®
Faster-than-the-eye-can-see
Now you see them, now you don't
Cockroaches and geckos are two examples of animals that can carry out movements faster than the human eye can see. Be sure to check out the high-speed video capture in the research report below, or read the less technical New York Times article that follows:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038003
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/cockroaches-split-second-escape-trick.html
Is this guitarist's hand moving faster than you can see?
In 2011 John Taylor was judged by Record Setter to be the world's fastest guitar player. Cono's swiftness is far beyond the range for neurotypicals, but you can see in the video below that Taylor has also achieved a speed outside of normal. Be sure to view the last part of the video, when Taylor hits 600 beats per minute playing Flight of the Bumblebee, and notice the analog clock ticking in normal time, so we know the video has not been accelerated. The wing beat frequencies of hummingbirds are reported as between 10 and 200 beats per SECOND, depending on the species. Taylor's 600 beats per minute equates to 10 beats per second, which puts him at the low end of hummingbird-ness.
The hummingbird's beating wings - too fast to see unless you are Cono (or have a high-speed video camera)
The recent availability of relatively low-cost video cameras with high frame rates (300-600 fps models are easy to find) has yielded an abundance of videos that reveal high-speed events in the way Cono might perceive them. Capturing the beautiful movements of hummingbirds is a favorite:
Seeing the World Like Cono Does (Thanks to High-speed Video Imaging)
High-speed video captures super fast motion. New technology makes it easy to see the world like Cono does, but it was arcane and difficult until recently. The pioneer of high-speed imaging was Harold "Doc" Edgerton. Some of his remarkable movies are here:
http://edgerton-digital-collections.org/videos
There are numerous videos on the web that capture high-speed events using high-speed video, revealing, for example, the elegant motion of a hummingbird's wings, usually just a blur to the human eye, as in the link below. The scientists who investigated Cono's neurological swiftness compared him to hummingbirds and certain reptiles.
In Performance Anomalies, Cono's imperceptible swiftness is compared to the flick of a frog's tongue as it catches a damselfly - too fast for a human to see. With the help of high-speed video capture, it is indeed a visible spectacle.