mercredi, septembre 27, 2006

here is a wicked cool and geeky fact that i learned in class.

each day, the average human makes about 20 000 saccades. A saccade is rapid, jerky movement that your eye makes as it looks from one target to another target. (if you want to know what a saccade feels like, stick up your two index fingers in front of you and move your eyes back and forth from the left finger to the right and vice versa.)

Anyways, because your eye moves so fast when performing these saccades, your retina is actually compressed (akin to driving a really fast car, accelerating from rest, and being sucked back into your seat), and for a certain period of time (approximately 40 milliseconds) you are actually blind. Of course, your brain compensates for this, and you do not realize you are blind.

SO, if you perform the calculations....

20 000 saccades/day x 40 ms/saccade= 800 000 ms/day
800 000 ms/day= 800 seconds/day
800 seconds/day / 60 sec/min= 13 minutes/day

Therefore...

humans are blind for 13 minutes each day.

good thing its only 40 ms at a time!

7 commentaires:

Anonyme a dit...

while it is interesting, could you possibly learn anything more useless than this?
:P

Anonyme a dit...

does sleeping count as blindness? i don't see much when i'm sleeping. should i be worried? do i need to see my optometrist? :S

Anonyme a dit...

thats so neat! i want to learn stuff like that in my class!

Anonyme a dit...

So what, it's like your braing covering over the frame splits in a movie? That's... pretty cool actually.

Anonyme a dit...

Now let's think about that for a minute... When you look from one finger to the other, with your brain editing out the blindness, it seems instant. So you are also losing out on 13 minutes a day. Your brain is editing out 13 minutes of your day! You're losing over 3 days a year!

Anonyme a dit...

Hey Lydia... the comment link to your Thanksgiving post doesn't work.

Anonyme a dit...

jonathan park, do you ever do anything else other than check my blog? addict.