When you watch a video, it’s just a long series of still images. The sensation feels fluid, though, appearing seamless even though a second of theatrical film takes about 24 still frames to animate.
Typically, all 24 frames are full of similar images from a recording or animation. But how would our brains respond if only some of those frames of film contained footage of a movie, and the rest of the frames were random junk?
That’s the question more or less posed by a new pre-print study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, which found evidence that our brains might be flashing between conscious and unconscious stimuli at a rate of about 15 times per second.
The study, first flagged by Science Alert, basically points to the intriguing possibility that our brains are selectively filtering out unnecessary stimuli — almost smoothing out the way we process static frames of film, to continue the video metaphor — from our conscious minds.
