Comment by wasabi991011
7 days ago
Found a source of others are interested: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-movement...
7 days ago
Found a source of others are interested: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/fixational-eye-movement...
You shame me into making the effort to quote from the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Dueling_Neuros...
> Beyond simple line-detecting neurons, [David] Hubel and [Torsten] Wiesel also discovered neurons that love to track motion. Some of these neurons got all excited for up/down motion, others buzzed for left/right movement, and still others for diagonal action. And it turned out that these motion-detecting neurons outnumbered the simple line-detecting neurons. They outnumbered them by a lot, actually. This hinted at something that no one had ever discovered before — that the brain tracks moving things more easily than still things. Why? Because it's probably more critical for animals to spot moving things (predators, prey, falling trees) than static things, which can wait. In fact, our vision is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all. To see something stationary, our brains have to scribble our eyes very subtly over its surface. Experiments have proved that if you artificially stabilize an image on the retina with a combination of special contact lenses and microelectronics, the image will vanish.
If you've never seen the optical illusion, it is stunning.
You stare at the center (unmoving) dot in a moving field. The field remains; the dot fades away - and POPS back the second your eyes move.
Your unconscious, constant "jiggling" of your eyes is called saccadal movement. Without it, only moving things would be visible - which is true for frogs.
That reminds me of the one 'trick' I was able to play on myself with a windshield mounted GPS. Placing it just so in the overlapping vision that it effectively becomes transparent from the brain's compositing of the two images.