Researchers from Tübingen show for the first time that the milliseconds- long blindness that occurs during rapid movements of the eyes, which allows flicker-free vision, comes from the retina.
Anyone who has ever recorded a video knows that the camera must be held still so that the images do not blur. On the other hand, we always perceive a stable image of the world, even though our eyes constantly move back and forth when looking for new impressions and therefore cause shaky images to be projected onto the retina. However, because vision is suppressed for milliseconds during these brief eye movements, these blurring motions are not perceived. Professor Ziad M. Hafed and Dr. Thomas Münch and their teams show in the journal Nature Communications that the signal for this suppression comes directly from the retina and its neuronal activity.
