The saccadic masking – one of the most impressive examples that our perception of reality is illusory

One of the core principles I often refer to in my work is that the content of our mind is fundamentally illusory, and thus that reality is something radically different from what we tend to assume it is.

This isn’t anything unheard of, and many religions and spiritual beliefs assume there is an ultimate reality that is very different from what our senses and reasons seem to suggest. But I claim I follow a strictly scientific perspective, and a scientific perspective is rooted in the empirical observation of reality. So how can we claim we need to go beyond that?

Simply put, science itself has clearly demonstrated that our perception of reality is deeply flawed. In this post I will describe a simple experiment you can quickly do to see how much your own perception is illusory. This is in my opinion one of the most powerful demonstrations of how much what we think is “real” is actually a construction of our brain.

For the experiment, I’d like you to find a mirror and stare directly at your reflected image, more specifically at the left corner of your mouth. Now, shift your sight to look at the right corner.

That very quick, jerky movement of your eyes that made it possible to shift your gaze from the left to the right side was a saccade.

So far, nothing unusual, just wanted to make you practically familiar with the mechanism we are dealing with.

Now, I want you to do the very same thing, but look directly at your left eye, and then again shift your gaze towards the right one. If you want, you can keep going looking from one eye to another. Each time, a similar saccadic eye movement occurred.

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But… did you notice you actually can’t see your eyes moving? What’s happening? By sure your eyes do move when you shift your gaze, nor it is too small to be detected. In fact, an other person looking at you while you do this experiment at the mirror will perfectly see your eyes moving (or you could record the, such as in the video above).

Thus, why you can’t see it yourself? This effect is called saccadic masking, and it is a rather complex integration of your raw perceptions in which your visual informations are «frozen» during the time the saccade is completed.

The reason you can’t see your eyes moving, thus, is that you are actually blind during that movement, and what you see is not what your eyes perceive at any given moment but a complex picture, created by your brain, that puts together many fragmented elements.

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This post is a free excerpt from my book.

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