Your eyes see things that your brain simply forgets to 'save' to your memory a millisecond later.
The 'attentional blink' isn't a failure of sight, but a failure of the brain's fronto-parietal network to consolidate a perception into working memory. This proves we are often consciously blind to things that our visual systems captured perfectly.
Resolving the Attentional Bottleneck: Cross-Modal Representational Alignment Reveals Late-Stage Working Memory Consolidation
PsyArXiv · eu659_v1
The attentional blink reveals the severe capacity limits of conscious human processing, yet whether this bottleneck arises from early perceptual decay or late-stage consolidation failure remains highly debated. To disentangle these psychological stages, the present study employed causally silenced cross-modal representational similarity analysis (EEG-fMRI RSA) to trace the fine-grained spatiotemporal information flow of target processing. Our results revealed a striking spatiotemporal double dis