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by int_19h 1835 days ago
But that's not how it works, at all. There's nothing "flickering" to draw your attention to one particular bit etc; you still perceive the whole image at once.

The closest I can come to describing this is a higher resolution - like viewing the same photo, but you go from 640x480 to 4K, and from 256 to 32-bit color. Indeed, when consuming any sort of digital visual input, resolution differences (and compression artifacts etc) become much more noticeable, so perhaps this isn't merely an analogy. But the same also extends to sounds and even taste - it's not that things taste different, for example, but you can more readily identify and appreciate all the overtones that combine to create a particular taste, without subtracting from the experience of the whole.

This, by the way, is why watching fractal animations [1] can be so fascinating in that state - you still perceive the fractal as a whole, but you also simultaneously see the tiny details, and can observe that they faithfully correspond to the larger image, without having to individually focus on each.

[1] E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ (best viewed at 4K)