SEEing is Believing [Motorcycle Safety Foundation]

Safe riding is a skill of the eyes and mind as much as it is a skill of the hands and feet. It's important that riders have well-developed perceptive skills. Having good perception means to "see and understand accurately." Our eyes see but our mind interprets, and sometimes we can be fooled into perceiving something that's not there or missing something that is; and that can be disastrous when evaluating risk factors in traffic. The MSF RiderCourses use the strategy of Search, Evaluate, Execute (S.E.E.) to describe the decision-making process that should be used while riding. Our eyes do the searching and our brain does the evaluating. But do we perceive accurately?

Take a look at these visual workouts to discover how our eyes can sometimes trick us..... [See more optical illusions]

Motion Induced Blindness

What to see Below you see a rotating array of blue crosses and 3 yellow dots. Now fixate on the centre (watch the flashing green spot). Note that the yellow spots disappear once in a while: singly, in pairs or all three simultaneously. In reality, the 3 yellow spots are continuously present, honest! What to do You can use the slower/faster buttons to change speed. Disappearance persists down to surprisingly low speeds. [If there are no buttons on the right, please update your Flash player.] You can use the larger/smaller buttons to change size. Disappearance persists up to surprisingly large sizes. You can use the “back-col” button to change the background colour. The yellow dots disappear into whatever colour the background has. The ‘defaults’ button at the top restores the standard settings. Comment According to Michael Bach, "Steady fixation favours disappearance, blinks or gaze shifts induce reappearance. All in all reminiscent of the Troxler effect, but stronger and more resistant to residual eye movements." Source This page provided by Prof. Michael Bach PhD, Ophthalmology, University of Freiburg, Germany, from his collection of Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena. [Find out more at Motorcycle Safety Foundation]