Science Sub-Journal: Scientific Explanation of "Temporary Visual Blindness"

Just like our social media, our brains are constantly uploading rich visual stimuli

The findings, published Jan.

"If our brains were constantly updating in real time, the world would be a jittery place, with shadows," said David Whitney, the study's senior author and professor of psychology, neuroscience and visual sciences at UC Berkeley.

Instead, "our brain is like a time machine

In this study, Manassey and Whitney investigated the mechanism behind variation blindness, in which we don't notice subtle changes over time, such as between actors and their stunt doubles.

They recruited about 100 study participants through a crowdsourcing platform and had them watch close-ups of faces that changed according to age or gender in 30-second time-lapse videos

The images in the video don't include head or facial hair, just the eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, chin and cheeks, so there are few clues, like a receding hairline, that can be used to tell the age of the face

When asked to identify the faces they saw after watching the video, participants almost unanimously chose the frame they saw halfway through in the video, rather than the last frame, which represented the most recent image

“It can be said that our brain is procrastinating, and the workload of constantly updating the image is too much, so it can only stay in the past, because the past can predict the present very well

In fact, the findings suggest that there is a slight lag in the brain's processing of visual stimuli, which is both positive and negative

"This delay is great to prevent the bombardment of visual input we feel in our daily lives, but it can also have life-or-death consequences when precision surgery is required," Manassei said

Altogether, changeblindness reveals how the continuity field is a purposeful function of consciousness, and what it means for humans, Whitney said

"We're not really blind," he said

Magazine

Science Advances

DOI

10.