The Illusion of Continuity

The Illusion of Continuity: What is perceptual constancy and how does the illusion of continuity pull a fast one over our brains? Find out in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind as Robert and Julie discuss the science behind Dancing Spider-Man, the whole Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz thing and the roots of magical thinking. About the Image: Man doing back flip on a trampoline by Eadweard Muybridge, 1881, in his Attitudes of Animals in Motion P&P Case © CORBIS

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
are you a fan of continuity in life? Oh? Sure?
I love in the most logical way, so that when
a string of words it is understood or put together.

(00:26):
I too makes sense when words prefer it in a
way that complete center, least informed string together, it's much
easier to understand. Yes, You're only a lot easier to understand. Well,
was there? Was there just some sort of asynchronicity going
on there? I don't know. It felt a little weird,
didn't it. Yeah, a little skipping about kind of felt
like David Lynch just edited us. Yes, noel or editor.

(00:47):
All right, well let's shake that off, alright, and uh
and and move forward, Because indeed, continuity is is an
important part of the way that we perceived the world
and and and how we make sense of the world.
But to what extent isn't an illusion? How much of
the perceived continuity uh in life is just a sort

(01:08):
of an accident of the brain. You know, I was
thinking about this lately because I'm watching the Olympics and
Winter Olympics and searching, and I don't have cable or
satellite TV, and um super lazy, and I didn't go
get some rabbity or antennas. Instead, I'm streaming it to
my Roku player through an app called us TV now.

(01:30):
Are us TV now And anyway, the point is is
that there are so many weird time lapses in the
streaming that it really does feel like David Lynch is
presenting the Olympics, and there's all sorts of odd conversation
loop back that happened three four times, and it starts
to feel like it's just even those little tweaks are

(01:52):
putting me into a different universe, into an alternate universe.
And I thought about that, just that that little tweak
can really be unsettling and fe centering. Yeah, I mean,
that's just the way that our our brain is seeing
and hearing things. We get these chunks that even though
they're they're out of sequence due to the realities of

(02:13):
our time system here on Earth, but we can't help
to try and piece them together and make sense of it,
because that's what our brains do all the time. Yeah,
and we really take for granted this idea of perceptual
constancy and how we see the world, because if you
see an image in front of you, think, oh, that's
that's just something that's that is exactly as it is
that I'm perceiving it, um, just as it is in reality,

(02:35):
and nothing could be further from the truth. It is
a constructed reality by your brain, by your visual system UM,
which analyzes let's slow down that moment and you're watching
the socio Olympics, right. It analyzes the interactions between visible
electromagnetic waves and the objects in our environment. So not
just the you know, when I'm watching on the TV screen,
but the light in the room, the dimensions of that room.

(02:58):
All of that is being penciled in by little artists
in my brain essentially trying to tell me what I'm seeing. Yeah,
we often experience reality with this idea that hey, it's
it's me experiencing reality, and ultimately that's the truth. You
are your body, so anything your body does, it's all
working together as a single unit. But when you start
breaking it down, you realize that you or your conscious mind,

(03:23):
and your conscious mind is just kind of the froth
on the beer that is the brain, and then it's
it's then that beer is just setting in a dark
room and it's only getting information um passed onto it
from these from these these eyes that are outside of
the room, uh, outside of the brain itself. So you're

(03:45):
getting this information passed to the brain and then to
the mind, and uh, it's not a accurate version of
what is actually going on outside the room. Yeah. We
talked about this a little bit with Liliputian hallucinations and
how that our brains have to create this perceptual constancy.
And if you think about it, it's doing this by

(04:05):
reconstructing a three dimensional dimensional world with two dimensional images
on your rentness, and so when you look at an object,
each of your eyes sees a slightly different picture. So
think about a fork and a plate on the table.
Now you're okay. So your brain has to move between

(04:25):
these two objects and create scale in shape, and there
has to be a perceptual constancy in there in place,
and it's doing that behind the scenes with a lot
of different processes. We're talking about minocular vision providing the
image perceived by each separately, and then you have binocular
vision that's getting in on on the play here. And

(04:45):
if you're looking at something in the distance, then you
have to keep in mind that there's something like atmospheric perspective,
which is created by the dust particles and water vapor
in the air, which then color the way that you
see an object. Something farther away from you is gonna
look a little hazy, a little blurry. Yeah. And we
know that damage to the brain can sometimes create gaps

(05:06):
in that visual data that comes into play. And we
also know that our brain and when it doesn't have
that data, will hallucinate an image for you. So again,
this hold on reality, this this illusion of continuity is
just a very tenuous thing here. Yeah, and it's and
again it's also worth remembering that your brain is not

(05:27):
passing on all the information to you. Uh, it's a
there's a lot of computation that's going on beneath the surface.
One example of this came from a study from the
University of Arizona from doctoral degree candidate Jay Sanganetti, publishing
the journal Psychological Science. And they took a various subjects

(05:47):
and they had them look at these images where you
had an abstract dark center of an image and then
white on the sides and on some of these that
there was just abstraction they did. There was no actual picture.
It's just white and dark. But in there's you had
these white seahorse shapes on the sides. So they flash
these at everyone's at everyone in the study, and some

(06:07):
people got the sea horse, some people got the abstract nonsense. Uh.
But they found that that that in the brain when
they looked at the brain activity, there was identification of
the sea horse going on even when people didn't consciously
see the sea horse. It's like the brain was identifying
it and saying sea horse. But then it doesn't pass
the information onto your your conscious understanding. It's it's happening

(06:30):
into some conscious level, so saying seahorse but not seahorse. Yeah,
so it's sometimes you were seeing things but you're not
consciously seeing them because it's not important to your to
your immediate understanding of the world around you. But you know,
how does that subconsciously color the things that do rise
to the top of that froth on the bier right right,

(06:52):
which is the whole other thing that we could get into.
But we're we're interested in looking at this illusion of
continuity and sing how it games us in certain ways
and certainly. One of the ways that we have mentioned
before is something that is exploited by magicians, and it's
called the retention vanish that very iconic trick in which

(07:12):
you see the coin go from one hand to the other.
And it happens when there's a lag in the brain's
perception of motion, and this is called persistence of vision,
and the audience will actually see the coin, say, transfer
from the right to the left palm for a split
second after the hands separate, and that is because visual
neurons don't stop firing once a given stimulus. Here the

(07:35):
coin is no longer present. So even though that coin
wasn't necessarily deposited into the left hand, the last image
that your brain saw looked like it, and it's not
going to stop that process and say, oh wait, hold on,
you know, split one of a second here we think
that it actually didn't get transferred. It's going to continue

(07:57):
to fire and you're gonna have this this false perception
of continuity into the other hand. Yeah, it's crazy. Again.
Your brain is filling in the gaps for you in
order to give you the complete picture. It's like a
reporter has been sent out into the city to get
a story finds out certain bits of information, and it's
just filling in, uh, the gaps in what happened, and

(08:17):
the way they fill in the gaps, it's it's the
way it likely happened, all right. Somebody was seeing a
point A and then they were seeing at point B.
It stands to reason they walk down the street from
point A to point B. But maybe not well, And
I was just thinking about this too. Aren't we even
getting to the point with metic keywords in the way
that we use the internet. Aren't we sort of filling
that in? Can't you look at a like a pool

(08:39):
of meta keywords for an article and immediately start to
fill in those gaps yourself. Yeah, So if you see
something like you know, illusion of continuity, visual visual perception,
persistence of vision, you begin to understand the story that's
developing there. Yeah. Or look at any movie trailer, especially
movie trailers for films that are not that inventive and
and that stick, uh, stick rather closely to the accepted tropes.

(09:04):
Oftentimes you'll look at at the extended trailer for the
film and you say, hey, well, I just saw the film.
There's absolutely no reason to see it because you were
given the little points, the little the little important moments
along the way, and then your brain just fills in
the rest, and based on previous knowledge, you know exactly
what's going to happen. Yeah, and movies are the ultimate
illusion of continuity. Yes, it turns out that twenty seven

(09:28):
point five hurts. This is a sequence of still photograph
slides that are displayed at or about this rate of
presentation gives us the illusion of motion. So, like the
basic flip book, like a horse running, you flip the
page is fast enough, and it looks like a little
horses is running around there, though obviously it is not. Yeah,
so motion pictures or those horses that you see are

(09:51):
really just a sequence of those still images at twenty
four prame, excuse me, twenty four frames per second, and
that exceeds something called the temporal resolving properties the human
visual system, so it's outside of the zone of detection.
So if you're looking at thirty five millimeter film projection,
each still is presented for one of a second, alternating

(10:12):
with a black frame for roughly the same duration, and
the eye perceives the images as just one fluid scene.
But old timey films, we we perceive that gap, right,
and then we kind of herky jerky motion that you
get this this sort of this unreal uh idea of movement,
the kind of unreal movement that is generally retained and

(10:32):
stop motion animation. Yeah, and that's because the frame rate
is clocking in at seventeen to eighteen frame rates per second.
It's too low. So the brain says, I see something here.
There is a discontinuity, and in this respect, this twenty
seven point five hurts. It also translates to sound and
how sound begins to form a sort of continuity. And

(10:56):
this is this is the idea that I'm going Dad.
Hear each individual beat, but if we were to speed
that up enough, it would just be one constant exactly,
because the molecules are vibrating at that speed and they're
creating that sort of booz that continuity. And Daniel J. Levitton,
who wrote the book This Is Your Brain on Music,

(11:17):
talks about that and he used this example of putting
a playing card in the spokes of a wheel. He
says that slow speeds, you hear the click click, click
click click of the car, but at higher speeds the
clicks were together and they cease to be perceived as
individual noises, but now as a continuous buzz and he
says a tone you can actually hum along to a pitch,
and that's sort of the magic of this continuity of

(11:39):
sound and motion. Alright, So on that note, let's take
a quick break and when we get back, we're going
to talk about why Spider Man, you know that gift,
why he is such a good groover. Alright, we're back

(12:00):
dancing Spider Man. Yes, uh, this is just one of
those gifts that's been around forever where the this this
little kind of pixelated the Spider Man. Uh, you know,
maybe it was a real person dancing in the original footage,
but it's just kind of it's kind of a little
artifact on the web that just won't go away. And
you see him sort of sashang, I guess is the
correct descriptive term, back and forth and kind of this

(12:23):
kind of is he snapping his fingers or am I
just I don't know. He seems to be doing the
Charleston sometimes and then he kind of goes into the
disco moves. Um. He's on a white background, and it's
just it's a very simple animated gift. But the great
thing about it is that you can play nearly any
piece of music to it, and Spider Man seems to
keep time. Yes, you can. You can throw classical music

(12:46):
on it, and he seems to be uh sash back
and forth to Mozart. You can throw there on some
dub step and he seems to be really jamming out
to that as well, and everything in between. No matter
what the genre, what the track, what the what the speed,
you know what? What? What are the beats permitted happen
to be? He still seems to be dancing to that

(13:07):
particular song. And it's a real insight into the human
proclivity for synchronicity, right, because there's nothing magic about the
Spider Man gift. It's just this gift of this dude
dancing and the Spider Man the costume. But when we
look at it, we can't help but find the ways
that it matches up. We can't help it but look
at it and say, hey, this fit's perfectly with the music. Yeah. Now,

(13:29):
before we get into how this actually happens, or this
illusion of synchronozy synchronicity happens, I wanted to mention that
when it comes to the visual cortex, it is mapping
a visual of how the pitch and tone in a
in a song are changing, and in turn, music moves
us because we envision movement in it. So we can't

(13:51):
help but look at something like this animated gift and
start to really synchronize our own um interpretations of the
music and the movements. Yea, with what we're seeing. Yeah,
we talked about before when we talked about the way
music and art moves this, Uh, that the music that
tends to really resonate the most with us, you know,

(14:12):
think about the songs that really give you chills or
or just you know, really you captures your imagination. Generally,
you're talking about places where whether there's definite movement going
on in the song, there's some sort of rising action,
or it's descending, or it's there's this sudden drop, you
name it, but there's there's something coming together or pulling apart,
and and that's what we lack onto. Yeah, and it's

(14:34):
no coincidence that music is really effective um and therapeutic
with Parkinson's patients and stroke patients and coordinating their movements
again because of the visual cortex in this idea that
we're trying to sync up to the thing that we're
listening to and we're seeing. So I wanted to mention
that Radio Labs Jody Avrigon has a great explanation of

(14:57):
why Spider Man is such a good dancer, and she
talked to someone by the name of Devin mcaulay who
works in the Timing, Attention and Perception Lab at Michigan
State University, and he says that humans are really flexible timekeepers.
He says, we have a tennessee to pay much more
attention to events that are synchronous than asynchronous, and so

(15:18):
this would bias our attention to time points that provide
evidence for Spider Man dancing synchronously with the music. We're
ignoring the times that he's out of time with music,
you know. And this this ties in really closely with
the episode we just did on Reincarnation. We talked about
families looking at like what a child is saying about

(15:40):
an imaginary friend or about some phobia that they seem
to have, and then how they end up matching that
up with someone who was recently deceased and their story.
You end up ignoring all the different places where it
doesn't come together, and you focus on the one or
two places, even then it does come together. Another example
of this that that instantly came to mind where you're

(16:01):
doing the research. I give you two rather distinct things
on one hand, the Wizard of Oz and then the
other hand, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Yes,
because here we have a great example of these two
independent artistic works. Right. Yeah, Wizard of Oz did not
inspire Dark Side of the Moon. But as your college

(16:22):
roommate will will happily tell you, they sync up really
well with each other. You if you mute Wizard of
Oz and you play Dark Side of the Moon, they're
gonna be all these moments where the lyrics or the
or the rise and follow up the music, where all
it just comes together perfectly and it seems as if
it were meant to be. You also see this with
Blade Runner and Dark Side of the Moon. So again

(16:43):
to you, completely independent works, but the brain thinks that
there's a collaboration going on. Yeah. I was actually looking
at a website called sink movies dot com and they
have a number of examples, some of them some of
them kind of interesting, Like there's one uh that they
call city Kid, which is a kid a the radiohead
album the Fabulous Album over the movie Dark City, which

(17:05):
is a movie I love. And so those are two
things I can see mixing rather well with each other.
I'm less into the idea of, say, Toy Story in
the Attic, where they take Aerosmith's Toys in the Attic
and sync it with Pixar's Toy Story. But again, they
have something like twenty one different examples of an album
and a movie. When sync together, they seem to make

(17:27):
sense magically, all of a sudden, they are synchronous. Now.
In the case of Spider Man, Abergann says that there's
something called periodosities. These are movements of various different but
related rhythms nestled inside the rhythms of Spider Man's gyrations.
And there are also these nested rhythmic patterns within any
given song. So she says that when we are watching

(17:50):
Spider Man, we were listening to a song, our brains
pick out two items to match, one from the column
of Spider Man's rhythms and one from the column of
the song rhythms, and then matches those up together. Huh yeah,
Because definitely it is a very fluid movement that of
this dancing Spider Man. There are no um, you know,
sharp points. It's not just him like bonking his pelvis

(18:13):
back and forth. Like that's the kind of thing which
would match up with many songs, but not but certainly
not have this universal um uh connectedness to music. Yeah,
he doesn't do the sprinkler or anything, so there's no
jerky movements. Um. But yeah, they're smooth, they're continuous, and
their short and duration, which help our brains again to
sync up those two different columns. If they were a

(18:34):
little bit longer, if his movements went on for a while,
then we would have too many beats that might have
been skipped, and that would put some red flags up
there in our brains. Interesting, you know, I wonder if
anyone has really applied this thinking to the sinking of
movies and music, because certainly I'm thinking of Flapstick and
Wizard of Oz, you know, and just you know, the

(18:54):
Cowardly Lion and then all this, and there's not a
lot of this kind of fluid movement that would match
with any kind of music. So I wonder if anyone
out there has, like has has looked at something that
is very fluid, some sort of like performance piece with
a lot of dance in it um or or or
something kind of avant gare. Like, I'm thinking maybe of
the what's the the gentleman that you're yeah, Philip Glass,

(19:15):
but also on the film side of things, the gentleman
that your husband's rather fond of makes the really strange
art films Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney, and what is that
series call though it's Master Ye, Yeah, Like I wonder
if that's the sort of property that would that would
pair well with just about any kind of movement music,
because there's kind of a performance, uh, dance quality to

(19:37):
it well. And Philip Glass does have a lot of
um pieces that he has done with dance before, and
it's very interesting. But there's his Generally, his music does
not lend itself to sort of any sort of smooth,
continuous or short burst there. It's usually pretty long and
drawn out um and then you know the sort of
jarring changes in the pitch and the tempo. And next

(20:00):
one wonder about the sort of media they consume and
the pacing of it all and the ways that our
brain likes to say, ah, yes, I like this idea
of continuity. Please let me try to create it wherever
and whenever I can around me, and indeed we we
do look for it all around us. And we see
this time and time again in our attempts to understand

(20:23):
not only how the world works, but the meaning behind
why it works. Right when we start trying to to
answer those big questions in life, why is this happening
to me? Why did this happen to the world, and
we start looking for these different different patterns. Uh, in
the world around us. You could all you could even
say that it's a synchro destiny here. That's a word

(20:44):
that Depoxia Chopra has termed has coined. And uh, he's
suggesting that synchronicity can quote accelerate you towards your destiny. Oh,
I mean you're going to be excelled towards your destiny
no matter what. Yeah, that's that's generally gonna happen. You
can just sett in your your house doing nothing and uh,

(21:05):
it's like the old proverb by doing nothing, all all
problems are solved right there you go. Um, but but
that does not sell books, my friend. No. One final
thought on on a synchro destiny. I found this is
not a depox writings, but someone had written about it
on a blog and they said, Uh, when you live
your life with an appreciation of coincidences and their meaning,

(21:28):
coincidences and their meaning, that's that's kind of that that
that has all the answers in it right there, because
a coincidence, by its very nature, it's just a coincidence.
There is no meaning behind the coincidence. If you're finding
meaning and your coincidences, then uh, then that's the problem,
potentially the problem. You might find some beauty in those
coincidences by aspiring reason to them, but if there's reason

(21:51):
behind the coincidence, it's not a coincidence, right Or am
I crazy? Um? Well, no, I mean I think that
if you take that line of reasoning, you might find
yourself in front of the new paper trying to pick
out secret codes and articles and covering the walls around
you and as well as the tinfoiled windows. It can
be problematic, right if you take that logic too far. Yeah,

(22:12):
it's And that's ultimately the point. You know, use a
little balance in your pattern recognition. Don't let your software
get two out of whack, because finding finding beauty in
the world is one thing. Uh, covering your your walls
of your house with newspaper clippings is quite another. For example,
my daughter has the Frozen Castle set. The other day,
I was looking at it and the throne looked like

(22:34):
a lion's face to me. It was mean, it was
very cool. It's just pattern recognition, uh, And I did
not run from it. I just saw it for for
what it was a plastic chair, all right. So there
you have it a little insight into continuity and how
we observe it and to what extended it is an
illusion and uh, you know, there's a whole deep end

(22:56):
of the pool out there in terms of union, uh
synchronicity that either we'll come back and talk about later
or you can explore on your own time. But it's uh,
it's one of those areas that gets really deep, really fast,
and it's just a little bit, uh, a little bit
more than we're looking to, uh to cover in this
particular episode. In the meantime, though, we'd love to hear
your take on this episode. What kind of music have

(23:18):
you tried to pair with Spider Man. We'll make sure
that we put that Spider Man up on the blogs
when this episode publishes, and we'll have a link in
the description for the podcast it so you can find it. Uh,
let us know how your your pairings went there. Also,
is there a particular movie and album pairing that you
think is rather magical, that you think comes together perfectly?
I myself have in the past when when I did

(23:42):
entertaining that was for somebody other than a toddler. I
would love to take like really bad be movies and
put him on mute and then play funk music over it.
And I found that there were often those magical points
where it's like the dude in the in the rubber
monster suit looks like he's dancing to the funk music
and it's perfect, and it's it's like it was meant
to be. But I see now that that was just

(24:03):
an illusion of my brain. Yeah, but I mean artistic
synchronicity is something entirely into itself. Yeah, So give us
your examples of artistic synchronicity, and you can do so
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(24:28):
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(24:54):
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