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.
“At any moment, only some of the brain’s activity reaches conscious awareness, while the rest is processed without ever being experienced,” as the researchers write.
To distinguish between perceived reality and the many other forms of stimuli we’re simultaneously taking in, the research team differentiates between “conscious epochs” and “suppressed micro-epochs.” To investigate, they strapped humans and macaque monkeys to anaglyph glasses — red and blue 3D lenses, basically, like at an old 3D film — which allowed them to show one human face to one eye, followed by the sudden introduction of a second face to the other eye, while monitoring the subject’s neural activity.
Instead of struggling to perceive the jumbled two-face image, the team found that the subjects’ brains actively switched to “experience” viewing the second face, treating the first almost like a foregone conclusion — despite the fact that it was still being “received” as visual stimulus.
“We found that, during a constant stimulus and percept, the brain rapidly alternates, about 15 times per second, between conscious and suppressed micro-epochs,” the researchers wrote. “These findings show that both inferotemporal and prefrontal cortex rapidly interleave conscious with suppressed content, indicating that conscious access requires temporal selection beyond localization.”
More on cognition: Experts Warn of Humans Becoming Empty Vessels Controlled by AI
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