
The brain can process images seen for just 13 milliseconds - jonbaer
http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-brain-can-process-images-seen-for-just-13-milliseconds
======
im3w1l
If you show a picture, really quickly, faster than the "refresh rate" of the
eyes, wouldn't it just be blended or motion blurred into a surrounding frame?
Suggestion for methodology: First show neutral grey. The flash image for
deltat. Then flash negative image for deltat. Then neutral grey again. This
ensures the average over time is grey.

~~~
apu
I think for many of these studies they have to go even further because it
turns out that people can remember the target images and "look" at them (in
their mind's eye) for longer than the allotted time, even if sandwiched
between neutral frames. So the target images have to be followed by random
noise images that have the same frequency statistics as the target images,
which interferes with your brain's recall mechanism and prevents you from
"cheating."

------
joshvm
Lots of interesting work on this by the military. They show rapid-fire photos
of satellite imagery to analysts who are looking for interesting features.
They monitor the brain activity and look for responses when features appear.
Results show that the analysts' brains detect things before they're
consciously aware of it.

They then tag the images that registered a response and look at them in more
detail. Apparently it's fairly effective.

[http://honeywell.com/News/Pages/news76.aspx](http://honeywell.com/News/Pages/news76.aspx)

~~~
amirmc
Presumably, those analysts still need to be trained in the normal way first so
that they know what features they're looking for.

In addition, you could probably only use people for short durations before you
have to allow them to rest, otherwise you run the risk of exhausting people
and missing things (c.f Air Traffic controllers).

Apart from that, this kind of reminds of the 'Focused' people from one of
Vernor Vinge's novels [1].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky)

------
etrautmann
The process of transducing light into neuronal spikes adds significant
temporal smoothing, so an image briefly flashed on the retina will be
lengthened in time somewhat before it even makes it to the brain. Need to look
up exact numbers here, but this isn't all that surprising.

What is quite surprising is that rod photoreceptors are sensitive to single
incident photons. That's truly unbelievable.

------
mnx
The funny thing is they stopped at 13 ms because of the refresh rate of their
screens couldn't go any faster.

~~~
NatW
hmm, so 13ms ~= 76.9 frames/second.

Wonder if they could find a higher rate with an OLED screen..

------
huxley
Back in the mid-90s, when I was doing digital editing, it got so I could
easily spot a single bad field (often just a portion of one television
scanline) appearing for 1/60th of a second (or about 16 milliseconds).

It wasn't quite "seeing" though, I was just suddenly aware and when I jogged
back to the bad frame, there it would be.

------
ecesena
In an Italian TV show, SuperBrain - Rai1, I've recently seen this guy,
Alessandro Gallippi, who is able to recognize a movie from a single frame
embedded within another movie. Pretty impressive!

Here's the TV show [1], an example is at 1:12:07. Of course I can't know if
that's fake, but I have no reason to think so...

------
jibsen
This reminded me of Ayumu the chimp [1]. The difference between being able to
perceive the overall image like a zebra, and the specific details like the
position of nine numbers seems interesting to me.

[1]:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16832379](http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16832379)

------
pknight
This reminds me of those courses that supposedly train you to read books at
insane speeds by relaxing and taking in the pages like a photo. Is there
anybody that actually gets results with this approach?

------
elwell
Reminds me of those flashes of demon faces in _The Exorcist_.

~~~
thejosh
Or splices in fight club.

~~~
ollifi
Those one frame flashes are easy to see though (which makes me wonder where
the previous result of 100ms treshold for image recognition came from).
Probably coincidence resulting from similar frame rates, but I think movie
projectors were running 72 hz shutter showing each frame 3 times to provide
low flicker image. That amounts to 14~ ms per showing which is close to what
they tested here. Of course part of the time the shutter is blocking (50%?) so
the actual image might be projected only half of the time.

------
Altenuvian
wow - that is fast. wondering what this means for latency-mitigation in
display devices?! waiting for carmack to chime in...

~~~
Strom
This is not fast, as 13ms is only ~75Hz. I'm not sure why they claim that the
results are surprising. What's surprising to me is that they had a test setup
that supported only 75Hz.

As for Carmack, I belive he has been onboard for even 200Hz displays for qutie
some time already.

