Why is it hard to hit a fly? How do flies avoid being swatted? How are they so incredibly fast? Flies actually have a pretty normal speed for their size. You're just a bit too slow. A tiny fly brain reacts several times faster than yours to what it sees. 1 second to the fly feels like 5 or 6 to you. When a fly looks at you, it sees you as if you’re hanging out at the bottom of your local pool, moving around really slowly.

What if you dropped a balloon from your bedroom window and watched it fall to the ground. That’s how slow a fly sees regular things fall! So it has ninja reaction speeds, but it also has special eyes. They're divided into thousands of receptors that capture light all at the same time. Flies can see in every direction at the same time, almost. No matter what side you attack from, that fly’s almost definitely gonna see it coming. So why does that fly even bother sticking around, you’re always trying to squash it?

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