Posted on 03/18/2020 7:24:11 PM PDT by MtnClimber
It might be the best-studied of all our senses, but surprises about the way our vision works just keep on coming. Recent research has startling and also salutary lessons about how we see.
Your brain makes up a lot of what you “see”
Whether you’re walking around or sitting at a desk, you no doubt feel that you can see pretty clearly all around you. Yes, so you might be looking ahead as you walk through a park, say, but you can see a rich world of grass, trees and people to either side of you. Well, you might be seeing it — but that doesn’t mean it’s all actually there. As research published in Psychological Science in 2016 revealed, your brain uses information from the clearly-focused central region of the visual field to fill in detail in the relatively data-poor periphery. In fact, as the lead author, Marte Otten at the University of Amsterdam, commented at the time, “Our findings show that, under the right circumstances, a large part of the periphery may be a visual illusion”. It’s what’s known as a “uniformity illusion”, and you can try it for yourself at www.uniformillusion.com. However, not all peripheral vision is the same… work published the following year suggests that we all have “good” and “bad” regions. Some of the participants in this study, led by John Greenwood at UCL, had sharper left-side than right-side peripheral vision, for example. And this could have real-world effects, says Greenwood — someone searching a room for missing keys, for example, could fail to spot those keys if they’re on their “bad” side.
It’s easy to make someone hallucinate (without drugs)
(Excerpt) Read more at digest.bps.org.uk ...
When I look at democrat political rallies I see lots of crazy people.
And of course this all came abut by chance, Darwin said so.
"That's what you get for driving a brown station wagon, with a white license plate, and a luggage rack."
Yet your peripheral vision can detect dimmer stars than your direct vision. Look directly at Orion, or the Pleiades, then look at something nearby—you’ll see stars that ‘weren’t there’ when you looked directly at them. You can make them disappear by looking at them.
I read a study a while back where they had people wear special glasses that could track the movements of their eyes precisely, and they found that when two people encounter each other, both eyes of each person simultaneously scan one eye of the other person (I think they said the right eye)
It happens so quickly that we don’t know we do it, and it isn’t noticeable, but the instruments picked it up. You focus for a brief second on one single eye of the other person.
They ended up testing a bunch of other animals of all sizes and types (even including chimpanzees) and they only found one other creature they tested that does that exact same thing: You guessed it...dogs. When a dog sees a human face, they focus on the right eye for a split second just like we do.
Additionally, they found that dogs are cued into humans in ways no other animal is. They did an experiment where they would put a treat under an upturned bucket, and have a little shell game with two identical, empty upturned buckets.
A human would gesture towards the bucket with the treat, and try to get the animal to go to it and get the invisible treat by overturning the bucket. They tried it with chimps, birds, cats, etc.
None of them would take the cue of the human pointing to the bucket with the treat under it. Except for dogs.
They took a little puppy, and the puppy picked it up immediately when the person pointed at it, literally on the first try.
Further, the person didn’t even have to point, they could simply look. More remarkable, they didn’t even have to linger with the look. They could just flash their eyes for a split second at the bucket with the treat, and the puppy would go unerringly to it.
Dogs have lived around humans so long that they are tuned into us, emotionally and physically. So they are a little bit different than other animals in this respect.
Interesting. My two dogs trained me to feed them!
In real low light conditions you have to look off to the side of something to see it.
That’s all fascinating.
LOL, my two cats try...
“Further, the person didn’t even have to point, they could simply look. More remarkable, they didn’t even have to linger with the look. They could just flash their eyes for a split second at the bucket with the treat, and the puppy would go unerringly to it.”
My dog does this. She can know where to go or where something is by my eyes or fingers
I just thought it was something animals did...should have known cats aren’t going to cooperate
I used to have a wonderful female Golden Retriever named “Ruby”.
That dog LOVED water. We had a pool, and she knew she was not allowed in the pool without permission, so she would lay down at the edge with her two front paws hanging over the edge, put her head down on her paws and just look at you.
Those expressive Golden Retriever dark, almond shaped eyes, and the accompanying twitching of the eyebrows above them.
She would lay there for long stretches and just gaze at you. You quietly could say, at any time “Go ahead.” and she would be in the water before you could blink your eyes. Other times, you could point, and in she would go!
They ended up testing a bunch of other animals of all sizes and types (even including chimpanzees) and they only found one other creature they tested that does that exact same thing: You guessed it...dogs. When a dog sees a human face, they focus on the right eye for a split second just like we do.
...
Yet humans are more closely related to rats than dogs.
You are the only other person I’ve heard note this. I’ve mentioned it to eye doctors and they listened politely, ignorantly and without curiosity.
in the human male brain
the exact image of the object
that is being searched for
perfectly overlays the image
received through the optic nerve
so that the two images cancel each other out.
I call this phenomena male pattern blindness.
7
Our eyes are just light detectors.
Our brains interpret the light detected by our retinas.
Our eyes don’t “see things”, but our brains do.
Quirk #8: When I look at a beautiful woman. I see (censored).
Sounds like a line out of a Carlos Castaneda tale. You can look at something but do you see?
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