Well, I didn’t know this. Interesting. From Wired.
Rapid, unconscious eye movements explain a famous optical illusion in which a still image appears to move.
When the eye movements, called microsaccades, were suppressed, test subjects reported that the Enigma illusion — an illustration that seems to flicker and turn — remained stationary.
"Our subjective experience is that sometimes our eyes move, and sometimes they don't. But they're moving all the time," said Susana Martinez-Conde, a visual neuroscientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix.
Martinez-Conde's findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do more than explain a neat trick. They also suggest an answer to an optical controversy: whether motion in static images originates in our eyes or our brains.
The eyes have it.
"If we can prove that microsaccades are involved, this rules out the hypothesis that the illusion comes solely from the visual cortex. It may be involved, but the illusion starts with the eye," she said.
Here’s the link: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/11/eye-flicker-exp.html
