Looked but failed to see...

This blog post describes the fascinating, recent scientific explanations for why we fail to see things that are right in front of us. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter that we’re failing to see things in front of us. We might sometimes wonder why we just hunted everywhere for our keys, only to find out they’d been right in front of us. But things I’ll describe have some real implications for many aspects of our lives, and are important to understanding how human vision works. In a later blog post, I’ll explain why I think these things are essential to understanding pictures as well.

no three-dimensional space could ever be perceptually uniform; three dimensions just cannot capture all of the weird and wonderful ways that our eyes and brains process color comparisons. As anyone who has entered a Turrell or debated The Dress can tell you, color perception is wild. When trying to predict how people are going to perceive the difference between two colors, we need to account for way more than three variables.

Making my own pictures led me down a road to understanding how wrong these views are. There is no such thing as correct perspective; all choices of perspective have advantages and disadvantages. It is impossible to accurately portray everything about 3D space in a 2D picture, so artists must make choices, and linear perspective is just one option.

10 out of 13 experienced visual hallucinations after 1 day of blindfolding. (I don't have access to full-text, if you do please send it to me.)

When Bush ducked and Maliki didn't flinch as the first shoe sailed toward them, it was a real-world example supporting the theory that there are two independent pathways in the human visual system.

a phenomenon of visual perception, attributed to adaptation of neurons in the visual system

Motion Induced Blindness