What is the actual physical process happening here?
In: 0
If you could stare perfectly still at a perfectly still object, you’d go blind as your cells overstimulate (think of the after image from looking at a bright light). This is your retnal cells getting tired. To keep them from getting tired, your eyes saccade, make tiny jumps from one point to the next. This gives them something new to see and a chance to rest a tiny bit.
Your brain is lazy. It hates how there is so much motion blur when your eyes move around so much and so quickly. Since the image is lost in the blur anyway, it ignores any signal from them while your eyes saccade. You go blind for a tiny fraction of a second. Your brain just assumes whatever was there is still there until your eyes get to the next spot and you get another look. That’s why you never see it.
(Try it out. Look at one eye in a mirror. Then shift your gaze to the other eye. You wont see your eyes move from one to the next)
This gives us a sort of frames per second. If an object can spin around and appear in the same spot by the time our eyes transition from one saccade to the next, our brain see’s that as the object not moving at all, or slowly in a direction, depending on how that matches up.
Final fun fact, when you’re in fight or flight mode, your brain super charges and wants as much information as possible, so speeds up how often it gets information from your eyes. This can give the feeling the world is slowing down, because you’re processing it faster.
Latest Answers