So, something I learnt the other day. So, you know how dinosaurs supposedly can't see you if you stand still? Well that myth is based on real-life lizards/etc and how eyes in general work. So, once my dad starts infodumping, here comes some other cool information. We, humans, can in fact, also not see something unless it's moving. We fixed this by having our eyes constantly shake. And then our brain compensates for us, so we don't have to have shaky vision.
What if aliens don't have this? Like. What if they find out when one of us was looking at something in the distance, and they walk around this thing that's in front of them, and the alien is confused so they bob their head and oh, there's a thing there, but how did the human know that, and then we explain and they're like, horrified.
Humans are apex predators. They can hunt in packs. They can hunt in pairs. They can hunt on their own. They're persistance predators, which is unheard of. They get stronger when they're mad or scared. They have this thing called 'body language' which acts like a type of hivemind, even if they'll claim it isn't. And. They can see you. When you're not moving. They can still see you. If you ever find yourself in a fight against a human, for whatever reason? Run. Run as fast as you can. And hope, pray if you have a religion, that they won't follow.
ok thats a really neat concept but what do you mean our eyes are always shaking
If you hold your hand at arms length and look at your thumbnail, thats approximately the size of area your eye can actually focus on. Everything else is a composite image generated by your brain.
Your eyes constantly dart around a little bit to fill in the composite.
the scary part? when your eyes move, you go blind. Your visual system has to cover up the periodic blindness but it does it "backwards" from how you'd expect: instead of "lagging" vision, it shows you what you see after the blindness, but makes it seem like you saw it the whole time.
You can see this by looking at a clock with a ticking second hand. The first time you move your eyes to it, the tick you see will seem to take longer than usual. That's because your visual system lied about how long you saw that tick, because you were blind for part of the time you thought you were seeing it. (fun fact: we don't see the same thing with moving objects, but only because our vision system "fakes the footage" of them moving while we were blind, because it understands consistent motion)
The human vision system is a marvelous clusterfuck of hacks.
Ok, I'm gunna link a YouTube video that touches on something that connects to this, ok? But from the starting point of SOUND, not just vision. Basically it breaks down what the human brain's perception 'FRAME RATE' is, and compares it to other animals, and it's so cool omg one second~
https://youtu.be/Gvg242U2YfQ?si=UdVh8rMbI-Xmn5oy
