why do eyes get “pulled” back while focusing on something in a car

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When you are a passenger on the freeway and focus on a repeating structure e.g. a divider, why do our eyes naturally bounce back and forward between the repeating structure instead is staying focused on one spot?

In: Biology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The superior culiculi is a super fancy word for an old brain region of ours that used to control our attention of vision but now it really just controls our peripheral attention and more subconscious visual stimulation and greatly helps regulates eye movements. Eye movements are largely out of our control. You can consciously focus your attention on things but there is a brain region that has a lot of input on where your eyes look so that it can evaluate things in the way it can.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s how our brains perceive things it sees – it focuses on this very narrow point and analyzes it, filling in peripheral visual information with peripheral vision.

If you want a hack to get around this, focus on a very small, transparent dot on the window and pay more attention to what your eyes see peripherally without shifting focus