看扒手如何欺骗你的大脑_BEC初级作文

看扒手如何欺骗你的大脑

Sure enough, eye tracking experiments showed that his hunch was right. But why? Martinez-Conde says that it is all down to the way different movements engage the visual system. Following an arc uses an eye movement called ‘smooth pursuit’, where the eye continuously follows an object. A straight line makes the eye move in a ‘saccade’, a fast movement where the eye moves from point A to point B in a fraction of a second.

“When we make a saccade our visual system is blind during the flight of the saccade, so you can see at the beginning and you can see at the end but while the eye is moving you cannot see,” she says. During smooth pursuit, however, there is no blind period, the eyes follow the moving object continuously from start to finish.

One explanation for why this makes us more likely to follow the hand, is that with a straight line, the eyes snap back to the beginning of the movement to try and fill in what the brain didn’t see during the movement. Whatever the explanation, it can be a very useful tool for a pickpocket. “Depending on what the pickpocket is interested in he may engage one or another type of motion, with or without engaging the person’s attention,” she says.

Dirty tricks

Of course, if you want to play with someone’s powers of perception, a good time to try would be late at night when after a few drinks everything is already a little fuzzy. Brown says he spent a particularly fascinating night observing pickpockets outside nightclubs in London’s Trafalgar Square.