Every Species Lives in Its Own Private Version of Time—and Yours Is Stranger Than You Realize

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• To get some idea of how animals experience the world around them, researchers created the concept of timescale, which tries to elucidate the temporal structure of experience.
• We can possibly gain insight into what it’s like to be another species by gauging the temporal properties of that species’ experience, such as how fast its vision refreshes.
• Temporal illusions are also involved, such as the temporary inability of female fireflies to see any other male but the leading male who flashes brighter and faster than competitors.

Most of us have wondered what it would be like to live as another animal for even a few seconds. What we may not realize is that those few seconds and everything that happened within them would be visually perceived in a highly unfamiliar way, because some species see changes in movement at far faster or slower rates than we do. These differences could be interpreted as temporal illusions compared to our perception, forming the concept of “timescape.”

There are more questions than answers about timescape, the temporal structure of a lived experience. Every sensory experience plays out over an expanse of time. What changes is the rate at which those experiences are stitched together. Take a field of fireflies at dusk, for example To one animal, the display is a multitude of rapid flashes, but to another, it looks like a few slow glimmers spaced far apart. Fireflies may see a favored mate flash first, while rivals follow a fraction later. But a human watching the same display would see every light blink in unison. It’s a brain-melting concept, but researchers from the University of Sussex, the Jeremy Coller Center for Animal Sentience at the London School of Economics, and the CIFAR Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness in Toronto came up with the idea of timescape to understand time and motion through the (sometimes compound) eyes of animals.

“Timescapes are a plausibly universal, yet diversely expressed, aspect of consciousness,” the researchers said in a study published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “The qualities and categories of experience may be endlessly varied, but arguably, they all share the property of unfolding across time. Experiences persist in time, succeed each other, extend over time, and incessantly flow in one direction.”

Gauging the temporal properties of another species’ experience can possibly give us insight into what it’s like to be something other than human. Snails’ vision unsurprisingly refreshes especially slowly, an echo of their languid motion, while bees humming furiously as they race from flower to flower are known for having vision that rapidly refreshes. How do each of these creatures experience motion in time? It can be assumed that snails view things in slow motion while the same scenes are fast-forwarded for bees, but this needs to have scientific backup. An animal’s timescale is defined by the researchers as having certain temporal properties that determine how a moment plays out. Synchronization is one of these properties, with the synchronization window determining the interval of time over which sensory experiences are perceived.

Another property of time perception is the window of revision, or how long an animal’s brain can still revise what it thinks it saw before the perception locks in. Other properties include how long attention can be held, how stable a perception is, and how long a sensation lingers after the stimulus disappears. Some aspects of perceptions can seem like illusions, like peripheral drift, which is when a static image appears to be moving because of shifting light. Flash-lag illusions occur when an object that flashes briefly is seen as lagging behind another moving object. Attentional blink happens when a first target shows up but a second target arriving shortly after is missed, something that happens to fireflies.

With their bioluminescent flashing, male fireflies put on a synchronized light show to impress females. This synchrony is the result of every male vying for a female’s attention. Eventually, the leader is set apart by glow intensity, rate, and duration, but also attentional blink. As he attempts to block signals from competitors, he becomes the primary visual target for females—who, for a fraction of a second, simply can’t see the flashes that follow his. How steady flickering lights appear differs vastly between animal species. For deep-sea isopods that live in the nearly impenetrable darkness of the abyssal zone, low temporal resolution makes them sensitive to the faintest light. Black-fire beetles that crawl eagerly towards flames have such a high temporal resolution that they can detect a blaze from almost 50 miles (80 km) away.

“Existing evidence already provides a basis for very tentative inferences about timescapes,” the researchers said. “Further still, these paradigms could form the foundation for investigating principles of temporal phenomenology in non-human animals.”