One odd thing about our visual functioning is how the world around us seems stationary even though our eyes dart back and forth several times a second in order to see. These tiny motions of the eyes are called saccades. If we saw the world through our saccades, it would be like having a “movie camera on top of a jumping bronco,” according to one scientist.
So why don’t we see a jumpy jittery world when we look around? Scientists think they have found a brain mechanism that subtracts the motion element from these saccades. Every time the brain sends the eyes a signal to perform a saccade, a region of the brain anticipates where the the eye’s center of focus will move after the saccade. Essentially, the saccade signal runs through a type of switch that discharges the motion component.
Source: Scientific American
