I don’t think it’s the brain but rather our consciousness that is limited. Our sensory inputs are always on and processed by the brain, but our consciousness is very picky and also slow.
People can sometimes recall true memories that they weren’t aware of, or react to things they didn’t think of and such.
Consciousness is also somehow lagging behind the actual decision making, but always presents itself as the cause of action.
Sort of like Windows telling you that you removed a USB stick 2 seconds after you did it and was well aware of it happening. Consciousness is like that, except it takes responsibility for it too…
When it encounters something that it didn’t predict, it’ll tell you that “yeah this happened and this is why you did that”. Quite often the explanation for doing something is made up after it happened.
This is a good thing mostly, because it allows you to react faster than having to consider your options consciousnessly. You do not need to or have time to make a conscious decision to dodge a dodgeball, but you’ll still think you did.
… Asked the brain about itself. Typical narcissistic brain behavior, don’t see the other organs doing it.
My bowels have been questioning a lot lately, so it’s not entirely without precedent.
Yea, what about your liver? Have you asked how it feels today?
Basically, yes. Our eyes capture the light that goes into them at 24 frames per second (please correct me if I goofed on that) and the image is upside down.
Our brains turn those images upright, and it also fills in the blanks. The brain basically guesses what’s going on between the frames. It’s highly adapt at pattern recognition and estimation.
My favorite example of this is our nose. Look at you nose. You can look down and see it a little, and you can close one eye and see more of it. It’s right there in the bottom center of our view, but you don’t see it at all everyday.
That’s because it’s always there, and your brain filters it out. The pattern of our nose being there doesn’t change, so your brain just ignores it unless you want to intentionally see it. You can extrapolate that to everything else. Most things the brain expects to see, and does see through our eyes, is kind of ignored. It’s there, but it’s not as important as say, anything that’s moving.
Also, and this is fun to think about, we don’t even see everything. The color spectrum is far wider than what our eyes can recognize. There are animals, sea life and insects that can see much much more than we can.
But to answer more directly, you are right, the brain does crazy heavy lifting for all of our senses, not just sight. Our reality is confined to what our bodies can decifer from the world through our five senses.
the 24 fps thing is one hella myth. our cones and rods send a continuous stream of information, which is blended with past-received information in our perception to remove stuff like the movement from darting your eyes around.
We definitely are seeing things faster than 24 Hz, or we wouldn’t be able to tell a difference in refresh rates above that.
Edit: I don’t think we have a digital, on-off refresh rate of our vision, so fps doesn’t exactly apply. Our brain does turn the ongoing stream of sensory data from our eyes into our vision “video”, but compared to digital screen refresh rates, we can definitely tell a difference between 24 and say 60 fps.
People looking at a strobing light, start to see it as just “on” (not blinking anymore) at almost exactly 60Hz.
In double blind tests, pro gamers can’t reliably tell 90fps from 120.
There is however, an unconscious improvement to reaction time, all the way up to 240fps. Maybe faster.The real benefit of super high refresh rates is the decrease in latency for input. At lower rates the lag between input and the next frame is extremely apparent, above about ~144hz it’s much less noticable.
The other side effect of running at high fps is that when heavy processing occurs and there are frame time lags they’re much less noticable because the minimum fps is still very high. I usually tell people not to pay attention to the maximum fps rather look at the average and min.
Yeah it’s not like frames from a projector. It’s a stream. But the brain skips parts that haven’t changed.
I think i read that fighter pilots need to be able to identify a plane in one frame at 300 fps, and that the theoretical limit of the eye is 1000+ fps.
Though, whether the brain can manage to process the data at 1000+ fps is questionable.
I’m using part of this comment to inform my monitor purchases for the rest of my life.
Generally humans don’t perceive a difference above 60 Hz.
Completely untrue and not even up for debate. You’d know this if you had ever used a high-refresh rate display.
Let me guess, you’ve also bought a Gamer Chair to go with your overpriced 144 Hz display.
24fps vision is a lie told by Hollywood so they can save on film
Also, your eyes dart around and you only see a little patch. You blink. Your brain makes up a nice stable image of the world, mostly consisting of things that your brain think should be there.
How do our brains process reality? Like this.
You can stop time by looking at a clock hand briefly. It’s your brain filling in blanks.
https://www.popsci.com/science/why-do-clock-hands-seem-to-slow-down/
Your brain is constantly processing the inputs from all of your senses and pretty much ignoring them if they fit with what it is already expecting.
Your brain is lazy. If everything seems to fit with what your brain expects then you believe that what you are seing is reality and you generally ignore it.
Generally the mind only focuses on what it believes is salient/interesting/unexpected.
Imagine if we had image sensors that could filter like that. Boom, video 100 times smaller in size. “Autonomous” surveillance cameras running on fractions of the power. Etc. Etc. Just far more efficient.
We do have those things. That’s how many technologies already work.
Yes. We get hints of this now and then when digital TV breaks up and only the moving parts are updating until the next key frame arrives.
I heard a similar thing. But a bit more complicated. It wouldn’t be just the eyes, but all senses used by the brain to edit a filtered vision of reality.
And while the eyes take in everything they’re capable of, the brain only focuses on what it considers important. Which is probably false due to the many, many times one will search for something within their cone of vision, yet are unable to see it.
So while I’m not sure of the details, the brain can be thought of as choosy with what it shows.
The theory you’re referring to sounds like the free energy principle (or a variation of it).
And in the end “reality” is just excitations in quantum fields. And you “perceive” mostly electromagnetic forces.
