Your brain has a frame rate and it’s pretty slow | Hacker News Reader

Your brain has a frame rate and it’s pretty slow

nerdist.com

13 pointsgivan5 comments

The folks at Oculus have done some good research on this, they found out that generally people find it hard to spot any difference in frame rate after 90fps.

I definitely see differences in some things at higher frequencies. When motion is involved such as my eye moving around, LEDs turn into an annoying series of distinct dots. Tail lights on some vehicles are big offenders and have almost caused me to crash. When adjusting LED duty cycle on my arduino projects I always increase the default frequency because ~900hz is too slow and flickers noticeably when I look around.

Any chance you have a link handy to their research [if its public]? I can find references to past research in their blog posts but none of their own on this exact topic.

AFAIK, motion fusion happens at about 30 to 50 Hz. However, we continue to see flicker still till about 60 to 90 Hz.

Your monitor is probably using something between 60 Hz to 75 Hz. Do you see any flicker on it? Peripheral vision is more sensitive to flicker, so also try looking off-angle. This also depends on whether it's CRT or LCD.

There are TVs claiming to use much higher frame rates. Well, for one, they still use a lower frame rate, just use higher blanking period since that reduces motion blur, and they call this higher frame rate [1]. This motion blur however is due to slow response of the LCD though.

[1] As am example, a TV using 120 Hz frame rate which puts the actual frame only for 50% of the frame time would often be advertized as a TV with 240 Hz frame rate (without telling you that every alternate frame is a black image).

Why is this on HN? It's garbage.

The headline implies the brain has a global "framerate" implying it's synchronous. That's most definitely not the case. The strobe light and shutter examples are examples of the light and shutter having specific refresh rate, and has nothing at all to do with our brain.

So...

1. We have a study.

2. Then we have a mainstream press (New Yorker) article written by someone barely understanding the study.

3. And then we have this cheap blog post, whose author briefly mentions the New Yorker article, as an excuse to feed us a bunch of contrived nonsense that ties the study (as if) to some random meme GIFs and videos.

I think we're better than this, HN.

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