Saccades & Perception

I notice saccades most when I’m looking at a visual illusion of the type that requires me to “look at the center of the image for 30 seconds”

Not really an illusion, but try yourself with the image below. Pay attention to how your eye involuntarily shifts by less a millimeter or so every few seconds.

You should notice your brain coming up with several distinct interpretations of the whole pattern in your peripheral vision. One might be made of rings, another might be made of curves spiraling out from the center. With each saccade, the interpretation may flip back and forth.

Each distinct interpretation can be thought of as a separate annealing cycle where the brain comes up with a plausible global representation of the pattern. However since the patterns aren’t quite compatible with each other, it settles on one or the other. Neither pattern is the “true” representation, they are simply different compressions of patterns present in the underlying image.

To see the image best, the eyes need to twitch back and forth and capture all possible interpretations. The annealed global patterns seem to largely disappear when the eyes are scanning over the image.

This happens on psychedelics very reliably if you pay attention. If you stare at some interesting regular pattern such as a grid while tripping, you will notice your brain interpreting non-existent patterns that overlay the grid such as paths, lines, crosses, squares, and maybe even depth in 3D. But only if you focus on one spot carefully. The moment your eye moves around, the patterns will dissipate and you get back to boring ole grid. A new set of patterns may quickly arise again, but saccades will make sure they don’t survive more than a few seconds at best.

Here’s an example that works reliably: the below image disappears when you stare at one spot for a few seconds. Try to keep it in the disappeared form for as long as possible. You will notice that the colors come back slightly every few seconds when your eyes involuntarily twitch by a tiny amount.

Hypothesis 1: Eye saccades interrupt visual annealing

I propose that the type of psychedelic subjective effect that imposes hallucinated patterns onto visual stimuli (such as a patch of grass appearing to have symmetries) is not specific to chemically altered states. If you train yourself to zone out and stare at a specific spot for long enough, and pay attention to your peripheral vision without moving your eyes as much as possible, it leads to the same type of effect where hallucinated patterns can lightly replace the clear picture that was previously making up the visual field. Try this with trees specifically. It works even better if you’re tired, pensive, or just hungover. Stare at a specific branch without moving your eyes & try to relax your visual awareness, see if you can notice the rest of the tree branches settling into fictional patterns that are completely reset when you move your eyes.

This can be explained by over-annealing, where the visual system is working only with the recurrent internal representations passed into the current moment from previous moments, without taking new crisp visual stimuli from the eye’s focal point. Normally the crisp images provided by the saccading & scanning eyes remove the possibility of alternative hallucinated representations. However in the absence of rapid, novel sensory input, the internal representations are channeled towards attractors of internal representations, which are biased towards patterns.

The more latent representations drift towards attractors the more fictional and less accurate they get – hence the involuntary eye twitches.

An experiment I propose is to see if saccades stop during intense open-eye psychedelic hallucinations. If so it would support the hypothesis that the role of saccades is to interrupt annealing. There seems to be some existing literature on meditation & saccades that might support this hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2: Annealing from scratch takes 50-100ms (ish)

There seems to be a minimum amount of time that annealing needs to take place for visual input to arrive at enough certainty. This seems to be in the range of perhaps 50 or 100 milliseconds. You can easily experiment scanning your eyes across a garden quickly without ever stopping and notice that you cannot create accurate representations of the plants you are looking at. The minimum duration required for annealing seems to be about 100ms while maximum duration before it is over-annealed seems to be around 2 to 6 seconds, which is when saccades kick in.

A relevant experiment I saw at Exploratorium in San Francisco was a mysterious booth where you are told to stare at something, unaware that you are being filmed in slow motion. The screen suddenly jumpscares you, and the slow-motion recording played back afterwards shows that your reflexes make your eyelids blink instantly, but your jump/scream reaction takes about 100ms to kick in. Because of these types of experiments it is often stated that conscious experience takes about 100ms of processing before you are aware of it. This seems inaccurate, since it would be impossible to play music in a band with 100ms of delay (proven by trying to jam over the internet with 100ms latency). When a conscious experience is coupled to external activity, such as sports or music, reactions can be near-instant and conscious at the same time – not just reflexes. My hypothesis is that coupled activity doesn’t require re-annealing, but having to anneal towards a surprise representation from scratch does in fact take that long. This would indicate that there is a minimum saccade duration where saccades are useful. Any saccade duration below that threshold would deteriorate the clarity of perception.

Hypothesis 3: There are mental saccades, it’s not just a visual phenomenon

When focusing on a task, or thinking about anything really, there is a natural tendency to switch gears at regular intervals. Even when typing this sentence, my eyes scan my desk, wonder if I should take another sip of my beer, pick at my fingernails, think about what I’m typing, and get back to typing. There are natural rhythms in every task. Even in flow states, there is an onslaught of mental interruptions that go unnoticed simply because the thread of attention returns to the main task regularly.

Similar to visual saccades, mental saccades must help prevent over-annealing as well. It makes sense if you think about it – how do you even know if a thought or task has stopped being useful if it isn’t for a secondary process that regularly checks in? And since conscious attention is a single threaded process, it must be itself that is regularly interrupted.

It wouldn’t be any surprise if these interruptions are related to tension/stress/suffering/anxiety/depression/ADHD etc. quite closely, since they seem to be failure modes where interruptions completely halt the main task, without successfully returning to it after a small “check” by the secondary processes.

With this line of thinking, I see meditation as an exercise in mastering interruptions. How often do you experience an interruption? Do you let each interrupt take full control, or do you manage to return back to the main thread?

In terms of psychedelics, the difference between a good trip and a bad trip is often interruptions as well. Even the hallucination of a demonic entity won’t cause much suffering if it doesn’t come with mental interruptions of the form “this is a bad thing”, “what does this say about me?”, “am i losing my mind?”, “what do i do”, “something worse will happen if this doesn’t stop” ad infinitum.

No wonder why surrender is the keyword. It just means “figure out a way to avoid interruptions”. It’s the uninterrupted flow state that’s pleasurable. If surrender was simply the lack of control, intentional free-wheeling hallucinations would also be unpleasant, but this is not the case. What starts the interruption spirals is the seeking of control when it’s unavailable.

It also just might be why profound awakenings & realizations often happen in altered states, because the activation energy needed to arrive at these unlikely internal representations can only be achieved with very long thought annealing durations. This is a core characteristic of cannabis as well. Thoughts go on for longer than they usually do; it’s as if the interruptions come less frequently, resulting in increased creativity. Which brings me to the downside of long gaps between mental saccades – it can lead to a lot of ridiculous thoughts that seem absurd when you reconsider them from a different perspective, which is normally the mental saccades’ job to do as a standard procedure.

I am starting to suspect that the building of an “ego” relies on these mental versions of saccades, and ego loss occurs when the annealing process continues without interruption for very long. Building a coherent world-view, a.k.a mapping consensus reality, relies on periodically interrupting the annealing process & restarting from different perspectives. It can be thought of as “ensemble inference” done across time. The ego is far stronger when thoughts are saccading back and forth between representations of the current moment: where the limbs are, what the current social setting is, how our posture is, what facial muscles might be doing weird things, how our voice sounds, what to say next, who else is in the room, what they think, etc. etc. Each little subroutine requires a small interruption to adjust itself in the current mental representation of one’s world. With all these wiped out, there can be no ego that defines itself & carries out its long running storylines. The absolute limit is zero interruptions: just one uniform process. Cessation or breakthrough experiences are likely strongly related to this.

Further saccade observations

I have been recently noticing that my saccades start doing very long jumps when I’m incredibly sleepy or drunk. When looking at a television, the distance of a regular saccade might be a few centimeters (on the screen), while in this state it might be a meter. Very involuntary and impossible to control. This seems somewhat correlated with starting to have blurry vision, and eventually passing out. The saccades become so out of control that a coherent/crisp picture cannot be put together anymore. I’ve also been noticing that a baby on the brink of falling asleep will also have involuntary eye twitches where they suddenly look up or to the side. Changes in eye saccades might be a side effect of the brain’s internal saccades being loosened up as a way of dissolving awareness & going unconscious. Another interesting thing is REM sleep, where the eye movements don’t have any use for perception whatsoever, but saccades keep happening behind closed eyelids. It suggests a strong tie between the brain’s internal machinery and saccades.

Conclusion

Saccades act like context resets not just in vision but all modalities, including abstract thought. They allow the weaving of multiple perspectives in every moment of experience, leading to a coherent picture of both external & internal states. The duration between saccades are tuned such that there is ample time to discover plausible internal representations, but not so much that they are allowed to diverge from external reality.