Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the informed opinion. I know way less about animal vision than machine vision but the statement that eyes have a "frame rate" and "send images to the brain a fixed number of times a second" smelled really bad.

A maybe-dumb question about point (3) - I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink just a split second before the thing hit me. Given that I'm unlikely to have any kind of precognition, do you think this might be related to the blink reflex being 'hard wired' and so my brain gets the "hey, a thing hit your face" signal after the "hey, your eyes just closed" signal? (Alternately, I read something once about our perception of audio being delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception of vision, despite our visual processing being slower than audio - maybe the signal that caused the flinch gets 'buffered'?)

> I've noticed that when I get a blink/flinch response from > something (usually some sand or a bug hitting my face when > I'm on the bike), it feels like I blink just a split second > before the thing hit me.

We know very little about conscious perception or even the locus at which sensory signals are integrated to generate a conscious percept. But it's perfectly possible that delays differ across modalities and that the proprioceptive signal about lid-closing reaches whatever-relevant-area before your visual system catches up.

> I read something once about our perception of audio being > delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception > of vision

Not an expert on audition, but the brain is really good at generating coherent representations of the physical world across modalities. I wouldn't be surprised if such cross-sensory synchronisation happened in some form.

Cool, thanks for the response! I'm glad my theory doesn't sound /too/ far fetched. :)

(Alternately, I read something once about our perception of audio being delayed by ~100ms so that it synchs up with our perception of vision

If such a delay does occur it is considerably less than 100ml as that kind of latency would be very noticeable playing a musical instrument.

Is it possible that there is a delay for one-off unanticipated events, but the feedback loop we form between perception and playing is much tighter? I definitely have a hard time playing anything with much more than 5ms audio buffers myself.

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