Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Day

…and then covers its tracks so that you don’t notice:

Now you see it…

The world you experience is not an accurate representation of reality. Your brain actively constructs your perception, editing your memories as they happen and manipulating your sense of time. What you perceive as the present moment is actually a processed and reconstructed version of past events.

Nor is your vision anywhere near as detailed as it seems. Only a small central portion is in high resolution, while the rest is blurry. Your brain compensates for this by filling in the gaps with its best guess and/or what it believes is there from the last time you saw it. Your eyes constantly make rapid movements called saccades, and during these (i.e. when your eyes are moving), your vision momentarily shuts down—making you effectively blind for (in total, if we add them all up) about two hours every day (according to this video, anyway; our calculations find it to be more than that, but you get the idea). Your brain stitches together the visual input, creating a seamless experience that feels continuous (much like an animation reel composed of still images).

Why does it do this?

It’s because your senses operate at different speeds—light reaches your eyes in nanoseconds, sound in milliseconds, and touch signals in tens of milliseconds. However, your brain processes these inputs together, creating the illusion of a smooth and simultaneous experience. In reality, what you perceive as the present is actually a delayed and selectively edited version of the past.

Instead of showing you the world as it is, your brain predicts what will happen next. In high-speed situations, such as playing table tennis, if your brain relied on past sensory data, you wouldn’t react in time. Instead, it estimates an object’s future position and presents that prediction as your visual reality.

This also means that because your brain effectively sees things slightly sooner than you do, your brain has already prepared multiple possible responses and when an event occurs, it quickly selects the most likely course of action, deleting the alternatives before you are even aware of them. By the time you think you’ve made a decision, your body has already acted.

This goes for more than just the things we think of as requiring quick reactions!

Walking is a complex task that involves multiple time layers—your brain processes past feedback, assesses your current state, and predicts future movements. That’s why it was something that cyberneticists found difficult to recreate for a very long time. If something unexpected happens, like slipping cartoon-style on a banana peel, your body reacts before you consciously notice the danger. Your spinal cord and brainstem trigger emergency reflexes to stabilize you before your conscious mind even catches up.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Take care!