Serious question : why do publishers break down their blog posts into umpteen tweeted microblogs? Do the engagement web algorithms give preference to the number of tweets in a thread? I see this is becoming more of a trend (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32296873).
If I tweet the 587,287 words of Tolstoy's War & Peace are more people inclined to read it, or at least have it come across their feed?
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
I highly doubt that, driving is dangerous because of: ego, technical failures, carelessness, sleep deprivation and other human factors. Probably our visual imperfections are the least important things to blame.
My meaning is that, for example, ego and carelessness are tied into our visual system. People believe they are more attentive and have better reactions than they actually have.
It's not just saccades, it is the entire system of vision and all of the approximations that the brain is doing in order to process the information. The twitter thread only goes into a couple things. There is also inattentional blindness, which happens all the time in driving due to distractions.
We are using a system that was grown, trained and optimized for a ~80kg mostly-water biped with full proprioception and 5 senses to move a ~1900kg metal quadruped using only vision and hearing.
A car routinely reaches 120 km/h. The fastest human who ever existed, Usain Bolt, can only sustain a third of that for ~10 seconds.
Anecdata: Just a few days ago I was entering a road after checking really carefully for absence of traffic (I had a heavy trailer attached and knew I needed some more time). Visibility on the left was excellent, but on the right not so much, so I waited for the right side to clear... look left, also clear, great... quickly check right again, still all clear.
I was surprised by the car coming from the right honking at me after I entered the lane, because I was 100% sure that it wasn't there before and could not have been "hiding" behind the A-pillar. Maybe they were too fast, but now I think it's realistically possible that my perception tricked me because the glance to the right was too quick. Will definitely adjust the timing for that.
Yes! This is why you need to look twice at everything, esp. at intersections, while also moving your head. If you do a simple glance, your brain will be perfectly happy to show you a nice empty road, ignoring the incoming vehicle that it didn't have time to properly see. (I was actually taught this when I got my motorcycle license.)
Not really, safe driving is not about split second decisions.
Cars have a lot of inertia, at highway speeds, it takes several seconds to stop your car, and your ability to avoid obstacles is limited. Even with instant reactions, it won't make much of a difference, the car can't do better.
So driving is more about planning what you are going to do for the next 10 seconds and making sure nothing bad can happen during that time period, if things are not sure, take defensive action (slow down, ...). In fact, most good drivers don't pay attention to what's just in front of them, they can't do anything about it anyways. Instead, they will continuously focus their attention on what comes next and act accordingly.
The tone of this is grating. That aside, I don't think this mechanism is all that surprising. Inferring the previous state of things helps you better predict its next state.
> Written as though it's competing for the attention of fourteen-year-olds against meme scrolls, video games and online porn.
Well, technically they are. Only not just teens. Attention spans have gotten shorter; I doubt that many of my friends can make it through that without checking their phone at least once.
I've noticed the second hand "freezing" on a quartz watch when I glance at it since I was a kid. When I asked adults about it they didn't understand what I'm talking about and had no explanation at all. Weird, fascinating stuff.
Wondering whether watched kettles never boiling is a similar effect, only at a larger scale.
Time as we experience it is an illusion bordering on insanity, actually everything we perceive seems to be such a freaking illusion it's mind boggling the whole thing works at all.
wow this is crazy. I had forgotten until now but, as a child, I remember looking at my watch and when the second hand finally ticked thinking "that was way longer than a second".
Same here. I remember seeing this as a kid and being perplexed, but haven't thought about it until reading it now. This is sooo interesting, I wonder how much stuff like this we have hidden away.
Sometimes it's amazing to me that kids trust grownups at all. Those plastic little brains don't filter out dozens or hundreds of things that adults just stopped thinking about because they're so overloaded with other worries. Everything from the sensory, to cultural 'norms' that may not make sense, like casual racism or sexism.
This shows up time and again in media where there are magical creatures that only interact with children. Everything from adults losing the ability to see them (Totoro has two separate classes of invisible creatures), to happenstance (Arrietty is accidentally seen by the boy, because she makes a bad assumption).
Ya, psychedelics are certainly "in the neighborhood" of this problem, but I'm thinking quite a bit different scope. Most people would probably think I'm insane for thinking about it in the way I do, as opposed to "Oh, well that's just the way people are, there's nothing you can do!". It's kinda one of those "fish don't realize they are swimming in water" types of things.
I can say that part of my litany on expanding your horizons is that the more things I try to learn, the more I learn about learning. Some skills are a lot like software, or sometimes I feel software should be more like them. But then there are things like tai chi that is just nothing like the intellectual pursuits I’ve occupied myself with. Those are “safe” in some ways that as I get older I see as a trap.
I would sometimes catch the seconds hand of our bathroom clock going backwards - but it only ever happened the moment I looked at it.
Nowadays I know why - the seconds hand would vibrate a bit after every movement, and if my eyes "saw" it going backward for a fraction of a second after focusing on it, the brain would complete that to "yep, it just went back a second".
Ok, I've noticed the same effect with music and yawning. I'm musically inclined and have pretty good rhythm and it seems to me that songs seem to change tempo when I yawn. Maybe the same type of thing is in effect here; my brain is time traveling somehow.
I've read about this many times, I don't really believe it..
If I move my gaze quickly from one spot to another I distinctly see the movement as blurry trail..
I'll believe that people ignore it, or do not pay particular attention to it, but I don't believe they _can't_ see it..
You can become aware of it, or ignore it. Just like you can become aware of your heartbeat, and even influence it.
When I was a kid, I was fascinated with trying to control my heart. Even nearly 40 years later, I’m aware of my heart and it’s beating 24/7 and I can’t turn it off. I’m curious if you maybe did something as a kid that made you hyper-aware of your vision?
If you move your gaze quickly, yes. Just start erratically moving your eyes and it seems your brain can't keep up and everything will be a blur.
But also keep in mind that even when you're looking at a stationary object, your eyes tend to move a lot. If you noticed the blur from tiny movements too, you'd have a very hard time seeing anything. Reading would be quite difficult, for example.
I believe you're wrong about your belief. As a kid I already noticed that, when looking at a watch, there is a chance that the first second takes too long.
And my vision always stays sharp during movement, no blurry tails around anything when moving the eyeballs. Even when "looking" for it and making wild eye movements. But I feel like things become a little bit more detailed (left from me is a window, so that might just be the pupils adjusting).
That's not to say that you're lying about what you're seeing; but it is quite possible both perceptions are possible ;-)
I see the blurry trail once my eyes stop somewhere, not while it's moving. Specially if I was looking at a bright object.
I think for these basic universal perception stuff it's much more certain to refrain from thinking your brain is that different. Most likely it's also filling up your expected perception of a trail.
I vaguely remember learning in school that the natives who saw ships arrive across the Atlantic for the first time saw the ships made of clouds because they had never seen anything like it before.
No idea if it was a fact or myth, but it’s always stuck with me that so much of our understanding and what we see is based on what we expect and not on reality.
I suppose a ship with a lot of large, white, billowy sails against a clear blue sky would look a lot like clouds.
Edit: I wonder, though, if native people didn't just use the word "cloud" because they did not have a word for "sail", and that was the closest thing they looked like.
I've read that there are native languages out there with some large number of words for certain shades of color, and no words for other colors. Speakers of the language can very reliably distinguish the colors they have words for with high accuracy, but can't tell the colors they don't have words for apart very well at all.
It doesn't quite land the same way to have to explain it long-form, but...
I remember learning years ago about an experiment some researchers did where they anesthetized some test subjects' eye muscles (don't remember how), bolted them into a frame so their heads couldn't move, and positioned mirrors above that could be moved with a handle.
What this test setup found was that as long as the mirrors were constantly moving (even just a tiny bit), the participants could generally speaking see completely normally. But as soon as the mirrors stopped moving, the participants reported that their vision fairly rapidly went completely grey.
(The ba-dum-tss here is the "completely reliable" in your comment... :D)
I don't think the optic system in the brain is the only aspect that is "change-stimulated". A bit of a pet theory is that a lot of thought processes are quite similar at the low (and not so low) level.
I'm hoping to come across that study at some point, just not sure what to Google.
But my favourite one of these when your vision of something doesn't go away--viewing these test images for a few minutes can alter your visual perception involuntarily for months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect
wtf, I didn't know that waking total paralysis was something that's experimented on in humans. It's impossible to search for too, being camouflaged completely by sleep paralysis.
> Before the succinylcholine was administered an arterial tourniquet was placed on the right arm, thus preventing local blood flow and paralysis. This procedure made it possible for JKS to communicate by flexing his hand even during total paralysis.
They found lots of other weird effects when trying to move one's eyes that are partially or fully paralysed, like feeling that the entire world is moving in the wrong direction, being able to see during saccades, and afterwards consciously perceiving an object as being in one direction but reaching somewhere entirely different when trying to touch it.
Wow, thanks for finding that PDF! I would not have had the first clue where to start.
In the Fading section on page 5 there's actually a reference to "An Active Feedback System for Stabilizing Visual Images" (1975, DOI 10.1109/TBME.1972.324155), and going and reading *that* is actually making me question my memory of what I originally took note of - I remember a bit about mirrors, I think there might have been a mention of a person's head being secured, and the part with the handles was my own conjecture (I (again) think that the setup described that the mirrors were moved, but I'm not 100% sure). I'm wondering if this was the study that was being referenced??
Thanks! The linked paper and the reference paper are both extremely interesting *adds to collection*
And it makes total sense that local anesthetic would be used to achieve paralysis, that's one brute force method lol
Troxler's fading is infuriatingly annoying (mumbled in biology's general direction), like the "L R" blind-spot test; while I think need to go stare at the McCollough effect for a bit longer, the test pattern was ever so faintly blue O.o
(What was that "humor-related task not presented here"? Why even mention it, and in the abstract too? Studying jokes so bad that they had to paralyse their subjects to tell them?)
You can do this any time. Just look at one point for a minute or two. It doesn't take very long to set in. I discovered this by myself back in primary school (christ, imagine how boring the lessons must have been).
It's somewhat difficult to avoid moving your gaze involuntarily, but it's ok if your eyes saccade just a tiny bit once in a while, the effect will still work.
Another interesting thing is that while everything fades to gray, if you offset your vision by a tiny bit, you'll see this weird emboss effect, where edges of objects are strengthened. It's hard to explain, but it somehow kinda makes sense to me in terms of an image transformation:
I can confirm this as well, discovered in a similar way. For me I notice objects start to fade into grey in the periphery. Another cool thing is that blinking seems to reset it for just a second or so and then things fade back to grey instantly.
> if you offset your vision by a tiny bit, you'll see this weird emboss effect, where edges of objects are strengthened.
That sounds like an FFMPEG stream with dropped keyframes, where you see a solid image then you see the changed parts of the next scene start moving but only the changed parts. It's the same mechanism in a way.
I've spent time staring as still as I can at things and tthis never happened for me. All I get is pulsating and artifacts like floating "invisible lines"
I know you’re joking, but this effect you described actually is just another trick our brains play to help us survive in the world. We believe that only we are free from this illusion.
I think it is not just plausible but likely that some world views are more accurate than others, and that various techniques/frameworks can provide not overly difficult means to improve one's approach....but, it is also very easy to wind up with a misleading one, often due to unrealized/unrealizable axioms.
Sounds like a false equivalence. The contradiction here is between our physical rendition of a phenomenon (like the image being rendered upside-down on the retina due to optics) and experience. We don't have a physical description of belief systems or philosophical views (nor we can), so I don't see how the sarcastic remark applies to those contexts.
Cognitive biases exist in a variety of contexts. The phenomenon of saccadic masking doesn't imply the existence of those other biases logically, but TheOtherHobbes makes a pertinent generalisation, imo.
Like I briefly mention in another comment, there is a point in claiming that what mind does is precisely to constantly deceive itself, yes. But the original comment sounds like hooking up to some factoids to bulk dismiss religious beliefs and meaning as illusions.
This is completely arbitrary when you think about it. Why would the physical orientation of the brain and its inputs necessarily have to have any correlation with anything? You don't expect it to have any meaning whether you plug in an HDMI cable vertically or horizontally, or what direction your RAM chips face. If someone turned your brain sideways or upside down while keeping the "cables" in tact you wouldn't even know it.
Well, there's nothing I disagree with in your statement, but am also not sure how to fit it within the previous exchange. OP was implying that, because there could be cases where the description of a phenomenon contrasts with the direct experience of it (such as the image being "flipped" due to the law of optics), then we are always deceived. I disagree with that characterization because either we say that mind always deceives itself (I can work with that statement) or you can't exclusively point out world views and beliefs, because in those cases we don't have a physical representation to contrast them with, therefore it's a non-sequitur.
I guess it doesn't contradict what you've said, but one of the tweets from the author of the main thread does repeat the cliche that our vision "should" be upside down because of the eye thing, which I've seen repeated a lot.
It's amazing how much our brain does in the background to smooth out processing because it can't handle all of the data coming in. This example several others (the one where you look at the center dot and all others disappear - briefly mentioned in this twitter thread also, the one where you stare between two sets of rapidly updating photos of celebrities..but after a few, your brain gives up and just sort of makes them all look like ogres, etc).
Awesome stuff and I will always do every one of these silly things.
This phenomenon made me convinced I was unable to move my eyes as a child. I thought I had some strange condition where I could move my focus without my eyeballs moving.
I remember my elementary school teacher saying "don't roll your eyes at me" and me trying to explain I couldn't move my eyes and her awkwardly going "right..." Then continued to believe it for another few years.
I discovered this when I accidentally performed an experiment that showed how paying attention to a bright light in my peripheral vision without moving my eyes caused my pupils to constrict. That was after I became aware that my pupil size affected how blurry things were from nearsightedness (the same effect as in cameras).
If I get really close to the mirror, so close I can barely focus, look at my dominant eye, then look at the general direction of my non dominant eye, but trying to focus some distant object, I can see it moving.
If you watch your eyes in the mirror and move your head, your eyes appear to do an incredible job of tracking using eye muscles. Are they actually? Or are they actually tracking jerkily and it appears smoothed due to saccadic masking?
It is possible to train yourself to do that. I'd suggest starting with the corners of the room, horizontally, where the ceiling meets the wall. Taking your eyes slightly out of focus helps too. You will fail often. The goal is to minimize saccades.
If you are not following a pre-existing "line", it gets exponentially harder.
I used to play with this as a kid. I have eye floaters[0] that tend to drift down to the bottom of my eyes, so I would saccade my eyes up to bring them to the center of my vision, then focus on the floaters and smoothly watch them on the way down (which actually just kept them centered since I was matching the tracking rate to their falling speed). I was kind of a weird kid.
Dennet's Consciousness Explained doesn't do what the title suggests, but it is great for stuff like this. I think there's at least one section on the brain retroactively time-stamping past events.
I’ve noticed that the speedometer or rpm gauge can sometimes move erratically when I’m making eye movements while driving. At first I thought the engine or the instruments were broken (I drive a crappy car). Since first reading this thread, it makes sense that’s saccadic masking instead. It’s pretty cool!
The craziest thing about this is that it’s effectively an attack vector for any adversary to be active within that time window given it can measure eye movements or predict it. I’ve come across some material that shows some ML/NN stuff was trained on it to validate if it could pass human perception (yes, easily).
There's a pretty common street fighting move of stomping with the forward foot while you throw a punch. An untrained opponent will glance down and you pop them during the saccade. It's even explicitly part of the "proper" technique in some martial arts that allow both hand and foot strikes.
After it gets you a few times you just learn not to look but there's no general defense against the idea I don't think, just specific applications of it.
I'm admittedly having a hard time figuring out practical attacks that could make use of this.
Screen content manipulation (eg a desktop)? Exceedingly unlikely to be the simplest strategy. Real-world manipulation? Not sure what could be achieved.
Hmm, information suggestion (displaying an onscreen message just outside the field of view, and changing it to something else when the user looks at that area of the screen) comes to mind, but that's not really up there either.
Not all people driving cars look left and right thoroughly before turning (but you can learn! [0]) This already leads to crashes and claims of 'coming out of nowhere'. So, practical attacks could be causing crashes. Could cause anxiety, injury, death, monetary loss, etc
I’m picturing an automated turret of some kind with the ability to track saccades and aim and track their human target during those periods. Turret is placed in the corner of a room, for example, engineered in a non-obvious shape. The target it’s tracking can move around briefly as the turret continues to track the target and in the meantime it can analyze the situation, maybe even phone home for authorization to fire. The human target would have no idea it’s being aimed at, right?
Could be useful for something like hostage rescue, maybe?
My problem with this is that once we have machines capable of tracking and exploiting saccades, humans have already lost completely and there’s no need for that kind of ability. I feel like our brains are too slow to compete with silicon.
Imagine perhaps exfiltration for any information within a saccade window. That wasn’t lag or a flicker of the imagination. Ghost in the shell relaying exfiltration semaphores.
It’s not just the amazing ways it exploits physical camouflage scenarios but also digital camouflage. It’s the perfect pair to steganography.
Huh. This is all about the impact on vision as opposed to imagination (or whatever it is that REM does), but that really does pose some interesting questions about long-tail impacts. Mirror neurons come to mind...
I wonder if this explains how I almost never see the minutes click over on a digital clock. I think of how often I check the time, say maybe 1 second at a time staring at the clock, it should at least every now and then be flicking over to the next minute, but it almost never seems to happen while I'm actually looking at it
If you normally glance at the time fir half a second, the switchover only happens every 120th time on average, which is infrequent enough that your brain simply doesn’t expect it in that context. Maybe it then just cuts out that “glitch” in the rare cases it happens.
Gets hundreds of poor devils to confess to "running somebody over cause i was frozzen up" in court, meanwhile its simply you were driving to fast for your visual system and it made up a plausible story after your drove into a poor guy.
Guilttrip included.
Here be privatpersons posting about how actions must have consequences.
I think that'd be called driving with undue care and attention here in the UK. Generally it's on you when you crash into someone without some super specific exception.
"The defendant lorry driver, was travelling on the M62 in a queue of slow moving traffic. He suffered a sneezing fit, losing control of his vehicle he knocked into the car in front. This car in turn knocked into the car in front causing a domino effect involving 7 cars. The Magistrates allowed the defence of automatism. The appeal court held that the Magistrates were right to do so and that an attack of sneezing could amount to an involuntary action for the purposes of the defence of non-insane automatism."
> This is not a web trend I would like to encourage but alas it is catching on.
Holy shit. My brain just did the saccade thing and made something that happened in the past feel like the present. My brain is telling me that the parent comment was written 35 minutes ago, but based on its content I have to logically conclude it's actually about 10 years old!
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Twitter, and resisted setting up an account for many years. But I realized that there are a lot of interesting people out there with AD(H)D, and a platform like Twitter is literally the only place that they can post their content in a way that works for them. I'll take "learn interesting things in a way that's maybe not my favourite" over "not learn those interesting things at all" every time.
This is not a comment about AD(H)D. For all I know I have it too. It takes me a long time to write content. When I write a blog post, I don't publish every one of my drafts, but I do write some specific content or thoughts in each draft. When I feel the draft has accumulated all my thoughts, I publish it.
I get the opposite is just as valid. Was it Paul McCartney who when he was asked how long it took him to write "Yesterday", he replied "I haven't finished writing it yet"?
And they say it is impossible to write in this way for them.
Incidentally I tried to have a browse but couldn't find any blog or even content at all, I have to wonder if your method is actually working or is it in-theory?
Disliking units of work that compose together via graph relationships on the internet is like living in a spiderweb yet hating strands of silk. You may struggle against this, but you will only wear yourself out. The web will continue to be woven - perhaps even around you as you struggle against it.
Meanwhile a spider can dance along the web - with each step it walks a path and the path under its feet was the blog post you wished was there; it was there, but it just had a different structure than you assumed, one less familiar to you, but no less real.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
This is used to a very cool effect in Peter Watts' novel "Blindsight", about an alien species whose brains are so much faster than ours that they notice and exploit this deficiency in ours.
Many of Peter Watts books and short stories - including Blindsight, and the short story set in the same universe "The Colonel" - are free to read on his website: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
There's also a non-free sequel novel - Echopraxia - together making the Firefall series.
Be sure to check out the "Vampire Domestication" multimedia presentation on that page, for some background on the "vampires" in the series.
(the pdf is a talk by the author above - so Inassumed it was a real talk, and it starts with how they started DNA therapy on an autistic child, who then experienced side effects, blood fixations and ... hang on what? This does not sound ethical ... oh look the logos in the images change, "FizerPharm - for the children", FizerPharm - better living for stock holders"
oh ok.
I get it - it's a low cost version of Resident Evil.
This is probably the book I loved the most that was an absolute pain to read. I got no pleasure from reading the book but a lot of the concepts and ideas are great. It's just a slog.
I've heard the sequel is good but I've put off reading it for years because I don't want to go through it again.
I enjoyed Blindsight, but I really did not enjoy Echopraxia. It feels like it sort of undoes some of the conclusions in Blindsight. While at the same time failing to do very much with its own conclusions and ideas.
Watts' Freeze Frame Revolution (set in a different universe iirc) feels like a better book to follow up Blindsight with, personally.
The twist of Blindsight is that a fundamental assumption about the nature of intelligence is false. The book takes a very long time setting this up and then it hammers it into both the reader and the protagonist. It seems to be saying, "Hey this is a big deal and you're not going to accept it, so I'm going to shovel it down your throat with a snow plow."
In Echopraxia they have the same idea, but it's trivialized in a blink and you miss it throwaway line and accepted as fact by everyone. I get that the author didn't want to just retread the same ground over and over. However, I feel it's a mistake to trivialize something that a bunch of post human super savants were surprised by.
Hard same. I ended up spoiling myself on the entire plot and the "big concepts" to justify to myself that it's worth it to go see the execution.
The author watched too many "Cinemasins"-like teardowns/nitpicks of books/movies where characters have a conversation about something that wouldn't happen in real life because they would both know it already (but it's exposition for the audience) and thought "Yes, I will have NONE of that."
SO instead there is absolutely zero exposition or world-building. You're just dropped into a heavy jargon filled environment that has a narrator who refuses to explain any of the terms or concepts (which are frequently VERY interesting once you go read some wikis).
It's a great way to avoid being nitpicked by pedantic nerds, but it's no way to write an enjoyable work of fiction.
Peter Watts has lots of explanatory segments, but he uses them for building his world and characters, not for teaching you stuff you can already go learn about in this world.
I'm sorry you don't enjoy his work, but I really like his writing style and have read Blindsight multiple times.
I recommend Blindsight frequently. It isn't for everyone, but I think there are a wide variety of types of people who would enjoy it, including those who tend to read more non-fiction than fiction. In my opinion, the payoff from that book is high enough that it is worth recommending it to a few people who won't like it.
I also think that people too frequently don't try things because they or someone else thinks they won't like it. I'm a big fan of people pushing their comfort zone and trying new things.
I feel exactly the same as you about the first book, I would say the sequel is actually much more engaging as well. I struggled to finish the first one, and finished the second probably 2x as fast.
Oh, I thought it was just me being too dumb for that book. Which is a shame, because as a big fan of hard scifi, Blightsight aliens are truly alien. But the prose was so dense and abstract I could not visualise anything the author was trying to convey.
I read it right after attempting to wade through an impenetrable late-career Greg Egan science- textbook-masquerading-as-novel, so it was a breeze in comparison. Haven’t picked up the sequel, though.
You can replicate the analog clock illusion without having to move your eyes. Open https://www.online-stopwatch.com/large-online-clock/ in a new tab and Ctrl+Tab, then Ctrl+Shift+Tab. It may take a few tries, but if you switch at the right time it will look as if the seconds hand freezes for more than a second.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadhttps://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html
If I tweet the 587,287 words of Tolstoy's War & Peace are more people inclined to read it, or at least have it come across their feed?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To the aliens we are using bumper lanes for time. Like bowling.
A car routinely reaches 120 km/h. The fastest human who ever existed, Usain Bolt, can only sustain a third of that for ~10 seconds.
Cars have a lot of inertia, at highway speeds, it takes several seconds to stop your car, and your ability to avoid obstacles is limited. Even with instant reactions, it won't make much of a difference, the car can't do better.
So driving is more about planning what you are going to do for the next 10 seconds and making sure nothing bad can happen during that time period, if things are not sure, take defensive action (slow down, ...). In fact, most good drivers don't pay attention to what's just in front of them, they can't do anything about it anyways. Instead, they will continuously focus their attention on what comes next and act accordingly.
Well, technically they are. Only not just teens. Attention spans have gotten shorter; I doubt that many of my friends can make it through that without checking their phone at least once.
I understood something glitchy was going on with my perception.
So it is funny to get an explanation.
Time as we experience it is an illusion bordering on insanity, actually everything we perceive seems to be such a freaking illusion it's mind boggling the whole thing works at all.
This shows up time and again in media where there are magical creatures that only interact with children. Everything from adults losing the ability to see them (Totoro has two separate classes of invisible creatures), to happenstance (Arrietty is accidentally seen by the boy, because she makes a bad assumption).
Nowadays I know why - the seconds hand would vibrate a bit after every movement, and if my eyes "saw" it going backward for a fraction of a second after focusing on it, the brain would complete that to "yep, it just went back a second".
I'll believe that people ignore it, or do not pay particular attention to it, but I don't believe they _can't_ see it..
When I was a kid, I was fascinated with trying to control my heart. Even nearly 40 years later, I’m aware of my heart and it’s beating 24/7 and I can’t turn it off. I’m curious if you maybe did something as a kid that made you hyper-aware of your vision?
I know I have a lot of busted mental equipment. :)
But also keep in mind that even when you're looking at a stationary object, your eyes tend to move a lot. If you noticed the blur from tiny movements too, you'd have a very hard time seeing anything. Reading would be quite difficult, for example.
That's not to say that you're lying about what you're seeing; but it is quite possible both perceptions are possible ;-)
I think for these basic universal perception stuff it's much more certain to refrain from thinking your brain is that different. Most likely it's also filling up your expected perception of a trail.
No idea if it was a fact or myth, but it’s always stuck with me that so much of our understanding and what we see is based on what we expect and not on reality.
Edit: I wonder, though, if native people didn't just use the word "cloud" because they did not have a word for "sail", and that was the closest thing they looked like.
I've read that there are native languages out there with some large number of words for certain shades of color, and no words for other colors. Speakers of the language can very reliably distinguish the colors they have words for with high accuracy, but can't tell the colors they don't have words for apart very well at all.
I remember learning years ago about an experiment some researchers did where they anesthetized some test subjects' eye muscles (don't remember how), bolted them into a frame so their heads couldn't move, and positioned mirrors above that could be moved with a handle.
What this test setup found was that as long as the mirrors were constantly moving (even just a tiny bit), the participants could generally speaking see completely normally. But as soon as the mirrors stopped moving, the participants reported that their vision fairly rapidly went completely grey.
(The ba-dum-tss here is the "completely reliable" in your comment... :D)
I don't think the optic system in the brain is the only aspect that is "change-stimulated". A bit of a pet theory is that a lot of thought processes are quite similar at the low (and not so low) level.
I'm hoping to come across that study at some point, just not sure what to Google.
But my favourite one of these when your vision of something doesn't go away--viewing these test images for a few minutes can alter your visual perception involuntarily for months: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect
Edit: this might be your study, https://doi.org/10.1016/0042-6989(76)90082-1
Edit:
wtf, I didn't know that waking total paralysis was something that's experimented on in humans. It's impossible to search for too, being camouflaged completely by sleep paralysis.
> Before the succinylcholine was administered an arterial tourniquet was placed on the right arm, thus preventing local blood flow and paralysis. This procedure made it possible for JKS to communicate by flexing his hand even during total paralysis.
They found lots of other weird effects when trying to move one's eyes that are partially or fully paralysed, like feeling that the entire world is moving in the wrong direction, being able to see during saccades, and afterwards consciously perceiving an object as being in one direction but reaching somewhere entirely different when trying to touch it.
In the Fading section on page 5 there's actually a reference to "An Active Feedback System for Stabilizing Visual Images" (1975, DOI 10.1109/TBME.1972.324155), and going and reading *that* is actually making me question my memory of what I originally took note of - I remember a bit about mirrors, I think there might have been a mention of a person's head being secured, and the part with the handles was my own conjecture (I (again) think that the setup described that the mirrors were moved, but I'm not 100% sure). I'm wondering if this was the study that was being referenced??
Thanks! The linked paper and the reference paper are both extremely interesting *adds to collection*
And it makes total sense that local anesthetic would be used to achieve paralysis, that's one brute force method lol
Troxler's fading is infuriatingly annoying (mumbled in biology's general direction), like the "L R" blind-spot test; while I think need to go stare at the McCollough effect for a bit longer, the test pattern was ever so faintly blue O.o
Visual experiences during paralysis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3232712
(What was that "humor-related task not presented here"? Why even mention it, and in the abstract too? Studying jokes so bad that they had to paralyse their subjects to tell them?)
> an arterial tourniquet was placed on the right arm, thus preventing local blood flow and paralysis
Don't cells begin to die off in seconds after blood flow stops? Did the researchers wire up an infusion to the arm?
It's somewhat difficult to avoid moving your gaze involuntarily, but it's ok if your eyes saccade just a tiny bit once in a while, the effect will still work.
Another interesting thing is that while everything fades to gray, if you offset your vision by a tiny bit, you'll see this weird emboss effect, where edges of objects are strengthened. It's hard to explain, but it somehow kinda makes sense to me in terms of an image transformation:
inputImage - troxlersFadingOffset = gray
inputImageWithTranslation - troxlersFadingOffset = edgeDetection
That sounds like an FFMPEG stream with dropped keyframes, where you see a solid image then you see the changed parts of the next scene start moving but only the changed parts. It's the same mechanism in a way.
I've spent time staring as still as I can at things and tthis never happened for me. All I get is pulsating and artifacts like floating "invisible lines"
This is completely arbitrary when you think about it. Why would the physical orientation of the brain and its inputs necessarily have to have any correlation with anything? You don't expect it to have any meaning whether you plug in an HDMI cable vertically or horizontally, or what direction your RAM chips face. If someone turned your brain sideways or upside down while keeping the "cables" in tact you wouldn't even know it.
Look at a mirror (not your phone camera), and look at your eyes. Now move your eyes, and try to see the movement of your own eyes. You can't.
Awesome stuff and I will always do every one of these silly things.
I remember my elementary school teacher saying "don't roll your eyes at me" and me trying to explain I couldn't move my eyes and her awkwardly going "right..." Then continued to believe it for another few years.
This is a thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_spatial_attention
I discovered this when I accidentally performed an experiment that showed how paying attention to a bright light in my peripheral vision without moving my eyes caused my pupils to constrict. That was after I became aware that my pupil size affected how blurry things were from nearsightedness (the same effect as in cameras).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pupillary_light_reflex#Cogniti...
When you're focusing/tracking something your eyes do a different type of movement called smooth pursuit [0].
To see this in action, look around normally - notice your eyes move and then stop, taking in "still frames".
Next, look at your finger and move your finger around. Notice that your eyes smoothly follow the finger around.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_pursuit
If you are not following a pre-existing "line", it gets exponentially harder.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater
After it gets you a few times you just learn not to look but there's no general defense against the idea I don't think, just specific applications of it.
Screen content manipulation (eg a desktop)? Exceedingly unlikely to be the simplest strategy. Real-world manipulation? Not sure what could be achieved.
Hmm, information suggestion (displaying an onscreen message just outside the field of view, and changing it to something else when the user looks at that area of the screen) comes to mind, but that's not really up there either.
Thoughts?
[0]: https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s... (been some past HN discussions, searching for fighter pilot got quite a few)
Could be useful for something like hostage rescue, maybe?
My problem with this is that once we have machines capable of tracking and exploiting saccades, humans have already lost completely and there’s no need for that kind of ability. I feel like our brains are too slow to compete with silicon.
It’s not just the amazing ways it exploits physical camouflage scenarios but also digital camouflage. It’s the perfect pair to steganography.
My friend had a stroke which damage the occipital lobe (vision) and he had an "empty space" there (about 20% of the field of vision).
After a couple years it was gone. It wasn't really gone, it was just "filled in" by the brain to an extent it wasn't noticeable at all.
If you tested them using accurate equipment to see field of vision you could catch it. But if you asked him, there was no "empty" spot any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
Guilttrip included.
Here be privatpersons posting about how actions must have consequences.
If you want to read more on this though it looks like there's been a study specifically on saccades while driving: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6536025/
"The defendant lorry driver, was travelling on the M62 in a queue of slow moving traffic. He suffered a sneezing fit, losing control of his vehicle he knocked into the car in front. This car in turn knocked into the car in front causing a domino effect involving 7 cars. The Magistrates allowed the defence of automatism. The appeal court held that the Magistrates were right to do so and that an attack of sneezing could amount to an involuntary action for the purposes of the defence of non-insane automatism."
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194
Holy shit. My brain just did the saccade thing and made something that happened in the past feel like the present. My brain is telling me that the parent comment was written 35 minutes ago, but based on its content I have to logically conclude it's actually about 10 years old!
I get the opposite is just as valid. Was it Paul McCartney who when he was asked how long it took him to write "Yesterday", he replied "I haven't finished writing it yet"?
And they say it is impossible to write in this way for them.
Incidentally I tried to have a browse but couldn't find any blog or even content at all, I have to wonder if your method is actually working or is it in-theory?
Meanwhile a spider can dance along the web - with each step it walks a path and the path under its feet was the blog post you wished was there; it was there, but it just had a different structure than you assumed, one less familiar to you, but no less real.
Oh, I don't care how the author writes it, or whether there's a graph relationship below (or anything else).
It's just that Twitter makes the experience of reading content like that a real chore.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's also free to read, e.g. at: https://bookmate.com/books/WiShbinL
There's also a non-free sequel novel - Echopraxia - together making the Firefall series.
Be sure to check out the "Vampire Domestication" multimedia presentation on that page, for some background on the "vampires" in the series.
Thank you, that was a fantastic read, really fills in the universe that Blindsight was set it. Here's a direct link to the PDF: https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf
(the pdf is a talk by the author above - so Inassumed it was a real talk, and it starts with how they started DNA therapy on an autistic child, who then experienced side effects, blood fixations and ... hang on what? This does not sound ethical ... oh look the logos in the images change, "FizerPharm - for the children", FizerPharm - better living for stock holders"
oh ok.
I get it - it's a low cost version of Resident Evil.
But boy it had me for a minute
I've heard the sequel is good but I've put off reading it for years because I don't want to go through it again.
Watts' Freeze Frame Revolution (set in a different universe iirc) feels like a better book to follow up Blindsight with, personally.
In Echopraxia they have the same idea, but it's trivialized in a blink and you miss it throwaway line and accepted as fact by everyone. I get that the author didn't want to just retread the same ground over and over. However, I feel it's a mistake to trivialize something that a bunch of post human super savants were surprised by.
The author watched too many "Cinemasins"-like teardowns/nitpicks of books/movies where characters have a conversation about something that wouldn't happen in real life because they would both know it already (but it's exposition for the audience) and thought "Yes, I will have NONE of that."
SO instead there is absolutely zero exposition or world-building. You're just dropped into a heavy jargon filled environment that has a narrator who refuses to explain any of the terms or concepts (which are frequently VERY interesting once you go read some wikis).
It's a great way to avoid being nitpicked by pedantic nerds, but it's no way to write an enjoyable work of fiction.
Peter Watts has lots of explanatory segments, but he uses them for building his world and characters, not for teaching you stuff you can already go learn about in this world.
I'm sorry you don't enjoy his work, but I really like his writing style and have read Blindsight multiple times.
I think the book is fantastic. I've read it at least three times, and I expect that I'm going to read it at least a few more times.
However, I'm not showing it to anyone who hasn't already displayed an appetite for hard scifi.
I also think that people too frequently don't try things because they or someone else thinks they won't like it. I'm a big fan of people pushing their comfort zone and trying new things.
It's not the explanatory segments. It's his entire writing style.
It's not an easy read by any means. But the ideas are too good to ignore.
> about an alien species whose brains are so much faster than ours
The reason _why_ they are much faster than ours is fascinating too.
But there's a great bit of video/trailer for the book on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM