← all facts
attention
Your brain shuts down for half a second after focusing.
Participants show significantly reduced performance in detecting a second target when it appears 200 to 500 milliseconds after the first.
The effect is not a total inability to detect the target, and it generally does not occur for targets appearing immediately (within approximately 100ms) after the first.
You are functionally blind to the world for a fraction of every second.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Raymond, Shapiro, and Arnell, 1992, Journal of Experimental Psychology
- What the check found
- The blink is a performance dip, not a total inability, and is specifically observed between 200 and 500ms, not across the entire 0-500ms window.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.