Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
I begin this chapter with three outrageous facts:
(1) You are blind every time you move your eyeballs.
(2) You experience reality approximately 120 milliseconds (three film frames) after it has happened.
(3) You are not aware of either of these facts.
I will use these strange but scientifically well-established phenomena to urge the final abandonment of the so-called retinal persistence of vision, which is often used (still!), two hundred years after it was first proposed, as an explanation for why we see motion when we watch a motion picture – which is, after all, just a series of still images.
Using the attributes of the saccade – the jump of the eyeball from one focal point to another – I hope to provide a satisfying replacement for retinal persistence. Cutting to the chase, it will amount to this:
The neurology of saccades, which evolved over hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate sight to smooth out the shifts of attention that happen during the sudden movement of eyeballs, was hijacked and put to use when motion pictures were invented.
more here.
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