Millions of shapes, colors, and ever-changing motion are bombarding our eyes.
This is not an easy task for the brain.
On the other hand, the visual world is constantly changing because of factors. Our eyes, head, and body are frequently in motion and our visual input constantly changes due to blinking.
To get an idea of the shyness of this visual input, place a phone in front of your eyes and record a live video while you are walking around.
Your brain deals with jittery, messy results in every moment of your visual experience.
This can also be seen in the video. The white circle on the right shows potential eye movements, while the blurry blob on the left shows the jumpy visual input.
Seeing doesn't feel like work for us. We don't perceive the fluctuations and visual noise that a video might record.
Our brain creates an illusion of stability. This process has fascinated scientists for centuries and is one of the fundamental questions in vision science.
We discovered a new mechanism that can explain illusory stability.
Over time, the brain smoothes our visual input. We see an average of what we saw in the past 15 seconds instead of analyzing every single snapshot. Our brain tricks us into seeing a stable environment by pulling together objects that are similar to each other.
Living in the past can explain why we don't notice subtle changes over time.
The brain is like a time machine, it keeps sending us back in time. It is like an app that consolidates our visual input every 15 seconds into one impression so that we can handle everyday life.
The world would feel chaotic if our brains were always updating in real time. We felt like we were hallucinating all the time.
We created an illusion to show how the stabilization mechanism works.
It is difficult to notice the full extent of the change in age because the face on the left side ages for 30 seconds in the video. Observers perceive the face to be older than it actually is.
We recruited hundreds of people and asked them to view close-ups of faces morphing chronologically in age in 30-second timelapse videos.
The participants almost always reported the age of the face that was presented 15 seconds before at the end of the video.
The brain sends us back to the previous 10 to 15 seconds when we watch the video because we are constantly biased towards the past.
Humans see earlier versions of the same image because our brain takes about 15 seconds to refresh. This illusion shows that visual smoothing can help with perception.
Procrastination is what the brain is doing. The brain sticks to the past because it is a good predictor of the present because it is too much work.
Information from the past is more efficient, faster, and less work.
The idea that the brain biases our visual perception towards our past experience is known as continuity fields.
Our visual system can sometimes sacrifice accuracy for the sake of a smooth visual experience. When watching a film, we don't notice subtle changes that occur over time, such as the difference between actors and their stunt doubles.
There are positive and negative implications to our brain when we have a slight lag in processing our visual world. The delay is great for preventing us from feeling bombarded by visual input every day, but it can also be dangerous when absolute precision is needed.
A radiologists sees several related images one after the other when examining hundreds of images. When looking at an X-ray, clinicians are asked to identify any anomalies and classify them.
Researchers found that the decisions of radiologists were based on images they had previously seen, which could have grave consequences for patients.
Our visual system is slow to update, which can make us blind to immediate changes, because it grabs on to our first impression.
Our experience of a stable world is promoted by continuity fields. It is important to remember that the judgments we make every day are not completely based on the present, but on what we have seen in the past.
Mauro Manassi is an assistant professor at the University of Aberdeen and David Whitney is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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