UNITED STATES.- A research team from the University of California in Berkeley, USA, has discovered that the human brain does not perceive images in real time. Given this, the study details that the images are received with a 15-second delay and the brain shows images from the past since their update takes that long. Thus, the mechanism is known ascontinuity field” in the field of science.
Due to the above, this function grants a visual stability of what the eyes can see. “If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would be a jumpy place with constant fluctuations of shadows, light, and motion, and we would feel like we were hallucinating all the time,” said study lead author and professor of psychology, neuroscience and vision sciences at the University of California, David Whitney.
Meanwhile, Mauro Manassi, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, pointed out that the brain It’s like “a time machine”. The images it sends are from the past and therefore it is as if the visual input is updated every 15 seconds, just like social media feeds. In addition, it was inferred that this effect has been studied after examining the mechanisms of “change blindness”.
In this context, it was detailed that to achieve this, about 100 participants were recruited who observed close-up images of faces that changed for 30 seconds. Only the eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, chin and cheeks were visible and, after completing this, they were asked to identify the last face they glimpsed. And to their surprise, the group mostly chose the one in the middle of the video.
“You could say that our brain is procrastinating,” Whitney stressed before adding that: “It is too much work to constantly update the images, so it sticks to the past, because the past is a good predictor of the present. We recycle information from the past because it is faster, more efficient and requires less work.” Finally, the results of this study have been published in the journal Science Advances.
