| As someone with a PhD in neuroscience I like the sentiment of this post but it’s off the mark in some key ways. From a high level @foone is right, our eyes and visual system are nothing like a camera. Our visual system constructs an internal 3D model of the world, our “perception”, given observations in the form of the electrical activity in our photoreceptor (rod and cone) cells. It tries to do this in a way that balances energy use and accuracy of the model. This simple concept can actually be used to explain a lot things that may seem like ‘hacks’ as @foone put it. One example: Saying Saccades are a problem is misleading, they likely evolved to give us higher acuity (resolution) vision without having to pay the energy cost of a larger fovea [1, 2, 3]. They also likely allow us to see color more accurately outside of our fovea. I also really don’t buy this time-shifting idea, although other neuroscientists would probably disagree. As @foone said our eyes are not cameras, our perception is our brain hallucinating an internal 3D model of the world. It knows what data to incorporate into the model and what not to, i.e. a blurry saccade is not a good representation of the world. If you want to read about how this can be framed with bayesian statistics you can read one of my favorite papers from my advisor [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Function [2] Ratnam, Kavitha, et al. "Benefits of retinal image motion at the limits of spatial vision." Journal of vision 17.1 (2017): 30-30. [3] Anderson, Alexander G., et al. "A neural model of high-acuity vision in the presence of fixational eye movements." 2016 50th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers. IEEE, 2016. [4] Olshausen, Bruno A. "27. Perception as an Inference Problem." The cognitive neurosciences (2014): 295-304. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bb00/42b5e48feff89a95182c63... |