I wonder how many other things our monke brains completely ignore, possibly even things we don't know about at all
"I wonder how many other things our monke brains completely ignore"
The typical visual examples are having unified binocular vision from two seperate sensory inputs, and filtering out eye movement and blinking. When i got my last pair of glasses, they had very notable reflections on the edges of my field of vision, which completely disappeared after two days, and by disappeared i mean they are still there and my brain has just learned to filter them out. Just as i usually don't notice the frame at all, or how they edges of my visual field, the parts not covered by my glasses, are blurry as hell.
In theory, you can feel the position of every hair on your body, you've got the sensory apparatus for that, and that's probably hundreds of thousands of individual hairs, yet you only notice them in very specific instances. The amount of ambient sensory input that we are submerged in all the time is staggering. Most of what we perceive of the world is pushed aside before it becomes conscious and takes up our attention, we are constantly observing only a tiny, subtractive sliver of reality. As anybody who has ever taken a large dose of LSD can attest to, this is kinda useful, as navigating your environment is sketchy when you are unsure of where your proprioception ends and tactile sensation of the outside world begins and you feel like turning into a human-chair-hybrid every time you sit down.
This was definitely one of the things I noticed the first time I tripped on LSD. Everything around me felt so novel and unique because it allowed me to perceive all of the useless sensory information the brain normally filters out. I felt like I was doing everything for the first time, and all my senses were extremely sensitive.
Not only that but your eyes also move in jerk-like motions a lot, called saccades, and when that happens you never notice it because your brain smooths those out. 30% of vision is data from eyes and the rest is approximations, extrapolations and processing your brain does.
similar phenomenon: highway hypnosis. Basically if you drive enough your brain starts to fast forward through it in the same way it does for almost any other repetitive task.
wow that's a good idea. Without it, you effectively gain more field of view because you're able to see things that your nose would normally block, I can how that might cause nausea
I think most of the nausea though comes from the fact that you see yourself moving but can't feel yourself moving and I don't think this can be fixed....
It varies from person to person, but it seems that for most people that if they have "jumpy" movement controlled by the player (ie in Half Life: Alyx you kind of teleport around) it avoids the motion sickness, but "smooth" movement (ie WASD or what you're used to in games) affects a lot of people. The killer for almost everyone is cutscenes - the Skyrim VR opening is horrible for motion sickness.
the solution is probably to submerg your body in a liquid and/or a full body suit that can simulate all the senses. or some neural implants.
Supposedly there are already prototypes that give sense of motion by stimulating inner ear though electrodes attached to the head.
Well that sounds like a horribly convoluted solution for consumer games...
I was so tripped out when I first learned about this. There is this demonstration where you look at a sheet of paper with two markings a couple inches apart. If you look at the center, and adjust it to the right distance, one of the markings disappears, and your brain fills the blank spot in to match its surroundings.
weird i just realized that if you sort of half pay attention you have a "ghost nose" that exists as a blurry afterimage. if you close one eye it becomes solid.
i personally just think I've got used to my nose and no longer notice it
