Our perception is continuously biased toward the past to help stabilize the chaotic world we live in.
Watch the video below (1 min, 32 sec) to see this illusion in real-time:
This video illustrates how our brains ignore change or incorporate it into our perceptions somewhat slowly through a “continuity field,” as described below:
Our brains are constantly uploading rich, visual stimuli. But instead of seeing the latest image in real time, we actually see earlier versions because our brain’s refresh time is about 15 seconds, according to new UC Berkeley research.
The findings, appearing in the journal Science Advances, add to a growing body of research about the mechanism behind the “continuity field,” a function of perception in which our brain merges what we see on a constant basis to give us a sense of visual stability.
“If our brains were always updating in real time, the world would be a jittery place with constant fluctuations in shadow, light and movement, and we’d feel like we were hallucinating all the time,” said study senior author David Whitney, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, neuroscience and vision science.
link
The study—Illusion of visual stability through active perceptual serial dependence—focuses on the illusion of visual stability:
Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for a mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time.
As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging.
In the video above, you can notice two things: 1) the slowness and blurriness of our perceptual change as we watch the video, and 2) that we can and do accept that change the moment it is shown to us in comparative stills.
If vision behaves this way, it is fair to assume our psychologies or, more precisely, our psychological memories do something similar on both points.
I was intrigued to see that the authors of the study calculated a time-span of 15 seconds:
We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago.
This is roughly the ‘speed’ or duration of our working memories.
FIML works most of all with the working memory because when we correct a mistake in our working memory or upgrade the data in our working memory while it is still present, we are able to make large changes in our psychologies almost effortlessly.
FIML leverages the working memory to make large changes in our whole brain memories.
It works well because changing your working memory to fit the obvious reality staring you in the face is easy.
In contrast changing whole brain memories and psychologies through rumination and recollection typically only entrenches them further and deeper.
While it is easy to see how this happens visually as in the video above, it may be difficult to see how to do this with our complex psychologies as they are functioning in real-time.
FIML completely solves this problem and yet it may be hard to see how and why.
It works like this:
The how is done by pausing real-life in real-time so you can compare your own mind’s percept with your partner’s percept of the same thing and make corrections as warranted.
The why is psychologically analogous to correcting the illusions produced by our brains “continuously smoothing our percepts over time.” This “continuously smoothing over time” prevents wholesome, realistic change. It lies at the heart of many psychological problems.
American Buddhist Net 