How fast is the human eye?

Daniel Porto · January 31, 2009

That's all Flounder can do... is look up (ward)... to look down they would have to see through their bodies. As a fisherman in Florida I can assure you.. they can see up... they see the boat.. they see us.. they see the spear.. they see the lure gliding by over their head.. they see my grill... looking up all the while... until I flip them. :P

Edgar, it was very distracting the first day I experienced this, but now, I love watching each frame!

You know that happened to me the first time I ever operated a 35mm camera (shutter at 150) I could see every individual frame and I couldn't concentrate. But then the second time it was all in my fluid movement and its as if my mind found a way to stop this from happening

Daniel Porto · January 31, 2009

Most people when looking forward are right eye dominant. It has nothing to do with handedness but about 85% of right handers are right eye dominant. But your eye dominance changes depending on the angle of the eyes. In other words if you look to the right, your left brain is 'out of range' of the site so you become right eye dominant. One of my mentors, a legend in sports shooting Barry Winik was left eye dominant and had his film cameras always set up so he shot off the right shoulder using his left eye. And he had custom viewfinder diopters as it was imposible to look though his viewfinder cause of his poor eyesight. Of course he loved to show me every day that his name was one after Gordon Willis in the IA roster book as if that meant anything.

I remember David Fincher saying once that a camera operator told him to check the composition of shots with your right eye, and to check the focus of shots with your left eye (it could be the other way around). He said it has something to do with the right and left side of the brain if I am remembering correctly.

Is this true?

Paul Bruening · January 31, 2009

I remember David Fincher saying once that a camera operator told him to check the composition of shots with your right eye, and to check the focus of shots with your left eye (it could be the other way around). He said it has something to do with the right and left side of the brain if I am remembering correctly.

Is this true?

Yup.

David Rakoczy · January 31, 2009

You know that happened to me the first time I ever operated a 35mm camera (shutter at 150) I could see every individual frame and I couldn't concentrate. But then the second time it was all in my fluid movement and its as if my mind found a way to stop this from happening

Ya, it is like an arcade game. I dig it... actaully seeing what the camera/ neg is seeing... One frame at a time!

Sent from my iPhone.

Daniel Porto · February 1, 2009

Yup.

Could perhaps Walter or anyone for that manner step in a give a technical reason why this is the case?

THANKS!!

David Rakoczy · February 1, 2009

The right side of your brain runs the left side of your body. The left side of your brain runs the right side of your body (generally). The left side of the brain is more cognitive and the right side more spacial (generally). Hence the phrase 'splitting your hemispheres'. However, I and most of you see focus just fine with our right eye providing we have good vision to begin with. Otherwise we would have binocular cameras.

This thread is Opthamologist!

Walter Graff · February 1, 2009

Could perhaps Walter or anyone for that manner step in a give a technical reason why this is the case?

THANKS!!

Wow, this thread is again and again showing the topic should be changed to 'myths and how folks really beleive them, and will defened them too!' Sorry guys!!!

It's not the case. It's wrong. MYTH! It's based on poorly interpreted science and conjecture that one side of the brain does one thing while the other does another. It's a myth just as it's a myth that you use only 10% of the brain. If that was the case then when we scan the brain we would not see the entire brain showing that it is processing, but only a small portion. Sounds great and everyone believes it but it is rubbish.

Here is a fact, both sides of your brain pass off information to each other and as I said it's not simply the right and the left. There is some brain lateralization but it is limited at best. Your brain is more in an intricately co-dependent relationship in terms of 'sides'. The lobes of the brain all interact. Areas may specialize in tasks but need the other areas to complete those tasks. It's part of the redundancies of the brain. You may have an injury that damages one side and you lose language ability but that does not mean language is only on that side. In fact those who are injured often complain that they can still reason the words perfectly but just can not articulate them. But at the same time, someone with the same idential injury does not have that language problem. Science shows we have to damge both halves of the brain to really have someone looss an ability at speech, etc which proves that two halves both have ability and work together.

Your eyes simply send information and all the parts of the brain go to work on it. Say you were eating something while reading this. The frontal lobes in your cerebral cortex are doing the reasoning of what you read. The occipital lobes (in the back base) are allowing you to see the words and form them into sentences. Thanks to your parietal lobes which are on top of the occipital lobes, you can taste the food you are eating and enjoy it. And the temporal lobes which is in the middle base of the brain let you get distracted by the dog barking outside while you read. So it is not as simple as right and left but rather region, area, and segment, but all together processing, like a city. One side of the city isn't only sleeping while the other side works, and all the garbage trucks are not only on one side of town picking up the trash.

Another myth? That eye dominance has something to do with brain dominance. Remember what I told you about the eyes... they have a dominant. Problem is it all depends how you are looking. Looking forward it might be the right eye that is dominant. But looking left your left eye will take over as dominant. That is because the brain is not a simple distribution device with one cable only going one way, and one cable going the other. Rather it uses all sorts of comparisons to make a decision and that requires both halves. Once again think "intricately co-dependent".

Like the eye and 'dominance', the brain does what it needs to do, so if it needs to switch dominant sides it does, but 'dominance ' i snot exclusive to one side or the other. So the notion that one eye sees focus better and the other composition is nonsense and there isn't a bit of scientific evidence to support it, but sure is a lot of folklore and myth surrounding it. Yes the left side of the brain is often in a very generalized way characterized as detail oriented, more into order and pattern perception, where you do math and science and is more practical, while the right side is generalized as where you 'see' spatial perception, more into abstracts and fantasy, etc. All great but without the two halves constantly hand shaking, you'd half missing pieces of the puzzle. It's not the left only does this and the right only does that.

You don't see focus of a film plane on one side better, rather information is processed on both sides, front and back, top and bottom, to draw a conclusion, but all 'parts' need each other and it's not black and white as right does this exclusively and left does that.

Do a search under "left brain right brain myth" and I'm sure you'll find a hundred articles with scientific notation that show most of it is all fantasy and about as accurate as the "world is flat".

David Rakoczy · February 1, 2009

(Unnecessarily long quote removed by admin)

Sheesh Walter. Hence my use of the term (generally). Save your endless dissertations for the library of congress.

Btw. You are WRONG in the Mac thread as Apple is offering a $200 rebate on MacPro purchases thru Apple and not your local dealer.... We look forward to your three page response to that!

Quantity does not equal quality. Obviously you spend more time with a keyboard than a camera.

Sent from my iPhone.

Walter Graff · February 1, 2009

"Sheesh Walter. Hence my use of the term (generally). Save your endless dissertations for the library of congress. "

Too bad I was not talking to you personally (David). I was talking about cognitive function related to the myth that looking through one eye will give you a better picture of something over the other, based on the question:

"I remember David Fincher saying once that a camera operator told him to check the composition of shots with your right eye, and to check the focus of shots with your left eye (it could be the other way around). He said it has something to do with the right and left side of the brain if I am remembering correctly.

Is this true?"

A good book folks might enjoy that explains a lot of the myths about the brain in detail is "The dual-brain myth. Tall tales about the mind and brain: separating fact from fiction." by M. C. Corballis, (2007) Oxford: Oxford University Press. This book spits in the face of what many believe to be true related to the left/right myth. It uses all the science known on the brain to dispel all the myths.

Related to what you (David) posted earlier that said right brain controls left side of body, etc, I don't disagree about motor function of the body and the brain. The right motor cortex controls the left side of the body, and the left motor cortex controls the right side. The decussation of our nerve axoms is well documented. Often this fact is expanded to make it seem like everything right brain is left and everything left is right or that one side has special powers and abilities the other can not. Simply incorrect.

My discussion was not concerning motor functions, but more the persistence that every left is about right brain and visa versa. This is false. In fact new research shows that if anything the right hemisphere might be in charge of the left but can not function properly without it.

"Btw. You are WRONG in the Mac thread as Apple is offering a $200 rebate on MacPro purchases thru Apple and not your local dealer.... We look forward to your three page response to that!"

Sorry that you appear to be such an angry person (David). But I'll give you a better deal, MacConnection is offering $300 off on the new Mac Pro Pro. Can't get that at the Apple store. And two other dealers are offering discounts too. Mac still controls prices but the economy is seeing dealers now compete. And occasionally Mac has "Mac store only deals". Nothing new. Still not going to find 'generally' better prices of Mac anywhere in particular. It all depends on the time of the year and what Mac is looking to move or eliminate.

Paul Bruening · February 1, 2009

What happened, Walter? I was really enjoying addressing you and referring to you to others as WALTER. My caps lock yearns for yesterday.

John Sprung · February 2, 2009

Ya, it is like an arcade game. I dig it... actaully seeing what the camera/ neg is seeing... One frame at a time!

Ah, but remember that with a mirror shutter reflex camera, in terms of time, you're seeing what the negative is *not* seeing. For instance, a very brief strobe flash or a fast burning gun blank that you see in the finder *doesn't* show up on the film, and vice versa. The TV roll bar in the finder won't be in the same place on the film. Even with a 144 degree shutter angle, the finder will show you a roll bar, though on the film it'll be reduced to roughly zero lines. With regard to space, what you see is what you get, but for time, it's what you *don't* get.

The feeling of seeing every frame may have to do with the much lower flicker rate of the finder, 24 rather than 48 light pulses per second. Arri tried a black stripe on their mirrors to put in an extra pulse, but that didn't work.

-- J.S.

Karel Bata · February 2, 2009

I remember David Fincher saying once that a camera operator told him to check the composition of shots with your right eye, and to check the focus of shots with your left eye (it could be the other way around). He said it has something to do with the right and left side of the brain if I am remembering correctly.

Utter bunk! Fact is there is no simple left/right eye, left/right brain correllation. Did no-one here do biology at school? :( It's way more complex, bafflingly so. And since a picture is worth a thousand words...

In both eyes the visual field is split down the middle, with the left side from both eyes going to the right brain hemisphere, and the opposite for the right sides. If an object passes from one side to the other, processing is passed from one hemisphere to the other. How the hemispheres talk to each other, and what happens in that 'mid' visual region remains very much a mystery.

Meanwhile it's left ear = left hemisphere, and right = right, so your left hemisphere 'hears' what's on the left and sees what's on the right. Confused? You should be.

Point is, if you look at the diagram, you can see that Mr. Fincher clearly didn't pay attention at school! :o

Paul Bruening · February 3, 2009

But, what about the bumps on my head? I'm paying my phrenologist a lot of money. He HAS to be right about all of this.

I compose with my right eye and focus with my left eye. It may have more to do with retinal damage or something nothing to do with the brain. I don't know. But, I've always done it. I've been doing it for about 30 years or more.

Karel Bata · February 3, 2009

Retinal damage? :( Can you remember why you started doing that?

That weird optic nerve arrangement makes sense because we have two eyes is for stereoscopic vision. The alternative of having two images processed in two separate hemispheres and then somehow combining the results would be way too complex. And sloooow.

David Rakoczy · February 4, 2009

Ah, but remember that with a mirror shutter reflex camera, in terms of time, you're seeing what the negative is *not* seeing. For instance, a very brief strobe flash or a fast burning gun blank that you see in the finder *doesn't* show up on the film, and vice versa. The TV roll bar in the finder won't be in the same place on the film. Even with a 144 degree shutter angle, the finder will show you a roll bar, though on the film it'll be reduced to roughly zero lines. With regard to space, what you see is what you get, but for time, it's what you *don't* get.

The feeling of seeing every frame may have to do with the much lower flicker rate of the finder, 24 rather than 48 light pulses per second. Arri tried a black stripe on their mirrors to put in an extra pulse, but that didn't work.

-- J.S.

Yes, I know John. I was speaking figuratively.

Walter, I am not really an angry person tho I'll admit I can often read as such. Since your post followed mine I thought you were addressing my post. Not a wise thing to assume.

Obviously if you remove 90% of someone's brain they will have a tough time functioning on the remaining 10%. There are a lot of over generalized statements that when taken as absolutes are inindeed myths...

Have a great day Walter.

Sent from my iPhone.