Well, perhaps a custodian’s closet isn’t the best place for this experiment, at least not the best lighting, but you see what I mean? As you shifted your eye from one thing to another, from one side of your field of vision to another and then back, and as your eye focused itself on near things and then on more distant things, did you get queasy? Did any of that make you feel sick? Dizzy? Of course not. And yet, if you were to reproduce the same sequence of eye and head motions that you just performed using a camera, the scene as filmed would be instantly recognizable as a “shaky-cam” styled scene, and the viewer might well complain of disorientation or nausea if the sequence were extended long enough. Would you become nauseous if I continued to ask you to look now at this, now at that?

What’s the difference, then? Why should “shaky-cam” footage be sickening to a viewer whose own vision is constantly shifting its perspective, darting from object to object? The difference is that human beings, and indeed most animals—are you listening? this is important! I’m telling you about something that your brain is doing without your being aware of it. This is scientifically-proven fact! Your brain is editing the visual information fed into it by your optic nerve, and the effect of this editing is something technically known as “saccadic blindness.” That’s not “psychotic” but “saccadic” – spelled s a c c a d i c.