Fancy messing with your sense ? Stare at the winkle green dot in the middle of the animation below , and see if you notice anything untoward .
If you gaze at the green corpuscle long enough , the three surrounding yellow dots will disappear . This is a phenomenon call up “ motion - induce sightlessness ” ( MIB ) , a form of illusion that causes a person to drop off hatful of objects that are otherwise in plain view . Although this may seem to be a failing of your own brain ’s ocular system , fret not : It is merely a way of filtering out extra entropy .
GIF reference : Mlechowicz / Wikimedia Commons ; CC BY - SA 3.0
A2008 studyby two researchers at Yale University mark that these yellow dots may represent a type of scotoma , or “ blind position . ” Every mammalian middle has a scotoma in its field of vision : either a location that contains no cell open to light ( photoreceptor cadre ) or the position where the optical mettle exist in the retina . Of naturally , these yellow Department of Transportation are n’t always unseeable to the oculus , so they represent a type of temporary scotoma .
According to common possibility behind MIB , the rationality you are not see the chicken window pane is due to a phenomenon call sensory overburden . As the storage-battery grid around the green dot rotates , and the yellow dots remain unmoving and static , the brain processes the yellow-bellied dots as unneeded info and blanks them out .
The brainpower , after all , does not automatically litigate all information , visual or otherwise , that the organic structure ’s sensory system encounter . If it did , it would overload , so it tends to filter out information that it has repeatedly come across without variety .
The Yalestudysuggests something else . or else of the brain automatically removing piece of unchanging information from panorama due to sensory overload , the idea is in fact comprehend the object as wayward to the logic of real - aliveness perception . The brainiac simply does not accept that the physical object can logically exist base on what selective information it has . Thus , they disappear from sight – they become perceptual scotomas .
The author suggest that the great the visual differences between two competing input – in this case , the puritanical grid rotate around the flashing green Elvis , and the stationary yellow dot – the more in effect the unchanging parts are capable to melt from view . One experiment even evidence that this type of perceptual scotoma can be induced without a move stimulus , but with changing aim cleverness .
