Visualizing What is About to Happen

Technocrat

Visualizing What is About to Happen

zogger

Fri May 16 17:20:16 -0700 2008

Science

Researchers think they can now explain exactly what various optical illusions work. They theorize it is because the brain has evolved to do a slight fast forward projection on things we are seeing, it anticipates what should be there well before, by a tenth of a second, it could possibly arrive via the speed of the visual cortex. Basically it is a compensation for lag time.

.."“Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don’t match reality. There has been great success at discovering and documenting countless visual illusions. There has been considerably less success in organizing them,” says Changizi, who is lead author on the paper. “My research focused on systematizing these known incidents of failed future seeing into a ‘periodic table’ of illusion classes that can predict a broad pattern of the illusions we might be subject to.”"

ed.z.: also could help explain why feints are so good in fighting, and why professional car racers can maneuver at such high speeds and *not* get in wrecks all the time, the other drivers there are also anticipating what should be common actions so they can stay in synch better and not mess up. A few centimeters at 200 MPH are just way too fast for any human eyeball/brain interface without "something else", and this looks like the researchers found the something else.

Déjà vu

John Dalton

Sat May 17 00:47:18 -0700 2008

Perhaps this is linked to Sleek Geek's explanation of Déjà vu? In one of their episodes they gave an explanation that the brain receives two feeds from the eyes. A subconscious low quality feed with a low latency and the "normal" detailed feed with a higher latency. The low latency path is used when we need to jump out of the way of a sabre tooth tiger or similar in a hurry. Under some conditions the low latency path gets through to our conscious thoughts and so we get a sense that it is the second time we are looking at a scene.

Déjà vu

Thornton

Mon May 19 05:44:58 -0700 2008

I can believe this based on my Aikido training. My sensei always said "Look at Mt. Fuji", especially when we were doing multiple attacker drills. Rather than focusing on one opponent and having to switch from one to the next, focusing on something in the distance makes everything in the foreground one wide angle picture, albeit low fidelity, and you are able to sense more movement from more directions and make quicker responses.