What is going on here? Consider that our visual systems evolved over hundreds of millions of years, while film editing has been around only for a little more than 100 years. Despite this, new audiences appear to be able to assimilate splices on more or less the first try. I think the explanation is that, although we don’t think of our visual experience as being chopped up like a Paul Greengrass fight sequence, actually it is.
Simply put, visual perception is much jerkier than we realise. First, we blink. Blinks happen every couple of seconds, and when they do we are blind for a couple of tenths of a second. Second, we move our eyes. Want to have a little fun? Take a close-up selfie video of your eyeball while you watch a minute’s worth of a movie on your computer or TV. You’ll see your eyeball jerking around two or three times every second. It turns out that most of the eye movements we make are these jerky, ballistic movements called saccades. They take a little less than a tenth of a second and, while the eye is moving, the information that it is sending to your brain is pretty much garbage. Your brain has a nifty control mechanism that turns down the gain during these saccades so that you ignore the bad information. Between blinks and saccades, we are functionally blind about a third of our waking life.
Worse yet, even when your eyes are open, they are recording a lot less of the world than you realise. The reason your eyes make saccades a couple of times a second is that you have high-resolution sensors only in the very middle of your visual field, in a region called the fovea. If you hold out your two thumbs together at arms’ length and look at them, the width of your two thumbs just about covers up the region represented by your fovea. Staring at your thumbs, they should appear sharp and detailed. Now, if you try to concentrate on an object out in the periphery, you will realise that your image of that object is pretty fuzzy.
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