits) have higher temporal resolution of vision than species relying on seeds (such as budgerigars). A , for example, found that their ability to perceive visual details was twice as quick as that of humans.
However, the natural world is complex and there are exceptions. Owls, for instance, which hunt moving prey, have relatively slow visual perception speed, whereas that of pigeons, which are seed-eaters, has been shown by some measures to be relatively fast.
John Davies
Lancaster, UK
Birds that fly in flocks, especially murmurations, exhibit exquisite awareness of birds immediately around them, so that they seem to fly as an organised whole.
David Tong
Leeds, UK
Even with the same kind of brain hardware, we might expect a bird that is 5 centimetres tall to react say 40 times quicker than a human that is 200 cm tall, just because the nerve signals don’t have to travel as far.
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