question: When you stare at something long enough, weird things start to happen visually. Why and how?
comment: Eyesight is kinda of an illusion. The majority of your actual vision isn't color, and is pretty low resolution. There's only a very small part of the back of your eye that absorbs light which is clear. Your brain compensates for this a few ways. For starters, it rapidly moves your eyes very minimally. This allows for you to see in 3D and slightly increase that "clear" vision area. The other way is through "mapping" what you see. When you look at a TV then look to something 3 ft away, your eyes don't fully see the TV anymore, but your brain helps that by saving an image of it and moving it with the environment. The other way is that your neurons have a sort of halflife. When they get hit by a certain color, say red, they slowly step down and go back into hibernation. When this occurs some weird stuff happens. A good example is if you stare at something long enough, then look away, you'll still see that image. Similarly, when you stare at something, your brain loses it's "map" as those neurons deactivate, and the neurons in your eye go into a type of hibernation state, so anything outside that small cone that you actually see starts fading away and becoming less clear and more blurred (which if it wasn't for all your brain's little tricks, is what you would actually see).
passages: Alternative areas of investigation include supplementary motor areas, frontal eye fields and parietal eye fields. These areas of the brain are involved with calculating predictions and visual salience. Changing expectations on where to look restructures these areas of the brain. This cognitive repatterning can result in some of the symptoms of these symptoms found in such disorder.
  
  Section::::Visual saliency modeling.
  
  In the domain of psychology, efforts have been made in modeling the mechanism of human attention, including the learning of prioritizing the different bottom-up and top-down influences.
   This spatial disorder of visual attention—the ability to identify local elements of a scene, but not the global whole—has been referred to as a constriction of the individual's global gestalt window—their visual "window" of attention. People fixate their eyes to specific images in social scenes because they are informative to the meaning of the scene. Any forthcoming recovery in simultanagnosia may be related to somehow expanding the restricted attentional window that characterizes this disorder.
   Section::::Pathological condition and observations.:Posture and gaze related hypotheses.:Gaze and autonomic nerves.
  
  Japanese plastic surgeon Kiyoshi Matsuo is cited as one of the thinkers who has focused on the relationship between the gaze of a person reading while standing in a bookstore and the autonomic nervous system. His theory was described in the December 17, 1998 edition of the magazine "Bungei Shunju" (published by "Bungeishunju-sha").
   Section::::Ocular microtremors.:Mechanism.
  
  Although originally thought to stem from spontaneous firing of motor units, the origin of ocular microtremors is now believed to be in the oculomotor nuclei in the reticular formation of the brainstem. This new insight opened the possibility of using ocular tremors as a gauge for neuronal activity in that region of the central nervous system. More research must be done, but recent studies strongly suggest that decreased activity in the brainstem correlates with decreased frequency of OMTs.
  
  Section::::Ocular microtremors.:Medical application.
   Section::::Possible neural correlates.:Lamme's recurrent feedback hypothesis of visual awareness and masking.
  
  This model proposes that backward masking is caused by an interference with feedback from higher visual areas. In this model, target duration is irrelevant because masking is supposed to occur as a function of feedback, which is generated when the target appears on screen. Lamme's group further supported their model when they described that the surgical removal of the extrastriate cortex in monkeys leads to a reduction of area V1 late responses.
  
  Section::::Possible neural correlates.:Lateral inhibition circuits.
   In 1980, Just and Carpenter formulated the influential "Strong eye-mind hypothesis", that "there is no appreciable lag between what is fixated and what is processed". If this hypothesis is correct, then when a subject looks at a word or object, he or she also thinks about it (process cognitively), and for exactly as long as the recorded fixation. The hypothesis is often taken for granted by researchers using eye-tracking. However, gaze-contingent techniques offer an interesting option in order to disentangle overt and covert attentions, to differentiate what is fixated and what is processed.
   In 2000, a 70-year-old man presented with akinetopsia. He had stopped driving two years prior because he could no longer "see movement while driving". His wife noted that he could not judge the speed of another car or how far away it was. He had difficulty watching television with significant action or movement, such as sporting events or action-filled TV shows. He frequently commented to his wife that he could not "see anything going on". When objects began to move they would disappear. He could, however, watch the news, because no significant action occurred. In addition he had signs of Balint's syndrome (mild simultanagnosia, optic ataxia, and optic apraxia).
   In her book "Fixing my Gaze", Susan Barry gives a detailed description of her surprise, elation and subsequent experiences when her stereo vision suddenly set in.
  
  Hubel wrote of her book:
   Section::::The Process of Science: A Philosophy for Teaching and Learning.
   What Tineo sees is a dense, obscuring fog in the center of his vision which, if the light is good, allows objects to appear as a blur, though with black turned white and white turned black, as in a photographic negative. If the light indoors or out is too bright, the fog turns into an intense and painful glare.
   BULLET::::- "I Gaze a Gazely Stare" took place at Feature Inc. in New York, New York from March 9 - April 14, 1995. Larmon was accompanied by Jeanne Dunning, Robert Flack, Jason Fox, Tom Friedman, Jim Isermann, Pruitt-Early, Brett Reichman, Richard Rezac, David Robbins, and Nancy Shaver.
  
  BULLET::::- "THOUGHTS" took place at Feature Inc. in New York, New York from April 14 – May 19, 2007. Larmon was accompanied by Pam Golden, Jonathan Heartshorn, Andrew Masullo, Tracy Miller, Travis Molkenbur, David Moreno, Oren Slor, the unnameable, and Tyler Vlahovich.
   Section::::Content.
   BULLET::::1. The eyes receive information from the environment regarding one particular focus. This sensory input is sent directly to the visual cortex to be processed. After visual processing, we consciously perceive this object of focus. In the context of a student in a classroom, the student's eyes focus on a paper on their desk. After his eyes collect light reflected off of the paper and this information is processed in his visual cortex, the student consciously perceives the paper in front of him.
   Wednesday Is Indigo Blue
  
  Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia is a 2009 non-fiction book written by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman documenting the current scientific understanding of synesthesia, a perceptual condition where an experience of one sense (such as sight) causes an automatic and involuntary experience in another sense (such as hearing). The afterword is written by Dimitri Nabokov, a synesthete, and the son of the well-known author and synesthete Vladimir Nabokov.
  
  Section::::Synopsis.
   Section::::Ocular drifts.:Mechanism.
  
  The motion of ocular drift is related to the processing and encoding of space and time. It is also related to acquiring minute visual details of objects that are stationary, in order for these details to be further processed. Recent results have shown that ocular drift reformats the input signal to the retina equalizing (whitening) spatial power at non-zero temporal frequencies across a broad spatial frequency range.
  
  Section::::Ocular drifts.:Medical application.
   Section::::Therapy.
   Broadbent and Broadbent (1987) discovered the attentional blink when they used a rapid serial visual presentation task to look at the recognition of multiple target words. Results showed that following the presence of a target, attentional processing is restricted and people can’t report the items that came after the target, however the presence of the item that comes after the target usually misses attentional blindness. This concludes that when two targets are shown within 500 milliseconds of one another and they are separated by one or more distractors, the second target usually falls within an attentional blink and will not be seen.
   Rubbernecking
  
  Rubbernecking is the act of staring at something of interest. The term "rubbernecking" refers to the physical act of craning one's neck, performed in order to get a better view.
  
  Rubberneck has been described as a human trait that is associated with morbid curiosity. It can be the cause of traffic jams (sometimes referred to as "gapers' blocks" or "gapers' delay"), as drivers slow down to see what happened in a crash.
  
  The term is generally considered to be slang or unconventional English.
  
  Section::::Etymology.
   BULLET::::- When presented with stimuli, eye saccades from fixation point are more common in extinction patients, are longer in duration, and show ipsilesional bias in movement.
  
  BULLET::::- Some evidence for a slight increase in detection of eccentric stimuli in the ipsilesional visual field – i.e. slightly improved peripheral vision.
  
  BULLET::::- Patients show increased difference in reaction time (crossed-uncrossed difference) for processing in contralesional and ipsilesional visual hemispheres.
  
  Section::::Diagnosis.
   Section::::Ocular microtremors.
   Inattentional blindness as also been looked at as a variation of the rapid serial visual presentation. Rees, Russell, Frith, and Driver (1999) investigated participants’ brain activity as they looked at rapid displays of a letter string or of a word above a picture. Participants were asked to watch out for repeats in the letter string or in the pictures that were displayed. They found that the attended words in the task were related to semantic processing.
  
  Section::::Modes.
   Section::::Symptoms.
   BULLET::::- "Queering the Collection: Emergency Readings," International Center of Photography Library, NY, 2018.
  
  Section::::Teaching.
  
  Soulellis joined the full-time faculty at Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 as Assistant Professor, graphic design. His "Experimental Publishing Studio" syllabus at RISD was cited as "required reading" by Rhizome. He has conducted workshops, been a visiting critic, and lectured at numerous schools and institutions in the US and Europe.
  
  Section::::External links.
  
  BULLET::::- "Making Public," Paul Soulellis, 2015, via Google Drive
  
  BULLET::::- "Performing Publishing: Infrathin Tales of the Printed Web," Paul Soulellis, 2015, via Google Drive
   In contrast to Bálint's hypothesis, Thaiss and De Bleser studied a patient who had a physical restriction of her attentional window. The patient's ability to perceive multiple objects and identify global structures significantly improved as the size of the presented image decreased. Thus, complex stimuli could be processed as wholes so long as they occupied a small visual angle.
  
  Section::::Proposed theories for mechanism of action.:Disengagement difficulty.
   BULLET::::- A more restricted example can be found with the Cognitive Biology Group, Institute of Biology, Faculty of Science, Otto-von-Guericke University (OVGU) in Magdeburg, Germany. The group offers courses titled “Neurobiology of Consciousness” and “Cognitive Neurobiology.” Its website lists the papers generated from its lab work, focusing on the neural correlates of perceptual consequences and visual attention. The group’s current work is aimed at detailing a dynamic known as ‘multistable perception.’ The phenomenon, described in a sentence: “Certain visual displays are not perceived in a stable way but, from time to time and seemingly spontaneously, their appearance wavers and settles in a distinctly different form.”
  