Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Researchers say we can all see into the future

From Sci-fi's Dvice blog comes an interesting notion that is bound to send you screaming if you think about it too hard. Consider this:

It takes a tenth of a second for visual information to get from your eyes to your brain, so everyone has the ability to predict what’s going to happen a tenth of a second into the future. That’s what you’re actually seeing, is that prediction. If you weren’t, everything would look like it was recorded a tenth of a second ago.

So we litterally have to predict what is going to happen 10 seconds into the future and make ourselves believe that what we are really doing is seeing everything in real time. The really interesting thing here that Dvice points out is that:

This explains how lots of magic tricks are done. In his research paper, Mark Changizi mentioned 50 types of visual illusions that work because your brain is attempting to predict what will happen 1/10th of a second into the future.

click article title for Dvice article or here for the complete Impact Lab's story

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