So when you look at someone’s face for a while, it feels like it zooms in and I couldn’t find any answer to this question online. can someone explain it for me?
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I can’t speak to the “zooming” sensation, but I can share what I know about the brain, our eyes, and faces. Odds are this “zooming” is happening entirely in your perception of vision in your brain, and not something optical or mechanical in your eyes.
For starters, our eyes don’t “snap” a picture like a camera, which captures everything in view with an equal amount of detail. Your eyes actually only have decent detailed vision in a very small area right in the center of your vision, the rest of your view has a much worse “resolution” so to speak. The image your perceive as your vision is actually stitched together by your brain from bits of detail as your eyes move around between things. Your brain makes a lot of assumptions about the world in doing this.
Humans in particular are hardwired to see and read other people’s faces. It’s the reason we tend to see faces in odd places. (Like the moon) we evolved in social groups where reading each others faces became an instinct. I used to work for a nature and science education center with kids, and one cool thing we would do with them was go out at night and let our night vision fully activate, which does a lot of weird things to your vision. One weird thing we’d do is have pairs of people stand 15-20 feet apart in the near pitch black and look at the others person’s face. The lack of light makes it impossible to see detail in the other person’s face, but your brain is still trying to figure out what their face looks like, so you sometimes perceive their face warping and morphing between different features. Almost like the Cheshire Cat.
There’s no visual “zoom.” There’s just your brain clearing processing space for whatever you’re paying attention to.
It’s the same way that video games can still feel immersive and surrounding even when the monitor they’re displayed on isn’t actually taking up 100% of your eye’s visual field.
There’s a lot going on around you at all times. Stuff at the edges of your peripheral vision. Sounds in the background. The feel of air on your skin. If your brain was constantly paying attention and processing everything equally, it would get overwhelmed. Instead, it chooses what to pay attention to, and drops the rate at which it processes everything else.
We are primed by evolution to pay close attention to human faces, because even small changes (brief or very slight expressions, etc.) can have big ramifications for us socially. So our brains tend to auto-focus on human faces in front of us. Just like a video game on a monitor, that can make them feel bigger than they are.
I find the zooming when we are up close to the other person… So our brain has nothing to see but their face which is common everyday sight, so brain be like shall we get into more details or so
Yeah, it feels like my vision entirely focus on the face, kind cool.
That’s maybe for the better? Nature is cool
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