8/21: Eye tracking study

[kisrael]

Yeah, your periphreal vision is surpisingly bad (except at detecting sudden movement, at which it does very well) but it's hard to realize this because of the way our eyes are constantly and effortlessly darting. You have to rig up weird experiments along the lines of "ok, keep your eyes fixed forward, now tell me what's the suit of this card I'm holding off to the side."

Our mental picture of the world is 'faked' to a higher degree than we know. I think this may explain some of the oddities of dreams; since we're trained to make reality out of messy data, those systems get used as we dream to make some kind of sense of the bogus data our eyes are sending us. (I'm not really certain about how backed up the assertions are) Like, one of the reasons people fly a lot in dreams is that our eyes sweep down, and the data sent resembles what it would look like if we were hurled upwards. Like I said, take that idea with a grain of salt, but it is kind of interesting.