How Film Cuts Mimic the Human Visual Experience

Man Hanging From Clock

In a truly insightful video essay based upon the work of brain scientist Jeffrey M Zacks, narrator Adam D’Arpino of Aeon Video explains how film cuts mimic the choppy human visual experience in terms of focus, blinking, saccades and periphery. So when a current scene seems incongruent with previous scene, the human brain to fills in information that isn’t necessarily there, but is assumed to make the experience whole.

Our brains do a lot of work to fill in the gaps, which can produce some pretty fascinating errors of perception and memory…In Hollywood, script editors work furiously to keep …inconsistencies out of movies, but they’re by no means perfect. The fact that they’re are so hard to detect gives us an important hint about how our brains handle cuts: We’re continuously knitting together successive glimpses to construct a coherent representation of the world.

Film Cuts Human Visual Experience

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

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