[HN Gopher] You want to know something about how bullshit insane...
___________________________________________________________________
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains
are? (2018)
Author : Tomte
Score : 362 points
Date : 2022-08-01 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| seri4l wrote:
| 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.
| cromulent wrote:
| I read this tweet thread here a couple of years ago, and it was
| striking how much of our vision is done in the brain rather than
| the optics, similarly to modern digital cameras.
|
| Since then I was diagnosed with amblyopia - a "lazy eye", which
| is not misaligned in my case but is simply not recognized
| properly by the brain. It's corrected easily when you are young,
| but not in adulthood. Apparently brain plasticity is the problem.
| The resulting double vision (diplopia) is quite annoying and
| sometimes debilitating when you are tired - and there is no
| surgery to fix your brain's learned behaviour.
|
| It's pretty common - get your kids checked. My parents had no
| idea, and I always thought being "right eyed" was normal.
|
| Apparently there are some promising new treatments for adults
| using VR headsets.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm confused how we can do thing like playing sports if our
| brains are mashing reality this much. How does a batter hit a 90
| mph pitch if his vision can be delayed by half a second?
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Maybe that's why it's so important to "focus on the ball"?
| Vision isn't retroactivity updated if your eyes aren't
| shifting.
| [deleted]
| austinjp wrote:
| Prediction, operating at the limits of human ability in an
| extremely limited (but very impressive) application.
| personjerry wrote:
| 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.
|
| When the batter is watching the ball, he is similarly tracking
| it.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_pursuit
| a_e_k wrote:
| To help the batter track the ball, MLB stadiums also have a
| darker, solid-color region called the "batter's eye" behind
| the pitcher and center field [0].
|
| It's also why pitchers can't wear white sleeves or use white
| gloves (e.g., Eddie Butler getting his sleeves cut off before
| he pitches [1]).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batter%27s_eye
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR0nHFTWNnY
| fimdomeio wrote:
| If the batter is not looking at the ball at the moment it's
| leaving the hand I doubt he can hit the ball.
|
| Also as soon as the pitcher starts moving his body the brain
| probably starts creating all types of predictions of what will
| happen next.
| JackFr wrote:
| He probably isn't moving his eyes, at least not tracking the
| ball. Presumably his brain is using a basket of other tricks to
| let him know where the ball is going to be.
| bena wrote:
| There's a range. Maybe his masking is less. Maybe his brain
| compensates in such ways that it makes it possible. Maybe he's
| not hitting the pitch, he's hitting where he believes the pitch
| is going to be.
|
| 90mph is 132 feet per second. The distance from the pitching
| mound to home plate is 60 feet, 6 inches. The ball will take
| under half a second to travel that distance. I think about
| 450ms.
|
| The actual swing takes about 150ms. That gives the batter about
| 300ms total to identify the pitch and decide to swing.
|
| They're basically watching the pitcher and determining where to
| swing based on the release. Once the bat is in motion, it's up
| to the baseball gods. That's why batting averages are so low.
| Even great batters are hitting the ball only about a third of
| the time.
| danielheath wrote:
| You can estimate where the ball will pass based on how the
| pitcher moves their hands, before they have even released it
| (that's why people swing when you pretend to throw but don't
| release!)
| kristov wrote:
| Maybe that's why you have to practice to be good at sports. I
| couldn't hit a 90 mph ball to save my life.
| zip1234 wrote:
| This is why driving is the most dangerous activity most people
| usually do.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Why? The entire activity is within our simulated expectation of
| how time works vs how it really works.
|
| To the aliens we are using bumper lanes for time. Like bowling.
| otikik wrote:
| 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.
| zip1234 wrote:
| 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.
| archi42 wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Pretty sure driving would be the most dangerous thing most
| people do without this
| GuB-42 wrote:
| 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.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| 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.
| zip1234 wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| 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.)
| senden9 wrote:
| I've had cataracts since birth. It's a relatively dense area in
| the middle of my field of view. My brain interpolates information
| there as well as possible. Because of this I never see a stain.
| It's funny to spot the bugs in this process though. For example,
| objects may become visible because of eye movement that were
| previously invisible because they were completely obscured by
| cataracts.
| batch12 wrote:
| If this happens every time your eyes move, what happens during
| REM sleep?
| exikyut wrote:
| 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...
| pluijzer wrote:
| The experiment whit the clock didn't work for me. I see no
| noticeable delay when looking back to the second hand. Maybe I do
| something wrong?
|
| Small anecdote: long ago in my teens I had a period where I
| didn't sleep for days due to an illness. One of the more freakish
| thing I experienced was a moment where I was watching television
| on the couch, stood and walk away but for about a few seconds my
| vision was frozen. Still seeing a frame of the orientation of me
| sitting down looking at the tv even though I already had a
| completely different orientation.
| exikyut wrote:
| a) I personally find that looking at the second hand just as it
| clicks into position - so I'm looking at the frozen second hand
| for a whole second - amplifies the effect for me. So I watch
| the clock for a bit to observe the seconds passing, then look
| at the wall while still counting the seconds in sync, then look
| back right at the start of a tick. Preferably while not really
| thinking about any of that, and paying attention to my eyes and
| vision.
|
| b) Wow, that is really interesting, I have questions :) How
| long was everything frozen for? "A few" = 3, 4, 5 seconds? How
| did you stand and walk away without crashing into anything (or
| did you maybe stand up, take one step, and stop)? Were you
| somehow still able to know where everything was, or did you
| have to rely entirely on positional memory? Before you got up
| and you were watching TV, did the TV picture seem to be moving?
| Also, how did this fix itself? Did your vision switch like a
| saccade, like the replaced (correct) image was the most normal
| thing in the world (regardless that it happened late), or was
| it like waking up, or...?
|
| It admittedly sounds kind of like the vision system went to
| sleep from exhaustion - then took a couple seconds to boot back
| up :P
|
| I'm also very curious what the illness was, but it's quite
| reasonable that's irrelevant to the impact and this phenomena.
| Arnavion wrote:
| Try the experiment a few times. It only works if you happen to
| look right after it changed to the number you see. Eg it
| changes to :57, 0.1s later you start looking at it, 0.9s later
| it changes to :58, 1s later it changes to :59. But to you the
| delay between :57 and :58 will seem noticeably longer than :58
| and :59.
|
| If you happen to look at :57 when it's already been on :57 for,
| say, 0.5s, then it'll change to :58 0.5s later. It might seem
| like 0.7s to you but you wouldn't have any way to know it was
| supposed to be 0.5s.
| throw7 wrote:
| They'll tolerate reading it on twitter?
| jasonincanada wrote:
| 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
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The user experience of vision is just great, good engineering all
| around.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| Is anyone else bothered by the gratuitous and wrong usage of
| 'bullshit'?
|
| English is not my mother tongue but bullshit would refer to a lie
| (horseshit would express disbelief, chickenshit - cowardice,
| dogshit - awful, etc..) while batshit would refer to something
| being crazy. Which would also make 'insane' redundant. 'Batshit
| crazy' would be acceptable as it's most commonly used.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Archive of thread reader https://archive.ph/RsBpI
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains
| are? (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29769275 -
| Jan 2022 (3 comments)
|
| _"You want to know something about how bullshit insane our
| brains are?" (2018)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591535 - June 2020 (200
| comments)
|
| _You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains
| are? (2018)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18850203 -
| Jan 2019 (12 comments)
|
| _You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains
| are?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17724178 - Aug 2018
| (2 comments)
| corobo wrote:
| For folks who want further info the wikipedia page on this
| phenomenon is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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/
| [deleted]
| rlpb wrote:
| https://e-lawresources.co.uk/R-v-Whoolley.php
|
| "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."
| foobarbecue wrote:
| The idea that the image comes in "upside down" has always seemed
| incorrect to me. Isn't it more likely that this is essentially a
| configuration variable that is initialized undefined, and then
| set correctly based on comparing the input to other systems
| (inner ear etc.)? Is there any evidence that it is ever set
| "incorrectly"? i.e. a baby reaching up instead of down for
| something?
|
| Edit: to clarify, I'm saying I don't see any reason to think
| anything in the vision system ever "expects" light from the
| world's up direction to come in at the top of the retina. Surely
| the developing brain doesn't know what orientation or flip to
| expect, and the whole system is constructed based on initial
| inputs. It was never upside-down.
| paulrouget wrote:
| Yes. It was never upside-down.
|
| The fact the cells are not aligned with our visual
| representation doesn't mean it's "upside-down". Like you said,
| it's undefined, and the brain figures out what these cells
| represent.
|
| There's no flipping going on.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| It is upside down in the sense that if you built a lens system
| like the eye, the image produced would be upside down.
|
| The system evolved that way so it is never set "incorrectly" or
| "expected" to be the other way.
| simondw wrote:
| But that's kind of the point -- the orientation of the image
| on the retina is irrelevant, unless it's being looked at by a
| little man sitting right-side-up inside your head.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Fortunately, his eyes have their own set of lenses that
| flip the image the right way up again.
| gfaster wrote:
| If you wear glasses that invert the image, your eyes will adapt
| to the image after a few days. There is some information on the
| Wikipedia page of the guy who discovered it
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Stratton).
| d_tr wrote:
| I had an eye surgery for strabismus when I was 5 or 6. They
| tightened some of the eye muscles. I was seeing everything
| rotated initially, and over a few weeks the angle gradually
| went from about 30 degrees back to zero.
|
| I guess it was because the muscle adjustments resulted in my
| eyeballs getting rotated.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yeah, ditto for glasses that change/remove colors ... after I
| few days your perception adapts and you see colors normally
| again.
|
| It all proves how we don't directly see what's coming thru
| our eyes - we see the mental model that our brain maintains
| about the outside word, built/updated via what's coming in
| thru our eyes.
| affgrff2 wrote:
| Please hint me to a source on this. I wonder since some
| time what will happen when you use a VR headset with see-
| trough cameras and change the color mapping.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I read this a long time ago .. don't remember the
| specific source. If I google for it I'm finding "The
| Innsbruck Goggle Experiments", but not sure if this was
| the same study I've seen before.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28521154/
|
| http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~ezequiel/AS/Kohler_1962.pdf
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| Try warm-tinted sunglasses for a few hours - world
| becomes blue for a minute or two when I take mine off. I
| thought everyone noticed this at some point. I would be
| surprised if you _couldn 't_ replicate it with a VR
| headset, although that doesn't sound very comfortable.
| You would probably also experience a fleeting feeling of
| hyperrealistic vision, given how low-fi the see-through
| camera would be compared to your eyes.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Yes, I know. That's why I called it a configuration variable.
| Balgair wrote:
| As for 'errors', yes, they are typically signs of trauma or
| dysfunction along the neurons that go into V1. You can have
| people that have blindsight or that can't tell faces apart
| in the upper half of their vision. You can get some pretty
| tragic stuff.
|
| You can also have glaucoma or other 'typical' diseases of
| the eye. Things like blindspots from welding or lasers.
|
| The visual system in healthy people is already a bit odd.
| You have the foveal blindspot, the differing distribution
| of rods and cones, the unseeing neurons that do light
| sensation for melanin production, etc.
|
| Really, the whole sensory chain is one giant bag of 'wait,
| it does that? huh?'
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddoch_syndrome
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Above comment misplaced?
| jakogut wrote:
| I think it has more to do with the content itself, and the
| elasticity and adaptability of neural networks. There is no
| "up" or "down" with inputs. I learned this when working
| with a machine vision problem. A model will adapt to the
| orientation or format of a given input. The orientation
| itself is never a variable, the network simply doesn't care
| and adapts to it. If you train a model to recognize input
| in a given orientation, any other orientation will give a
| high error rate. If you train the model with _every_
| orientation, it will be able to classify inputs that are
| upside down, sideways, mirrored, etc., all relative to the
| original orientation.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Exactly. There is no "upside-down" unless you train one
| way and then flip it. So I wish people would stop saying
| "babies see upside-down at first."
| grupthink wrote:
| Rays of light travel in straight lines. Light enters your eye
| and hits the back of your retina inverted, not just upside
| down. Left is right. Up is down.
|
| [1]
| https://www.schoolphysics.co.uk/age11-14/Light/text/Pinhole_...
| game-of-throws wrote:
| Right, but how is this any different than a camera? Nobody
| goes around saying Nikon designed their cameras upside down
| and then had to hack around the mistake in software. It's
| just how lenses work.
| grupthink wrote:
| > Right, but how is this any different than a camera?
|
| The commenter above argues the image isn't upside down.
|
| > Nobody goes around saying Nikon designed their cameras
| upside down and then had to hack around the mistake in
| software. It's just how lenses work.
|
| That's an oddly specific statement. A camera inverts an
| image using any combination of lenses, mirrors, and
| software. And if you were building an eye, you would be
| meticulously poring over these implementation details and
| discussing all your options. Should you revert the image by
| adding another lens? Or, do an inverse affine
| transformation? Maybe you can cross the optic nerves so
| that the brain gets the correct image? Or program a reward
| function to individual neurons guided by the vestibular
| system... etc.
|
| The screen you are looking at right now has gone through at
| least two transformations - due to the physical nature of
| light. The fact that you can look around and not realize
| all this is happening is pretty amazing. There are a few
| leaky abstractions as noted in the twitter thread.
| Ralfp wrote:
| As bit of trivia I've had procedure of laser ablation performed
| on one of my eyes upper edge of retina that detached. I've pink
| cloud from bleeding obfuse botton half of image in that eye for
| short time.
| skizm wrote:
| My favorite visual trick is the chess board illusion. People
| straight up think you're lying. Even when you draw a line between
| the boxes with the color and your eyes adjust in real time, I've
| had people tell me it's a gif or I'm doing some other trick.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| xphx wrote:
| Written as though it's competing for the attention of fourteen-
| year-olds against meme scrolls, video games and online porn.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| That's quite literally the exact context, so yeah.
| [deleted]
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| > 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.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well, it is foone...no offence to them but it's kind of their
| hallmark
| iakov wrote:
| 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.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| 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".
| hinkley wrote:
| 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).
| mistermann wrote:
| Do you think it might be possible for adult humans to
| simulate the curiosity that young minds are capable of?
| Perhaps even in short bursts?
| hinkley wrote:
| I think Michael Pollan might be actively engaged in
| suggesting some options there...
| sshine wrote:
| I also played around with this, making seconds go faster or
| slower.
|
| I understood something glitchy was going on with my perception.
|
| So it is funny to get an explanation.
| [deleted]
| chmod600 wrote:
| If you can hear the tick, is it misaligned with the motion or
| does the tick time shift as well?
| lazyant wrote:
| This is the "stopped-clock illusion", an example of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis
| lloeki wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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".
| rocgf wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mkeedlinger wrote:
| Almost ten years ago now I found a site that would help show you
| all these visual inaccuracies. It was like a more interactive
| version of the wikipedia article on our blind spot. I haven't
| been able to find it for years, but it was an awesome expose into
| how non-objective our vision is.
|
| If anyone knows of this, please remind me! I've been looking for
| it for years.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I just happened to be reading the article on my tablet at the
| exact distance needed to make the blind spot test work without
| needing to adjust.
|
| I've seen the effect before, but this time when I closed one
| eye, before I moved another muscle, the letter disappeared as
| completely and instantly as if it was done digitally. I knew
| what to expect and it was still amazing. A truly "holy shit"
| moment.
| drnyet wrote:
| Possibly this: https://michaelbach.de/ot/
| mkeedlinger wrote:
| Not what I had in mind, but just as good (or maybe better,
| this has a lot more content)!
| igammarays wrote:
| And this is the reason why Elon Musk made a mistake by saying
| LIDAR was unnecessary for self-driving cars by assuming that
| cameras could fulfill the role of vision (He used first-principle
| thinking: our eyes can drive, so why do we need anything more
| than cameras?). Our eyes and brains do way more than any camera.
| The part about estimating the size of baseballs depending on
| one's intention to hit it also shows that our brain takes our
| intent into consideration when making moves, something no AI/ML-
| enhanced camera could ever do.
| otikik wrote:
| Yes, chronostasis is my favorite "evolution hack" (probably
| thanks to this tweet).
|
| The difference between a designed system and a "grown" one is
| that the Universe takes what works and discards what doesn't. It
| doesn't need for the thing to make any sense at all.
| dusted wrote:
| 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..
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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?
| otikik wrote:
| You can turn it off, but it only works once.
| dusted wrote:
| It's probably from training it, I was pretty aware of my
| vision when I was a kid.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Everyone's brain is a little different. It is possible the
| masking system in your brain is broken.
|
| I know I have a lot of busted mental equipment. :)
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| 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.
| archi42 wrote:
| 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 ;-)
| doliveira wrote:
| 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.
| psyc wrote:
| This isn't comparing like with like. You moving your gaze to
| something else on purpose is not a saccade. Those are
| unconscious.
| Retr0id wrote:
| It sounds like you might be the exception. I certainly do not
| see it.
| mbg721 wrote:
| "Batshit" is the measure of insanity. "Bullshit" is a measure of
| inaccuracy, "chickenshit" is a measure of obscurity, and "holy
| sheep shit" occurs, as far as I know, only in the film "Repo
| Man".
| mwint wrote:
| Wait, hold on. I somewhat recently discovered I can "see" pulse-
| width modulation on dimmable LEDs by moving my eyes quickly over
| the LED and then examining the trail of dashes left by the light.
|
| How does this square with vision being "paused" during the
| movement?
| rzzzt wrote:
| If you are following an object, the saccades routine itself is
| put on hold and you get more or less continuous eye motion,
| complete with smooth focus and field-of-view adjustments. I'm
| doing this for fun when walking alongside slow-rolling cars -
| the end result occasionally "looks like" a tracking shot
| straight out of a movie.
|
| Edit: ...OK, field-of-view doesn't vary that much, unless you
| are Colonel Steve Austin with the telephoto augmentation.
| mwint wrote:
| Not following an object - this is the procedure:
|
| 1. Put LED at the bottom of vision 2. Look below LED, so now
| it's at the top of vision 3. There's a trail of light for a
| fraction of a second, seeming to start from the bottom of
| vision to the top.
|
| I'm not smoothly tracking anything, just looking at one point
| and then another. I can clearly see the on-off duty cycles,
| and I've been playing with training myself to estimate
| frequencies with this method.
| A_No_Name_Mouse wrote:
| That's what I do as well with tail lights of cars. There is
| a clear distinction between LED and normal lights: the
| LED's form a trail of dots.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Hmm. I see something similar when looking quickly at or
| away from bright text (eg. end credits) on a DLP projector;
| it will get split into its constituent colors in the
| direction of my eye's movement. I guess the "double
| buffering" functionality does not completely shield one
| from experiencing the interim flashes.
| TheCoreh wrote:
| Vision only seems to be paused briefly. If you repeatedly keep
| moving your eyes it seems to allow the blurriness through,
| there's probably a "timeout" mechanism. Probably better
| strategy to still see something in case your eyes are shaking
| for a long time for whatever reason than to not see anything
| eru wrote:
| dang wrote:
| " _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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| blincoln wrote:
| 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.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| 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"?
| corobo wrote:
| > It takes me a long time to write content.
|
| 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?
| Karellen wrote:
| > 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!
| JoshCole wrote:
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| Foone on Twitter threads
|
| https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1440695609913053194
| e40 wrote:
| A much better way to read this:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Maybe because the ships came from over the horizon?
| lukas099 wrote:
| 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.
| altruios wrote:
| the chicken and the egg, or the thought and the word.
| exikyut wrote:
| Expectation and also language.
|
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| This fits with (not sure the term) the model of our brains
| constantly doing projection/simulation. Your consciousness is at
| the abstract level and the brain projects successive levels of
| detail, then compares to actual input at the lower levels looking
| for differences to correct the simulation.
|
| In the abstract this is very similar to how a Kalman filter
| works. There is a prediction component and a correction, with a
| (possibly time varying) adjustments for how much weight to give
| to measurements. The equivalent here would be to simply ignore
| the measurements when the eyes move since the input will be known
| to be messy, and just rely on the prediction.
|
| This turns out the be a very effective (and in some ways
| mathematically optimal) way to process sensor input even in
| human-engineered systems.
| frostwarrior wrote:
| This fits with my personal model of the brain composed of a
| distributed system made of millions of dumb organisms screaming
| in coordination to create a bigger, more intelligent being.
|
| Kinda like an ant colony, CUDA and Kubernetes mixed together
| outworlder wrote:
| > Kinda like an ant colony, CUDA and Kubernetes mixed
| together
|
| Thanks for the nightmare fuel.
| tootie wrote:
| I think the author of these tweets is falling in to a common
| trap of trying to reverse engineer why our brains do what they
| do and try to ascribe intent to randomness. Everything our
| brains do is the product of a billion years of random
| evolutionary events leading up to a system that does something
| useful for our survival. Trying to explain how our brain
| processes "images" like a camera is the first mistake. The
| universe is a wild cacophony of matter and energy and what we
| see in our brains is just a rendition of the salient bits of
| data gathered from that noise. Looking at a second hand on a
| clock or a mirror was never an evolutionary selector. Neither
| was seeing infrared or ultraviolet. At least, not for humans.
|
| If you want to compare it to a system, then a neural network is
| actually pretty apt (no coincidence there). Data goes in,
| conclusions come out. The mechanism takes thousands of
| byzantine shortcuts to get from A to B and the result is a
| small number of egregious blindspots in an otherwise highly
| efficient system.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Right. We are constantly sampling the environment in small
| amounts, but we perceive a much larger, more stable and
| detailed space than we can directly sense in recent moments
| because our consciousness is based on a simulation integrating
| a lot of information already gathered.
|
| https://youtu.be/NTnbnw01HHY
| rekrsiv wrote:
| Gamedevs have known for quite some time that theoretical math is
| too slow to simulate the universe in real time and sometimes
| _this_ is what works best.
| [deleted]
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Luckily this only applies to vision and not at all to more
| abstract processes like world views and belief systems...
| namero999 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jrh206 wrote:
| 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.
| namero999 wrote:
| 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.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > upside-down on the retina due to optics
|
| 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.
| namero999 wrote:
| 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.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Don't worry, it only applies to everyone else's world views and
| belief systems. Yours are accurate and reliable.
| jrh206 wrote:
| Mine too. In fact, seven years ago I decided to stop moving
| my eyes. Since then, both my world views AND my vision have
| been completely reliable.
| exikyut wrote:
| 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.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troxler%27s_fading
|
| 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.
| aasasd wrote:
| Ah, the seventies.
|
| > _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?
| exikyut wrote:
| 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
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| 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:
|
| inputImage - troxlersFadingOffset = gray
|
| inputImageWithTranslation - troxlersFadingOffset =
| edgeDetection
| mym1990 wrote:
| That sounds like a terrifying experiment!
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| wussboy wrote:
| 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.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| This will pass the average sarcasm detector I'm sure of it.
| lebuffon wrote:
| :-))))
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| But after they read your comment people will have always
| known it was sarcasm.
| [deleted]
| personjerry wrote:
| The most verifiable part if you want to check it out yourself:
|
| 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.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| 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?
| personjerry wrote:
| Tracking smoothly. Copied from my other comment in this
| thread:
|
| 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
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Thanks for the info. The part about needing catch-up
| saccades above a certain speed is particularly interesting.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| That's cool! I really can't track around the room smoothly,
| despite "trying" hard to do so! Grr....
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Haha yes this has annoyed me since I was a kid!
| [deleted]
| outworlder wrote:
| 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.
| thedanbob wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floater
| usgroup wrote:
| I did the same thing in much the same way ... So there's
| at least two of us mate.
| kej wrote:
| As a follow up, watch someone else doing the same thing. You'll
| be able to see their eye movements, but not your own.
| sovnade wrote:
| 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.
| seri4l wrote:
| 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.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| > move my focus without my eyeballs moving
|
| 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.
| ..
| linux2647 wrote:
| > and can even see polarization of light? our good friends the
| Cephalopods!
|
| I'm sorry what?? That's possible? That's incredible. Anyone have
| any speculation on what that would look like?
| Winsaucerer wrote:
| This is a question which I don't think anyone can even
| speculate at. It's similar to the question 'what is it like to
| be a bat?', [1] or, what might a colour that no one's seen
| before look like?
|
| Some people (such as myself) like to distinguish between the
| physical processes that are involved in the biology of (say)
| sensory perception, and then the phenomenology. The biology
| involves things like light waves, retinas, neurons, etc. The
| phenomenology is the "what it's like". The following is a
| controversial claim for reductive physicalists who believe
| everything reduces to the physical, but here goes: there is
| _no_ way to go from the facts about the physical world alone to
| any statement about the phenomenology.
|
| The problem with answering the question of what that would be
| like to see polarised light is hopeless. It's so hopeless that
| if we had two separate species that could "see" the
| polarisation of light, we would have no way of even telling if
| the "what it's like" for one of those species is the same as
| the next. Maybe for one it's similar to how we see colours, and
| for another it's similar to what it's like for us to hear
| sounds. Or maybe it's a completely alien kind of phenomenology
| with analogy to human experience.
|
| The "easy" question is the biology. We can investigate whether
| an organism's sensory systems are sensitive to the polarisation
| of light or not, and if it's done via an eye-like organ, then
| we might say it "sees" light, even if we have no idea if the
| phenomenology is anything like our vision.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
| cromulent wrote:
| It seems to be well established that bees see polarized light.
| For example:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049011/
| muststopmyths wrote:
| That book recommendation at the end seems really interesting.
| (edit: I was talking about the SciFi book, Blindsight)
| zip1234 wrote:
| There is a podcast call "You Are Not So Smart" that talks about
| all the ways our brain tricks us.
| https://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/
| psyc wrote:
| 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.
| ivoras wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's also free to read, e.g. at:
| https://bookmate.com/books/WiShbinL
| outworlder wrote:
| I regularly recommend Blindsight here.
|
| 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.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| There is also a audiobook on youtube.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R55gdpgwQQ
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Also check your library. I listened to it on Libby.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| 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.
| Verdex wrote:
| 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.
| buildbot wrote:
| 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.
| deanCommie wrote:
| 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.
| Freaky wrote:
| 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.
| exhilaration wrote:
| _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
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Wow that took a couple of minutes to level set
|
| (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
| foobarbecue wrote:
| , as it says in the original post.
| madrox wrote:
| To me, Blindsight is the gold standard for bleak scifi. It
| gives the same unsettled feeling one gets from watching, say,
| Alien for the first time.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1014286291314270208
| thedrbrian wrote:
| _SPOILERS_
|
| But there's a great bit of video/trailer for the book on
| youtube
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Proof that software doesn't need to be "well-designed" or
| "clean", it needs to be functional. What you think of as "insane
| design" is actually just functional design (or polymorphism,
| depending).
| LesZedCB wrote:
| yes exactly! i thought insane design was such a weird way to
| describe it... the fact that it is functional and emergent
| means is has a satisfying cleanliness, even if we don't fully
| understand it yet.
|
| another natural phenomenon that gets me like that is the
| balance of the innate/adaptive immune systems. the fact it all
| works on chemical physics (don't know the right word here) just
| blows my mind in the best way possible.
| [deleted]
| lake_vincent wrote:
| For those who hate Twitter threads as much as I do:
|
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1014267515696922624.html
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| 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?
| samatman wrote:
| You jest, but I follow a bot which does this for the complete
| works of Shakespeare. A larger corpus, though by less than
| one might guess.
| dang wrote:
| " _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._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ornornor wrote:
| Thanks
| shever73 wrote:
| If you prefer blog format, Foone used to put their Twitter
| threads on their blog here:
| https://foone.wordpress.com/2019/03/01/the-eyes-have-it/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've suggested that link be substituted to the HN mods (via
| email).
| weaponizedlinux wrote:
| "So while I firmly believe we're basically just overgrown
| biological computers, we're apparently computers programmed by
| batshit insane drunkards in Visual Basic 5."
|
| This explains... everything.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| 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!
| JackFr wrote:
| Isn't that the purpose of heads-up displays - to make that eye
| movement unnecessary?
| jtwaleson wrote:
| To an extent it should reduce eye movement, yes. My cheap ass
| car doesn't gave that though :')
| ryanschneider wrote:
| I have a (thankfully mild) inherited retina disorder. If you read
| the part about lasers and eye damage it's basically that, but the
| "lasers" are faulty genes rather than anything external causing
| the eye damage. And I can verify that at first my brain did an
| incredibly good job at error-correcting over it, but in the last
| couple years it's finally been able to "peek through". One day I
| was hiking and suddenly had black spots in my vision. Then after
| that I woke up one morning and noticed large black halos in my
| vision that went away after a couple seconds of being awake. A
| couple weeks later and I started getting flashing visual
| artifacts in the edge of my vision.
|
| Which is/was terrifying because I didn't know this was a multi-
| decade process I was just becoming aware of and instead assumed
| that if I just noticed this much visual degradation in a couple
| weeks then surely I'll be completely blind in a couple more?
| Thankfully that's not how it works, the damage has been
| increasing at a slow steady constant, it's just that the
| processes in place to correct for said damage do a _really_ good
| job at hiding it, until they don't, so the rate of degradation
| seems much worse than it actually is.
|
| That said, please if you notice any new visual artifacts get them
| checked up on _immediately_, while my case is a slow genetic
| issue sometimes it's a detached retina, which can happen for any
| number of reasons and can usually be reversed quite easily with
| surgery if caught early. I was "lucky" mine was genetic rather
| than physical trauma, since I didn't go see someone until things
| got noticeably worse.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| That reminds me a bit of tinnitus (chronic ringing of the
| ears).
|
| You expose yourself to loud noises (e.g. at a club or party),
| damaging your hearing, and afterwards your ears ring for a
| while. Your brain adjusts and the ringing stops by the next
| morning, so you think to yourself, "well, this is fine".
|
| Until the day comes that the damage is too much for your brain
| to compensate, and the ringing never stops.
| xSxY3fj5gVCmvWE wrote:
| Wait, is that actually how it works? Makes me sad about my
| hearing. Not sure how I wrecked it - must have been headphone
| use at loud volume as a kid.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I have self diagnosed _(never saw a doc)_ Ocular Migraines, and
| the first time i encountered one it both amazed me and
| terrified me.
|
| I was working and i noticed something was off with my vision, i
| couldn't read a label. I went to the bathroom and didn't see
| anything. I eventually realized i had a large deadspot in my
| vision that my mind was just... autocompleting. It looked
| flawless, but then i'd pass my hand slowly infront of the
| deadspot and there would be this strange artifact. My hand
| would be missing a finger, or this odd blending with the mirror
| behind it, etc.
|
| It was like some poorly ML generated object removal. The scary
| thing was i had several, and had no idea. As i experimented
| with it further that day i was able to disappear entire
| vehicles (i wasn't driving thankfully), forklifts, etc.
|
| I've only had ~half a dozen in my lifetime that i'm aware of,
| but i'm still quite fearful of experiencing one while i'm
| driving. As i likely would not realize what was wrong with me,
| immediately.
|
| _edit_ : Oh i should note, as the "migraine" clears, it turns
| the blindspots into this weird crystalline structure. Kinda
| like looking through a prism. It's a pretty crazy experience.
| random314 wrote:
| I had the same problem! Surprised to find the diagnosis on
| HN!
| mym1990 wrote:
| I get these as well, it seems very random. I might have one 3
| days in a row, and then not have one for 3 months. About 15
| minutes before the shimmering happens, I can already feel
| that something is off with my vision. The shimmer basically
| moves left to right/right to left until it dissipates in
| about 30 minutes to 1 hour. It started in high school, and
| back then the migraines were the absolute worst pain I had
| ever experienced. Now they are more or less just normal
| headaches(sometimes no headache at all even).
| philsnow wrote:
| > About 15 minutes before the shimmering happens, I can
| already feel that something is off with my vision.
|
| I've had only a couple of these in my life, both brought on
| by stress. For me they've both been preceded by about 15
| minutes of a "feeling of impending doom" (which apparently
| is an actual medical symptom).
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Have you checked if there's a correlation with caffeine? I
| get these too, and like one of the other replies to the
| parent mentioned, in my case it's definitely connected to
| drinking too much coffee.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I remember a recent-ish study that found a strong
| correlation at 3 or more (or was it more than 3?) coffees
| in a day, but was inconclusive below that amount. I don't
| know what the unit of coffee was (probably standard
| espresso) and I unfortunately no longer remember the
| source.
|
| There are a bunch of different triggers though and they
| vary from person to person. Coffee is one I hear very
| often. For me, the worst is the combination of at least
| two of {hunger, dehydration, physical activity}.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I have this too, when I drink too much coffee.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Back in those days i was quite heavily under sleeping and
| over coffee'ing, so quite possible. I haven't had an
| episode in ~8 years, but i also sleep and coffee
| intentionally these days.
| pitaj wrote:
| I get this kind of thing when I (very rarely) get a migraine.
| Interestingly, it comes on like 20min before the terrible
| crushing headache begins.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Same for me. It's a useful warning to immediately drop
| whatever I'm doing, cancel all my plans for the day and
| find a dark room to hide in.
|
| That said, now that I've found a drug that works extremely
| well for me, I can often recover in less than an hour and
| continue my day with only something like a mild hangover.
| If you haven't already, definitely talk to a doctor and
| look into migraine-specific medication. They work like
| magic and the new stuff actually seems pretty safe. I never
| leave home without an emergency pill in my wallet.
| lavasalesman wrote:
| Migraine rescue medications that target CGRP receptors like
| Nurtec or Ubrelvy would help with this. They're modern
| migraine meds and have no side effects for me.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I love your comparison with bad ML image inpainting. Not only
| does it kind of look like that, but it also feels like it.
| The picture looks fine until you focus on that one bit and it
| turns out there's no real information there. It's very hard
| to fully covey it to someone who hasn't experienced it, but
| this plus what happens when you look into a very bright light
| comes close.
|
| It would be really interesting to look at different scenes
| and patterns to see how my brain reconstruct it, if it
| weren't for the crushing headache that I know will follow in
| 10-30 minutes from the first sign and wipe me out for at
| least the rest of the day.
| graypegg wrote:
| It's always weird to hear someone describe migraines! I've
| had the exact same experience. At first it's a weird feeling
| that I "missed" something, then I have trouble reading, then
| that sort of bad -ML-object-removal spot shows up with
| sparkly prism patterns around it. It grows until it's half of
| my vision, and by the point I'm normally keeled over in pain
| if I didn't take any triptans through that process.
|
| When I was younger and had no idea what triggered them, I'd
| also get pretty bad aphasia and be almost unable to form
| sentences. It's really a full-brain experience.
|
| I can totally suggest going to a neurologist. Triptans
| (either as an autoinjector, or a tablet that dissolves under
| your tongue) have made a massive impact on my life. They've
| never stopped pain 100%, but I've come out of that aura long
| enough to get home.
| rikschennink wrote:
| I have these as well, but what you describe a crystalline
| structure is there from the start and then it expands to
| encompass my right side vision before disappearing out of the
| edge of my eye sight.
|
| If anyone is wondering what this looks like, this video gets
| quite close: https://youtu.be/qVFIcF9lyk8
| robotnikman wrote:
| I recently started having these as well. Only found out they
| were migraines when I asked my doc during an eye exam.
| Thankfully my eyes are otherwise fine
| manwe150 wrote:
| Everyone normally has a small blind spot right off center (it
| is mentioned near the end in the tweet list), and can hide
| small objects, if you want to experience the same feeling at
| a small scale. There is a bright fluorescent bike helmet
| sitting in front of me right now, and if I close one eye and
| look slightly to the side it vanishes completely from my
| sight! Very weird feeling to know something is in my eyesight
| and cannot see it.
| d_tr wrote:
| It wouldn't hurt to verify that these are harmless by seeing
| a doctor. It will probably be a 10' examination.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Good point. I'll bring it up on my next visit, though it's
| been .. boy, 8 years since i had one last? Nevertheless,
| doesn't hurt to ask on routine visits.
| anm89 wrote:
| You want to know how fuckin wiiiiilldddd science is fellow kids?
|
| Title should be changed.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| 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).
| exikyut wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thoughts?
| pedantsamaritan wrote:
| 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
|
| [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)
| lovehashbrowns wrote:
| 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.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| refurb wrote:
| This is just the brain correcting for inputs and it does it all
| the time.
|
| 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.
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