Are you blind?
saccade | sa’ka:d | noun
a rapid movement of the eye between fixation points.
There are twelve black dots at junctions in this image - but your brain won’t let you see them all at once.
Consider this scenario - you approach a big junction, looking ahead of course, and the road seems to be empty. As you get closer, you look right and left as a prudent, final check. You see no other vehicles and proceed through the junction. Suddenly, and it’s your lucky day, there is an indignant blast of horn and a car flashes across in front of you, missing you by inches and leaving you thoroughly shocked, and confused. Sound familiar?
So what happened?
On the approach you did not see that another car was on a perfect collision course, with no relative movement for your peripheral vision to detect …
...you looked quickly right and left, to avoid holding up the traffic behind you, and your eyes jumped cleanly over the approaching vehicle…
The rest of the road was empty, and this was what your brain used to fill in the gaps!
Read on …
Extracted from A Fighter Pilot’s Guide to Surviving on the Roads...