Alex Hsu is hosting June 2026 indie web carnival. The theme is No Way.
My entry is not about something that happened to me specifically, but something that blew my mind when I first learned about it. And technically, it does happen to me (and almost every human), so I think it counts.
You, like me, may have noticed how the second “stretches” longer immediately after you look at an analog clock. This is called Chronostasis. And it ties closely to how our brain processes visual information.
Basically, our brains are constantly lying to us. The exact phenomenon is quite complex, so I’ll link the relevant terms on Wikipedia.
While we perceive vision as a continuous stream, it’s not like that in reality. Our eyes continuously move from point to point in a motion called saccades. If our brain was to process all this information, we would see a lot of blurred images.
So, the brain just turns off processing when the eye is moving! Once the eye stops moving, the brain turns on the visual processing again.
What about the information that our brain missed when the eye was moving? Simple, the brain just “fills in” this information (see saccadic masking and Transsaccadic memory for full details). That’s why the second hand appears to have stopped when you look at it first.
This is the science part, now how about some fiction?
Minor spoilers for 2006 novel Blindsight by Peter Watts ahead.
Peter Watts’ science-fiction novel Blindsight based in 2082. Humanity becomes aware of an alien signal, and a small group is sent to investigate it in trans-Neptunian orbit. Turns out the alien species can detect the saccades and rapidly move between them, rendering them invisible to the human eye!
I read the book in 2015 or so and enjoyed it. It did feel a bit heavy and leaning towards philosophy at a lot of the time. It was still quite entertaining.
I found out saccades from a post recommending the book and recall going “no way”. Did you know about it already? If not, did this made you go “no way”?