Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know

by Alexandra Horowitz

Dogs also have a higher flicker-fusion rate than humans do: seventy or even eighty cycles per second. This provides an indication why dogs have not taken up a particular foible of persons: our constant gawking at the television screen. Like film, the image on your (non-digital) TV is really a sequence of still shots sent quickly enough to fool our eyes into seeing a continuous stream. But it’s not fast enough for dog vision. They see the individual frames and the dark space between them too, as though stroboscopically. This—and the lack of concurrent odors wafting out of the television—might explain why most dogs cannot be planted in front of the television to engage them. It doesn’t look real.