A new study by two psychology professors from the Universities of Aberdeen and Berkeley, published by The Conversation, reveals that our brain is practically a time machine in terms of the visual perception of the world around us.
Mauro Manassi and David Whitney emphasize that our eyes are constantly bombarded by an inconceivable amount of visual information. Millions of shapes, colors, luminosities change every millisecond, while at the same time the blink, the movements of the eye and the body make the processing of data by the brain a titanic effort. So how does the brain manage to respond to this “noise” of information? A representation of visual instability can be seen below, where the white circle shows the movement of the eyes and the blurred dot on the left reveals the sudden changes of what we see every moment.
And yet our vision comes naturally, effortlessly and tirelessly and instead of abrupt changes we experience a visually stable environment. The process by which the brain creates this illusion has impressed scientists for centuries. Among other things, new research reveals that the brain automatically stabilizes visual stimuli.
Instead of analyzing each image, we perceive an average of what we have seen in the last 15 seconds. Thus, having objects that are similar to each other, our brain deceives us to perceive a stable environment, while “living in the past” can explain why we do not notice small changes that occur over time. If the brain gave us the real picture in real time the world would be a chaos with constant alternations of light, shadow, movement giving us a sense of extreme illusions, while with the delay of the last 15 seconds they give us an impression of our environment that offers stability .
In the video below, the researchers try to illustrate the illusion. The person on the left ages slowly for 30 seconds, however it is very difficult to see the complete change in age and observers usually consider that it ages much slower than it actually ages. Hundreds of volunteers, with an overwhelming majority at the end of the video reported the age of the person who had passed 15 seconds before.
There are negatives and positives in this little “lag” that our brain has. Delay offers us a consistent vision experience, however it has its risks when it comes to absolute accuracy. For example, radiologists look at hundreds of x-rays that look alike. Research has shown that their decisions are based not only on the image they look at now, but also on past ones, which can affect patients.
Our visual system blinds us to abrupt changes, yet this sense of continuity helps us to live in a stable world.
The research was published in Science Advances.
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