Brain Slow-down
I was lying down staring at the ceiling fan. The fan had a circular metal piece at the center and it had the radii with ridges. When the fan is on, I can't see the ridges, but all of us a sudden I felt I'm able to see the ridges for a fraction of a second. I realized I could see the ridges when I was blinking my eyes. I wasn't sure whether the vision of ridges precedes the act of blinking or the other way around. The theory behind the persistence of vision is still being debated or debunked. Instead of banking on a theory, I have my own explanation. As the fan center rotates at more than 24 cycles a second, the ridges are not visible. We can compare this to the movie watching experience where 72 or more still images are produced per second to create an illusion of motion. When I blink, as the last image captured by the eye is processed by the brain, it doesn't have a succeeding image to perceive a rotating circle. So, the last image is exper...