When I use just one eye, it shows me a specific view, but it feels blended(is that the right term?) when i look with two eyes. How does our brain patch these viewpoints up to what we’re seeing?
In: Biology
Our eyes work a lot less like a camera than we might think! Ever try waving something under fluorescent (or other flickery) lights and seeing it in “frames”? Or sometimes if you look at the light in a projector lens, and move your head back and forth, you might see the edges of the red, green, and blue light patterns, while if you look straight on, it seems like color? Why do we see these quickly flashing things as distinct images, when they normally seem all blended together? Like, why doesn’t the entire room appear to flicker under the same light?
Here’s another experiment. Look at a single point in space right in front of you. Stare at it, and don’t move your eyes at all (this is hard to do – our eyes are naturally constantly darting around). What you might see is that the details in your “minds eye” start to fade out around the edges. In fact, if we look at the cells in eyeballs, we can see that the ones that are really good for making out detail are mostly located in the middle of our visual field! The areas on the outside (our peripheral vision), tend to have more cells that are better for picking out motion and rough images. So, then, there must be some other “blending” and filling in the blanks that happens to fill in the image that we “see” in our heads! We understand how some of it works, but that last step of integrating all of the different (and different kinds of) signals into one seemingly cohesive mental image is still something of a mystery.
Any question that begins with “How does the brain…” is really hard to answer. There’s still a lot about the brain that we don’t know.
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