As an observant person, I tend to keep my eyes on my surroundings at all times. In doing this, my peripheral vision is typically one of the main ways in which I do this, but according to something I recently found out, I’m likely getting a very distorted view.
Have you ever swore that you saw something in your peripheral vision that you simply couldn’t explain? If you said yes to that, you aren’t alone. I swear I have thought I saw things, that I couldn’t make sense of, and most people can agree with this statement.
We have an entire field of vision, and part of that is our peripheral. We often use our peripheral vision while reading, riding a bike, or playing sports. Most of the time, we don’t even realize we are using it. In most cases, we are using both our peripheral vision along our central vision.
However, when you take out your central area of vision, something strange takes place. Our sense of what we are seeing becomes distorted without our central vision being taken into account. If you don’t believe me, look at the video below. Focus on the cross in the middle, while using your peripherals to see the moving celebrity faces.
Don’t allow your central vision to become unfocused on the cross.
What did you notice?
For me, the faces became scary and distorted. Honestly, they were downright horrific. The reason this happens is that our retina contains a spot called the yellow spot, which is about 10% of our overall range of vision.
Using the above video, your range of vision is cut down to your peripheral, which causes the brain to have to process the images differently. In turn, you get the scary movie images that are the stuff of nightmares.
If you are like me, and sometimes see scary things in the corner of your eye, this is likely caused because of a similar phenomenon. What do you think? I thought it was pretty crazy! And a bit scary.