What Is The Time Resolution Of Our Senses?

Our senses pick up information from the world around us, but they don’t pick up every tiny detail every single second. Instead, they have a “time resolution”. Time resolution is a reset button. After every sensation, our sense organs snooze off for sometime before they pick up a different sensation.

1. Vision: Our eyes are same as cameras. When you watch a movie, it’s usually at 24 frames per second. Our eyes see things a bit faster at about 60 frames per second. That means in one second, our eyes can pick up 60 separate “pictures” of what’s happening.
2. Hearing: Our ears are even faster! They can hear sounds that are as short as 3 milliseconds long. If a sound happens quicker than that, we probably won’t hear it as separate sounds.
3. Touch: Our sense of touch is somewhere in between. If you were to be poked twice quickly, about 10 milliseconds apart, it would feel like one long poke. Touch takes about 50 milliseconds before reacting to a separate touch again.
4. Smell and taste: Taste and smell are complementary to one another. An apple, a potato and an onion tastes the same if we were not allowed to smell while eating. Undoubtedly, these two senses have a similar time resolution. Bad news: They are the slowest too. Taste and smell takes atleast 1 second to reset.

Maybe we can take a lesson or two from our sense organs— to reset and reboot ourselves. The pace in our time teaches us to multitask, and then we have our bodily features rooted in minutely working on one task at a time.