Research Claims What We See is A Mash Up the Last 15 Seconds
Don't worry, it's not a lag, it's more like a montage of moments.
Hiya!
I remember the moment the adults in my family decided it was time to take away my grandma’s car keys. It happened after she was stopped and waiting to make a left turn out of her neighborhood — something she’d done a million times — looking both ways for cars. The road looked clear in both directions, so she drove forward… then was nearly t-boned by a car.
It turned out that Grandma developed a blind spot in her vision. Instead of seeing a literal black hole in her vision where the gap is, her brain filled it with an approximate guess based on previous experiences. When she checked for cars coming, the car was in her blind spot, so her brain didn’t see it. Instead, her brain filled the empty space with previously contained imagery of the road — tricking her into believing it was safe to turn left.
This experience seems to align with some new suggestions by researchers that certain visual inputs are delayed by 15 seconds. While the connection between our vision and brain is remarkable, it’s also unnerving to know how easily our brain tricks us.
New Research
The journal Science Advances published a paper titled Illusion of visual stability through active perceptual serial dependence in January 2022. Researchers David Whitney, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, and Mauro Manassi, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Aberdeen, shared a curiosity about the relationship between vision and our brain.
To understand it, open your camera app and begin recording a video. Now, use the screen as your viewfinder while you walk around and look at different things. You’re probably seeing shakey shapes, blurry colors, and jarring motions, which give you an idea of the messy visual input we regularly receive.
So, the researchers wanted to know why and how our vision appears smooth and stable instead of a jittering, blurry mess—especially considering the constant visual bombardments, shifts in head movements, blinking, and light changes.
After conducting their studies, the researchers suggest the brain smooths out our vision over time. Instead of analyzing every individual snapshot of every moment throughout the day, what we experience is actually an average compilation of the previous 15 seconds.
Whitney and Manassi penned an article about their paper in The Conversation where they compare it to a time machine.
“In other words, the brain is like a time machine which keeps sending us back in time. It’s like an app that consolidates our visual input every 15 seconds into one impression so that we can handle everyday life. If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would feel like a chaotic place with constant fluctuations in light, shadow and movement. We would feel like we were hallucinating all the time.”
The researchers created the video below to test their idea and demonstrate how the stabilization mechanism works. They showed the video to hundreds of participants and asked them to state the age of the face at the end of the video.
The participants nearly always said the age of the face from 15 seconds before the video ended. The researchers believe it’s because we’re “biased toward the past” with a “refresh time” of 15 seconds instead of seeing the images in real-time. The illusion helps show how smoothing over time also stabilizes perception.
Now, just to clarify, they don’t mean that we’re living 15 seconds in the past. It’s okay; I was confused too. Thankfully Manassi explained the distinction in the comment section of the Conversation article to a similarly confused reader. The commenter brought up video games and struggled to reconcile a 15-second delay while gaming requires real-time decisions. Then Manassi answered: (the bolding is mine.)
It is not an actual delay (like a lag in the sound of thunder), but an average over time during those 15 seconds. Importantly, this averaging occurs only between similar objects.
For example, if you were playing a multiplayer game, and a player changed identity, you may notice it after a while because in your past you still had the previous player’s identity. You would not be completely stuck to the previous 15 seconds, as the averaging bias is somehow smarter than that and it occurs only between similar identities, features etc.
In other words, what we see isn’t 15-second blocks of time constantly rotating or switching about. It’s more like our brain collects the clear snapshots among the blurry ones to piece together a consistent image of our surroundings, making us slower to notice when similar things change — like a player’s identity or the aging face.
We experience a seamless reality without being overloaded by jarring visual input. However, when precision is needed, skimping the details by relying on our past experiences can result in life-or-death consequences — like in the medical field.
But why do our brains do this?
As mentioned, our brains filter through a ridiculous amount of crap every day, sorting endless sensory signals and determining what to keep or toss. Not just in terms of memories but also experiences. Filtering our vision provides a smooth visual experience, but are there other possible reasons? Well, according to Whitney and Manassi, there is.
What the brain is essentially doing is procrastinating. It’s too much work to constantly deal with every single snapshot it receives, so the brain sticks to the past because the past is a good predictor of the present. Basically we recycle information from the past because it’s more efficient, faster and less work.
Reading this sparked an interesting thought for me. Humans are lazy. We’re incredibly efficient, but that’s mainly because we don’t want to work harder than necessary. Everything we’ve ever achieved has been to make our lives easier — and our brain is no different, for better or worse.
Perspective Shift
The human brain is both incredible and mischievous. While my grandma’s brain tried to protect her vision by filling in the gaps, replacing the car with an empty road also put her in danger. Leading her to believe it was safe. I admit that the thought is a little scary to realize our brain can trick us so completely.
Though this research is a little different than my grandma’s situation. Instead of filling in missing information, it takes us longer to notice changes in our environment because what we see is actually a collection of visual inputs every 15 seconds — a montage of moments. For the most part, it’s not a huge deal if it takes us a little longer to notice subtle changes. But sometimes, noticing details is the difference between life and death.
Still, 15 seconds is a relatively long time. It makes me wonder how much I haven’t noticed in my life. What changes occurred without my conscious observation? Could this explain why humans are slow to change? Because we’re slow to notice when change is happening?
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