Quote:
Originally Posted by M.D. Holloway
(Post 8760941)
When I was young, I would stare into a mirror or at something for an extended period of time and would ‘see’ things.
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I think this is relatively normal/well understood. You brain only processes a small amount of the information that the eye receives and it fills in the rest based on some sort of "from experience, this is what I'm expecting to be here so I'll sort of make stuff up at this point". The vast majority of the time, this works perfectly fine. If you sit in a dark room and stare for a length of time (or some of these other situations), your brain gets bored and starts making up weird stuff. Like this:
An Optical Illusion that Explains the Origins of Imaginary Monsters
This phenomena also plays out in other ways (like the famous "guy in the gorilla suit walking through the group of people tossing a basketball back and forth"). The brain isn't expecting to see a guy in a gorilla suit, so it just doesn't process that information.
I had a experience just like this once. I was at an intersection getting ready to turn left out onto a highway (I was leaving Barber Motorsports Park, interestingly enough). I looked to my left, didn't see anything, looked to my right and didn't see anything and glanced back to my left as I started to pull out. When I glanced back to my left, there was a guy on a motorcycle right there on the road. I would have sworn in a court of law that that guy wasn't there 2 seconds earlier, but he was - my brain just didn't process it.
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