yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

STOPPED CLOCK ILLUSION


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.

And today I've got a brand new episode of Vsauce Leanback. You can click this annotation or the link at the top of the description to start it, and then you can just lean back and the autoplay playlist will bring the knowledge right to your brain. As you already know, it doesn't really work on mobile phones yet, so wait until you are in a better position to lean back.

In the meantime, let's get saccadic. No, not psychotic; saccadic, referring to what is known as a saccade—the quick movements that our eyeballs make when we move from one object to the other. As you may remember from a previous Leanback, some animals, like most birds, cannot move their eyeballs.

And so, to look from one thing to another, they have to move their head really, really fast. To keep the world from being blurry when their bodies move, they have to keep their heads completely stationary. But here's the neat thing about saccades. When our eyes move, there's a quick blur between one destination and the other.

And that blur is completely incomprehensible to our brain. So what our visual system does is erase it from our memory and instead replace that little fraction of a second that our eye moved during with the very next thing we see. This leads to a really amazing illusion called 'The Stopped Clock Illusion.'

You may have noticed this before if you've ever been in a room with a clock with a second hand, like in a classroom, darting your eyes back and forth, waiting for class to be out. Now here is what happens. Right when you dart your eyes to the clock, that very first second—that very first movement of the second hand that happens when your eyes reach it—seems longer than every other second afterwards.

Look away from the clock and then look. And that first second will seem to linger, as if time itself has stopped. The reason for that is that your brain replaces the time it took for your eye to go from here to the clock with an image of the first thing you saw, which was the second hand.

And so, that little fraction of a second of time is added to the length of time it takes the second hand to move. What's really mind-blowing about this entire effect is that it happens all the time. All day, as you look around the world from one point to another, that little fraction of a second that your eyeball was moving is lost, and your brain just replaces it with the very next thing that you see.

Now, it might just be a tiny, tiny amount of time, but over the course of an entire day, those little fractions of a second add up to almost 40 minutes. 40 minutes of every day that you're awake are lost because our eyeballs move.

And as always, thanks for watching. So what are you waiting for? Click here to start the Leanback or click the link at the top of this video's description. You know what? I totally never say this... Yeah, I'm totally heterosexual, but... You are really attractive!

More Articles

View All
'Big Short' Investor Reveals His Biggest Bet for 2024.
I’m always a little bit hesitant to try to ask you for Big Picture top down analysis, ‘cause a lot of times you don’t really want to go there. I actually have an opinion on this one. Good! If you don’t know that man, his name is Steve Eisan. He’s the seni…
World's Longest Straw
Hey Nige, can you get me another coke? Nah, I’m good, thanks. It’s just downstairs. Nah, the tennis is on. You come to my house to watch the tennis and you’re not even going to get me another coke? Yeah, it’s the tiebreaker. Relax. You know what I …
What Causes The Phases Of The Moon?
[Applause] Now I’ve been around Sydney and I’ve asked people what causes the phases of the moon, and you know what they say? How do we get the faces of the Moon? Uh, because of the Earth blocks the light that comes from the Sun. A full moon is basically w…
Worked examples: Definite integral properties 1 | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
We want to evaluate the definite integral from 3 to 3 of f of x dx. We’re given the graph of f of x and of y equals f of x, and the area between f of x and the x-axis over different intervals. Well, when you look at this, you actually don’t even have to …
Paul Buchheit: What traits do startups need to succeed?
I think like focus is one of the most important things because like as a start-up, it’s actually I think your most powerful weapon. Right? Like the reason that you’re able to take on like these big companies or areas is because they’re doing a thousand di…
Representatives as delegates, trustees, and politicos | US government and civics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about congressional roles. Now, what do I mean by congressional roles? Well, whether someone is a member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, or even one of the state legislatures, there’s different w…