Your brain may be doing something surprising even when you think you are seeing the world clearly. The findings could offer new clues to one of neuroscience’s biggest puzzles: How the brain decides what enters our conscious experience. The research, which involved macaque monkeys and human volunteers, suggests that brain activity alternates between representing a face that is consciously seen and another that is suppressed from awareness around 15 times a second.
It could be rapidly switching between information you are consciously aware of and visual information that remains outside your awareness, according to a new study.
The study, titled ‘Rapid Alternation Of Conscious And Suppressed Stimulus Representations In The Primate Brain’, was led by neuroscientists Janis Hesse and Doris Tsao of the University of California, Berkeley. It has been published as a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review.
The team demonstrated a phenomenon known as binocular flash suppression. In this experiment, each eye is shown a different image. When a second image suddenly appears before one eye, it typically becomes the one a person consciously sees, while the first image remains visible to the eye but disappears from awareness. The researchers believe studying these rapid changes could help explain why some information reaches awareness while other information remains hidden from it. However, the findings are preliminary. The recordings were made in just two monkeys, and the study examined specific brain regions rather than the entire brain. The human volunteers helped verify the visual illusion; they were not the subjects of the same neural recordings.
