Your brain is scamming you

you know I was on Twitter the other day and something very interesting caught my eye it was a tweet storm by somebody named foon which spoke about how crazy our human brains are and you know usually all the content of my podcast is pretty original but I had to talk about this I have to talk about it because it just tells you how the brain is so unreliable you see the reason we invented measuring devices whether that be a scale calculator or whether that be you know weights is

because the human brain can't be trusted to make any accurate measurement here's an example so there is a physical problem with our eyes we move them in very short fast bursts and these are known as circuits right they're very quick synchronized movements but when we actually do this when you move our eyes quickly our vision goes blurry having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes it's obviously a stupid idea so what our brain does is it removes it from our memory so what phone talks about is that if you are an engineer there are two obvious things you can do the first thing is every time this movement you just make your vision go black and many VR games do this in fact it's so when you're in VR the edges of your screen actually go black during fast moment to prevent you from feeling nausea and feeling dizzy the second idea is to just keep showing the last thing we saw just before the movement right so we just keep this image of whatever happened just before the quick movement and we continue replaying the head inside of the brain both are good options they have stupid downsides and you know it works if everything worked in order but your brain does neither of these two options it doesn't take any what it does is first it keeps your visual system on pause you're not seeing blackness or even anything you're just not seeing and then when you finish this fast movement of your it's in your at your new position it just removes whatever you saw over the last few seconds that's what it does it that actually just eliminates the fact that your vision was paused it makes you forget the fact that it paused vision so what it does is it as soon as you finish your first moment it shows you the new image but then time shifts it backward so it seems like you are seeing it the whole time your eyes were moving and your brain is not something that has a consistent clock and that's why this works and your brain lies to you all the time just to make simple things like this work which is why I feel like if somebody actually made the brain if there was actually a hacker that created it he or she is not a very good one now

one way you can actually test this is if you see or watch a normal analog clock that is a clock with the seconds and an hour sign and you just look at it and then look away just for a second and then look back at the second hand so just look at that the hand that keeps moving every second look away for a few seconds or a microsecond and look back it seems like it take longer than a second to move and then it resumes moving as normal you are actually literally pausing time your visual system just lied to you about how long time is just to cover up the physical limitations of that chemical camera that you have in your eyes and the word chemical camera ops is something that foon that's what he calls our eyes and I find that that's it's very funny name but you know chemistry is one part of how your eyes work obviously it is a filling physical solid organ it's called saccadic masking this entire process right and this particular thing where your brain shows you an after image it's called Chronos tasses right and it happens for about a half a second right just so that you don't feel nausea and you don't feel the blurring sensation of your eyes moving fast now one question you might be asking in fool-ass himself is what your vision pausing for half a second have all kinds of weird effects on moving objects like why don't they appear to and the answer your brain puts out is even more hacky right just to avoid you seen blurry starter objects your brain runs you through even more hacks right if you've got a clock where the second hand doesn't pick but move smoothly where you know that it's not a per second click click it's ER it keeps running continuously you won't see it because your brain recognizes it's a moving object and adjust what you see to make sure it's the right thing it's only really obvious with periodically moving things that move according to metronome like that of a seconds hand which moves every second you know it's easy to think of your eyes and visual system as some camera that's just dumping of feed onto your brain and then flipping it upside down but that's not the case because what you think you see and what your eyes actually see are too varies exceptionally different separate things the big obvious one is the blind spot we know that we have a blind spot there's an area you can actually go to google and type blind spot experiment with your eyes and there is a spot where you actually can't see at all and you can obviously Google this experiment is hard for me to explain and again your brain stitches and image there it's just your brain does so many happy things just to make sure you have a consistent worldview and it's not optimal or well created at all you know this is

one of the reasons why humans invented the concept of measuring devices there is no such thing as objective reality because your brain basically stitches everything together your brain is only a device concerned with survival and it only shows you what you need to see to survive and get your food and run away from predators and reproduce so do you know what the best measuring device is if you want to see something accurately it's a camera that we literally invented this device to see something more accurately than your brain doing hacky stuff over everything you already see one more thing phone ads is that you know lasers can do a lot of damage to your eyes but laser damage even when it deals quite a bit of damage to your eyes your brain will still continue to cover it up so you can actually damage a small spot of your retina and your brain will still cover it up right because that's what it does best there was an experiment back in 1890 where somebody wore glasses made with mirrors to flip their vision after about eight days the vision system started flipping it backwards and they could see a normal image okay so that's the weird part like your brain literally knows how to adjust to things right and even if you screw up your vision because your vision is so important your brain will either stitch things in or reset your vision or work with any filters or parallels you put just so you can see a consistent image so if you guys want to know more or read some sci-fi on saccadic masking there's actually this crazy sci-fi novel by Peter Watts it's called blind side it's about where humans encounter an alien race who can move very fast and the only time they move is when you actually have Sur cards where you actually move your eyes quickly so if you're just standing at one place then these aliens don't move at all but if you move your eyes that's when the aliens move so imagine a situation where you know you're just staring straight and there's this crazy alien and it's not moving at all but you know that whenever you move your eyes the next second you move it the alien is gonna be much closer to your face so if you move your eyes twice the aluminide next to your face so it's a brilliant novel to read you guys should read it I read it after you know going through that tweet thread that foon put out and you should check out foon on Twitter but that's the cool part your brain is a goddamned liar