Humans have visually oriented brains. Our vision evolved to help us survive predators and also helped us capture our dinner. As Shiela Reaves says, our vision evolved to help us defeat camouflage.
Reaves is a professor of Life Sciences at UW-Madison, and a member of the UW McPherson Eye Research Institute.
But today there is a different stress on our vision. We are bombarded by images. Some of us look at computer screens all day, absorbing the pictures Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other apps offer us. We watch many hours of television.
Reaves says our visual brains didn’t evolve for that kind of pinpoint focus:
"I find in our overly multitasking society where our lives are so much lived on a flat screen in front of us, I actually think its kind of nice to look around our daily, ordinary world and just enjoy being visual."
Reaves will talk about how we see, and ways we can improve our visual perception, tomorrow night in Sheboygan as part of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences’ Academy Talk series.
