Mind Trip of the Week #13: You can’t see your own eyes move

First, grab a mirror. Second, grab a family member, friend or colleague. Now you are ready to begin.

Stand in front of the mirror about 6 inches away. Look from eye to eye. Observe that as you do this, you will not be able to see your eyes move nor will you feel your eyes moving.

Now have someone watch your eyes as you do this experiment again. They will however, see your eyes moving back and forth.

The truth is that we cannot see our eyes in motion. We can see other’s eyes in motion and other people can see ours, but we cannot see our own eyes move.

This phenomenon is called Saccadic Masking.

A saccade is a movement of the eye when it makes a sudden change of fixation, ie looking from one eye to the other.

As our eyes move, there is a blurring of the image on the retina. To counteract this so that the image stays clear and sharp, a part of the brain, believed to be the cortex, cuts off the processing of images. What happens is that we go momentarily blind as the visual information is no longer going to the brain, therefore stopping the blur. We can’t see this happening as it is done automatically and quickly thousands of times a day.