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Comment by PavlikPaja | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what you mean, I don't stop seeing when I stare at something.

Yes, the sharpness obviously drops away from your central vision, yet you can still see with FOV well over 180°. (Not sure if it's actually 190°, so I edited my question)

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The sharpness drops away really fast, so you can really imagine the actual focused FOV as a narrow beam when projected. Also, you don't really just "stare" at something, unless it's far away. For objects of interest that are larger than 1-2 degrees in your FOV, your eyes will have to move a lot, really fast, to continuously scan it. You don't notice your own eyes moving, though. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade.

(Also, what you "see" is in large parts made up by fusing the "real" visual input with knowledge and expectations you have in your head.)

Thank you for your concerns, but I'm pretty sure I can see for real, I'm not imagining anything.

Unless you have a wonderful mutation, your colour perception in almost all of your peripheral vision is imaginary.

As is mine.

I have the impression you took the other post personally when it’s about all humans.

It indeed seems I have much better peripheral vision than most people, so you might be right. As I wrote in the other post, I have tested that I can definitely see color in my peripheral vision.

Out of interest, what was your test?

Random color generator. The precision goes down on the far periphery, (the colors usually look more saturated than they are), but the basic color is right. In near-mid periphery (~45°), the colors seem normal.

Good work. Have you included randomised brightness to avoid accidentally learning the difference between what the computer thinks is constant brightness and what your eyes respond to constantly? (Such as “green seems brighter than red”)?

It was just random RGB colors. I didn't train for it and I doubt it's possible to learn anyway.

Good work.

If it had been HSV(rand, 1, 1), which you didn’t do, I would anticipate accidentally learning to map subjective brightness to hue. But you avoided that entirely, so no matter :)

I did the test as well, asking someone to old coloured pens on the periphery of my vision and i wasn't able to tell them apart.

Focus the center of your visual attention on something for a few minutes, and you will indeed stop seeing. In reality you think you are seeing continuously because your brain timeshifts your consciousness during your eyeball's saccades.

Try it. Stare at some spot on the wall. If you do it for few minutes you'll notice that the rest of your field of vision goes to black. Not to total black but you'll see worse and worse.

the most noticeable effect of doing this (at least in my experience) is you can't pick out the shade of colours in your peripheral after a while. You'll see a dull or pastel colour, turn your eyes directly to look at the object and it's actually brightly coloured.

The brain fills in what it expects in your peripheral vision. For example, you can see colors in your peripheral vision, but it is only an illusion made in the brain.

I'm pretty sure I can actually see in my peripheral vision, only not as clearly. Including colors, I have tested that before.

You can see in your peripheral vision, but not clearly, and not colors. This is because the cones in the eye are all in the center, and they are responsible for most of your daytime vision. Around the cones are rods, they are used for night vision and motion detection. The colors you see in your peripheral vision are not real, but an illusion made by the brain.

This Ted gives some good examples https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucina...

I know, it's less clear, but there are colors, I have tested that with a random color generator. The colors are imprecise in the far periphery, but the basic colors can still be seen.

I guess my vision may indeed be abnormal as somebody else above suggested, since I don't get the blid spot in the central vision in the dark, either.

As for the sound, I think you just learn to hear the sine waves as speech - I tried to convert a part of audiobook (that I haven't listened to before) and I can understand it a little bit. I used praat with this script (it doesn't seem to like long sounds): http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-spe...

pretty sure that is exactly how magic (tricks) work.

you do not see it all. you do see /are aware of the model of the FOV you have constructed and are piece by piece maintaining, slight of hand tricks seem to be holding the focus on updating one part of the model while altering another part.

You’re 100% right, and it why many magicians paint s single nail, use an extraneous prop, or have other little tricks to draw the attention. In addition to an element of theatricality, it’s a necessary part of anything involving sleight of hand.

And bigger things...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKry81bf2qw

I lost track when the penguin walked on the stage.

I guess if any group of people were likely to be more observant than most, it would the this group here!

You don't stop seeing but your visual attention typically goes hand in hand with what you focus on, except in a few surprise cases of change picked up by your periphery, or your conscious effort to look straight ahead but focus on something peripheral.

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