In previous studies, Potter has shown that the human brain can correctly identify images seen for as little as 100 milliseconds. Other authors of the paper are former MIT postdoc Brad Wyble, now at Pennsylvania State University, postdoc Carl Hagmann, and research assistant Emily McCourt.Īfter visual input hits the retina, the information flows into the brain, where information such as shape, color, and orientation is processed. So in general we’re calibrating our eyes so they move around just as often as possible consistent with understanding what we’re seeing,” she says. “The job of the eyes is not only to get the information into the brain, but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next. This rapid-fire processing may help direct the eyes, which shift their gaze three times per second, to their next target, Potter says. That’s what the brain is doing all day long - trying to understand what we’re looking at,” says Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the study. “The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts.

In the new study, which appears in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, researchers asked subjects to look for a particular type of image, such as “picnic” or “smiling couple,” as they viewed a series of six or 12 images, each presented for between 13 and 80 milliseconds. That speed is far faster than the 100 milliseconds suggested by previous studies. However, a team of neuroscientists from MIT has found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds - the first evidence of such rapid processing speed. You might think it would be impossible to identify any images you see for such a short time. Imagine seeing a dozen pictures flash by in a fraction of a second.

Imagenes de un cerebro humano real