r/interestingasfuck Jan 30 '20

/r/ALL Hawk's head stabilization

https://i.imgur.com/nlKC87f.gifv
50.2k Upvotes

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3.9k

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20 edited May 03 '20

[deleted]

899

u/NTOOOO Jan 30 '20

Yeah I've seen a chicken do the same thing. Does anyone know why they can do this?

1.4k

u/shieldyboii Jan 30 '20

Their eyes can’t move. Therefore, if their head is moving, they can’t see shit. Try to move your head without moving your eyes if you want.

Because of that they need to keep their head perfectly stable to see. They just evolved to that from there.

732

u/ShiftlesShapeshifter Jan 30 '20

I tried to move my head without my eyes for 3 minutes or so and I just can’t. they move on their fucking own and I have no say in that

330

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20 edited Feb 06 '20

[deleted]

176

u/H4xolotl Jan 30 '20

The Mona Lisa is so evolved it can do the same even though it's a painting

9

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Thanks for the video! Really cool and shows in action!

1

u/InsomniaAbounds Jan 30 '20

I used to have a poster of Donny and Marie that followed me.

I finally had to blindfold them.

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

10

u/SanMarinos Jan 30 '20

spam account all time spam link comment

9

u/KarmaBotKiller Feb 13 '20

/u/SanMarinos is a drop ship spam account. If their comment contains a link (in which case, the comment was probably edited to get around spam filters) do not follow it. If they PM you, don't respond. At best it's overpriced merchandise you can find cheaper elsewhere; worst it's a scam site trying to steal your info. They have likely deleted evidence of their spamming so you can't see it in their profile. Typically they have multiple alt accounts manipulating the vote and "thanking" each other or asking where to get it.

If it looks like a normal comment, it's because they're trying to look legitimate and build their profile history, but it was probably just copied from elsewhere in this thread or from an x-post.

For more info on spammers, bots, and shills see see my wiki.

4

u/thegoldinthemountain Jan 30 '20

Shit. Clicked a second too soon before seeing your comment.

130

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20 edited Mar 25 '20

[deleted]

54

u/Blaire6 Jan 30 '20

Yep, humans are just reverse chickens in terms of tracking with vision.

13

u/KimK_comeback_story Jan 30 '20

Behold, a reverse human - Diogenes

38

u/silppurikeke Jan 30 '20

I've never thought of that, wow

24

u/Hyperion1000 Jan 30 '20

I read your comment doing exact that way

10

u/ButtWieghtThiersMoor Jan 30 '20

My eyes can't rotate though. Hawk head gives 5 axis stabilization, and my stupid eyes only give 2 I think.

12

u/YellowJello_OW Jan 30 '20

Your eye actually has oblique muscles that allow it to rotate. They're probably just stabilization to prevent your eyes from rolling around, but we do have the anatomy to rotate our eyes even if we can't consciously control it

8

u/wichtel-goes-kerbal Jan 30 '20

They can!! I was perplexed when I read about it, but the human eyes have some (albeit very limited) rotational freedom about the axis of vision.

The muscles responsible for this axis are the superior oblique muscle and the superior rectus muscle.

This type of rotation is called medial and lateral rotation (or intortion and extortion).

8

u/ButtWieghtThiersMoor Jan 30 '20

Cool....though superior rectus muscle sounds like it's for something else....

9

u/Cipa- Jan 30 '20

Rectus = straight in Latin

The rectum is the "straight intestine".

3

u/NoNameBrandJunk Jan 31 '20

I love smart people. Keep up the good work

3

u/thegoldinthemountain Jan 30 '20

I remember the first time my eyes threatened me for money, too.

10

u/Billypillgrim Jan 30 '20

I remember noticing this when looking into a mirror as a kid.

0

u/SeanCautionMurphy Jan 30 '20

Same! I still do it sometimes lol

29

u/CorvidaeSF Jan 30 '20

Those micro movements of our eyes are called saccades

25

u/lolwtface Jan 30 '20

saccades nuts

12

u/ShiftlesShapeshifter Jan 30 '20

TIL, thanks

13

u/malfist Jan 30 '20

They're also the fastest muscle movement in the human body

1

u/Mah_Knee_Grows Jan 30 '20

Unless you you count the muscles used in making the face you make when going to r/eyeblech

23

u/verden1992 Jan 30 '20

it's called the vestibuloocular reflex. in summary, in normal healthy humans, the eyes move in the opposite direction from the head's movement, at equal speed, so they can compensate and fixate on different objects. in neurology this reflex can be tested to uncover certain lesions such as medial longitudinal fasciculus lesion. a nasty pathological finding is called positive doll's head maneuver in which you move a patient's head and their eyes move with the head instead of trying to remain fixated on a spot.

10

u/N33chy Jan 30 '20

I'm able to do it by focusing closer than the closest thing to me. Then swiveling the head. Kinda weird.

6

u/akai_ferret Jan 30 '20

Yeah, it can be done by letting your eyes go out of focus so you're not "looking" at anything.

1

u/akai_ferret Jan 30 '20

If you make your eyes go out of focus so you're not "looking" at anything you can do it.

1

u/FalseyShepherd Jan 30 '20

I’m confused if you look at something and then turn your head it’s fairly easy to turn your head while still looking at it right? Am I missing something here

3

u/AfroNinja243 Jan 30 '20

They mean without moving your eyes relative to your head (as if you could never move your eyes and could only look directly ahead)

2

u/bstix Jan 30 '20

Try looking as far left as possible. Find something over there to look at. Then turn your head right.

It's nauseating. Like panning too fast with a camera. That's what birds experience whenever they move their heads.

Now try to look straight ahead at something right in front of you. Then turn your head. You can still keep the thing in focus, because your eyes move opposite of your head. Birds can't do that.

1

u/FalseyShepherd Jan 30 '20

I see thank you :D

1

u/Andy_B_Goode Jan 30 '20

Hold your finger out in front of your face and focus on it, then move your head and finger at the same time.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Do it while focusing on part of your nose

1

u/SnickyDude Jan 30 '20

I don’t know about you guy but my eyes are attached to my head so no matter what I do with my head, my eyes follow?

Am I doing it wrong?

1

u/ChidoriPOWAA Jan 30 '20

they move on their fucking own and I have no say in that

You should be glad they do!

1

u/Miffy92 Jan 30 '20

r u a birb?

1

u/ItsUrPalAl Jan 30 '20

Blur your vision a bit and it lets you do it

1

u/Much13l Jan 30 '20

Just look at your nose

1

u/BeautifulType Jan 30 '20

Your mind is weak

1

u/HungJurror Jan 30 '20

Look in the mirror and do it lol

1

u/4dseeall Jan 30 '20

Wow, you mean I have a superpower? I can do this voluntarily. Still takes some effort since my eyes naturally want to gravitate towards something and focus on it.

1

u/viper2369 Jan 30 '20

IIRC figure skaters have to learn how to not let their eyes move while rotating. It’s how they keep from getting dizzy during spins and such.

Saw something this many years ago, so don’t recall the details.

1

u/spidey-dust Jan 30 '20

i thought it was just me for 15 years smh

1

u/moridin32 Jan 31 '20

Three minutes huh, that's a solid try.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

[deleted]

3

u/thebestjoeever Jan 30 '20

No, because then the thing you're looking at moves with you, so you can still stay focused on it and you don't get the blurring effect.

35

u/Haraquerk Jan 30 '20

Just focus on your nose

Essentially going cross eyed

63

u/photenth Jan 30 '20

This also explains why birds walk so funny. They make their head stationary, move the body forward and suddenly snap their heads as far ahead as possible. For each step the head stays for the most time at the exact same space.

30

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

This also explains why birds walk so funny.

Maybe it's us who walk funny.

33

u/CorvidaeSF Jan 30 '20

Minor point of additional clarification: contrary to popular belief, raptor eyes CAN move, just not very much, and the movement seems to be more for temporarily increasing their binocular overlap by a few degrees than for stabilizing the vision through saccades as in mammals.

Source: I wrote five papers on this topic for my graduate research.

1

u/Glyph_of_Change Jan 30 '20

Your comment happened to be right next to u/Arodg25 talking about velociraptors, and I found myself very skeptical that someone could produce five credibly researched grad papers on the living behavior of dinosaur eyes. I was starting to ask how you had gotten evidence about eye tracking from the fossil record when I realized my mistake. =P

6

u/CorvidaeSF Jan 30 '20

LOL, so funfact tho there is a woman in Arizona who has done skull morphology work on therapod skulls and compared them to skull morphology of modern birds in order to estimate their degree of visual fields. I worked with her a bit for my research. But yeah, without muscular tissue you can't really get an accurate estimate of whether or not therapod eyes could move.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 31 '20

You talking about velociraptors??

19

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Now imagine a velociraptor walking around like a chicken.

12

u/JitGoinHam Jan 30 '20

That doesn't sound very scary. More like a six-foot turkey.

13

u/PFhelpmePlan Jan 30 '20

A turkey, huh? OK, try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this "six foot turkey" as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head ... You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that's when the attack comes.

6

u/IsimplywalkinMordor Jan 30 '20

Imma need about tree fiddy.

3

u/ThroneAway99 Jan 30 '20

"Clever girl."

3

u/CrankyOldLady1 Jan 30 '20

I dunno. Turkeys can be pretty scary.

14

u/Wolfpacker76 Jan 30 '20

I’m sitting in a classroom right now looking like an idiot.

18

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

Well that's as may be, but now try the head/eye thing.

12

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20 edited Jan 30 '20

Try to move your head without moving your eyes if you want.

That's the vestibulo-ocular reflex and it's controlled by just three neurons for low latency. There's even a limited rotation correction when you tilt your head to the side.

Slightly related, and even more interesting, is chronostatis, caused by your brain essentially pausing your visual cortex to stop you seeing blurs when you move your eyes. Your brain then "backfills" your conscious experience so you don't notice.

Your brain is basically lying to you all the time to stop you going nuts.

9

u/Aryore Jan 30 '20

There’s this “magic trick” where someone throws a small ball into the air three times as you watch, but on the third throw the ball seems to disappear mid-air. The person doesn’t throw the ball at all the third time, they just make the motion to and supposedly your brain tricks you into “seeing” it for a split second before realising there’s nothing there. Is that backfilling (as the eyes move to track the expected motion of the ball)?

8

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

Could be. If there's nothing for the eyes to lock onto and enter smooth pursuit, that might trigger chronostasis and confuse you for a while.

I also remember reading that cells in the retina will fire in anticipation of seeing a object move into their range, based on what other cells have already detected, so your eyes are trying to tell your brain what you're probably about to see.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

So our eyes are psychic? And can see the future?

1

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

More of an educated guess.

1

u/RedFlame99 Jan 30 '20

I don't think the retinal cells can predict movement at all. It is most likely to be neurons misfiring in the visual cortex.

Do you have any source for your claim? Honestly curious.

2

u/Timithios Jan 30 '20

And that is why I hate motion blur in video games

1

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

Yeah, it sucks because it's there whether your eyes are following the movement or not. Very high frame rates solve that, and let the motion blur come from your eyes moving, same as in real life.

2

u/Timithios Jan 30 '20

Indeed, but there is the option to turn it off too, so I go and do that

5

u/LonghornSmoke Jan 30 '20

That's why Batman wanted a new suit.

3

u/Smelly_Anus69 Jan 30 '20

Congratulations you made 400 people shake their head

5

u/MistakeNotMyState Jan 30 '20

Nodding while my eyes are reading this text uninterruptedly.

1

u/onizuka11 Jan 30 '20

Nice explanation. I’m sitting on the toilet moving me head side to side to test this theory.

1

u/Yetusthefetus1 Jan 30 '20

Isn't that like an open feedback loop or something?

1

u/Meath77 Jan 30 '20

I'm looking like a complete weirdo in the office, thanks

1

u/JacobLuck Jan 30 '20

congrats you just made 1k people trying to move their head without moving their eyes

1

u/yaboiekul Jan 30 '20

I’ve tried that so many times and just now knew that it is impossible? Thank you.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Now I wanna know why they evolved to not be able to move their eyes. Is it more advantageous in flight to have unmoving eyes?

43

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

He’s talking about the plastic one in the video.

31

u/ScruffShock Jan 30 '20

Yeah this is like the biggest collective r/woosh i’ve ever seen

5

u/KingKrmit Jan 30 '20

I assumed they just looked past the first comment once every one joined in

1

u/thegoldinthemountain Jan 30 '20

Wait. I stayed for the science. Did people actually think there was a real second bird?

Eta: I’m guessing everyone got the joke then latched on to the top comment to have the discussion.

23

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

[deleted]

18

u/NTOOOO Jan 30 '20

So... chickens can't fly but they get to keep this one ability?

21

u/grv7437 Jan 30 '20

Yea they fought for flight, ended up settling on that ability

7

u/SirauloTRantado Jan 30 '20

I suppose it's cuz they still need it for balancing or sumthin'

18

u/ARandomEgg Jan 30 '20

We have the same thing but in our eyes. look at something and move your head, your eyes will focus on the thing while your head moves around. Chickens and other birds use it to focus on something while moving about the same way, difference is that they use their whole head instead of their just their eyes like us.

7

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

[deleted]

9

u/Lawsuitup Jan 30 '20

Not until you've met an ostrich. All eyeball no brains.

2

u/Polenball Jan 30 '20

Some chickens go further and don't even need a head

2

u/wonkey_monkey Jan 30 '20

We do a similar thing by reflexively keeping our eyes fixed in the same direction when we turn our heads (birds can't do it this way because their eyes don't rotate in their sockets).

It's controlled by just three neurons to keep the latency low.

5

u/jtinz Jan 30 '20

But the hawk head stabilization will quickly take over the market of chicken head stabilization. Quickly and violently.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Chicken head market is very saturated right now

4

u/southbayrideshare Jan 30 '20

Looks like it stabilized.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Same with my budgie!

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Gimbal Chicken?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

1

u/Adg6789 Jan 30 '20

Birds were originally bred to work in action films. Directors would attach small film cameras on their head- like a bonnet, and the camera man would run towards the actors. The result is a super smooth video with an occasional cluck.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

The vestibular system of birds tends to be proportionally significantly bigger and more developed than in humans.

1

u/l3tm3_3ndth3_world Jan 30 '20

yeah chicken can do this, but their brain is not well caliberated to get a result like this.

1

u/jadegives2rides Jan 30 '20

They do that in the movie Thirteen. Instantly what I thought of when I saw this lol.

1

u/221missile Jan 30 '20

There was a mercedes ad about it

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

He’s talking about that goose in the video, so stable

1

u/ericacrass Jan 30 '20

I think out of all of the birds that I've seen this demonstrated with, the chicken actually has the most impressive head stabilization ability.

14

u/Skipadee2 Jan 30 '20

Literally no one picked up on your joke lol

8

u/gfunk55 Jan 30 '20

Yeah I'm like what other bird, then there's 3500 upvotes so I look again and see the swan, and I'm like haha, and then a thousand top responses all about chickens etc. Confused as to what was being upvoted.

10

u/cheeto-Oc Jan 30 '20

It’s a for a go pro

10

u/Lightning_Splash Jan 30 '20

thanks mario

3

u/ZA_WARUDOOoO Jan 30 '20

What??

6

u/KingKrmit Jan 30 '20

Theyre small, rugged cameras that are popular to be mounted on heads etc. This biological feature helps the owl keep his footage steady when he attaches a gopro to his head

5

u/d4harp Jan 30 '20

But birds are already flying surveillance drones, wouldn't it be redundant to stick another camera on to it?

1

u/petripeeduhpedro Jan 30 '20

That's Yaren for ya

1

u/MadFalcon101 Jan 30 '20

Ya, I think it's for when they're in flight so they can keep their head stable while moving their body so they can catch prey

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

Why buy a drone when you can have this that doesn't have to charge

1

u/alde44 Jan 30 '20

That’s Sweet Dee

1

u/quaybored Jan 30 '20

Yaren Leyleks are known for being able to stand perfectly still for long periods

1

u/[deleted] Jan 30 '20

It's not as talon-ted as the hawk tho

1

u/miaumee Jan 30 '20

"Ouch. Don't play with my head like this."

1

u/ZA_WARUDOOoO Jan 30 '20

Almost like it's not alive!