so I notice the other day that when I look away from my moniter but still pay attention to it I can see the moniter refresh. I found a site to back this up but it didnt go into detail why.
does anybody know?
The area of the retina which handles peripheral vision has a high density of light-sensitive rod cells, compared to color-sensitive cone cells. Rod cells react much faster to ligght, thus the peripheral vision is very sensitive to motion. The reason for this is so that you can quickly detect an animal trying to sneak up on you and eat you. Of course, these days it’s more useful for detecting your wife trying to sneak up on you while you’re surfing porn sites. 
Another consequence of the rod-dense peripheral vision is that you can see dimmer things out of the corner of your eye. Amateur astronomers will often use “averted vision” to look at a particularly faint object.
Of course, it’s just a small step from there to “averted imagination”, which will let you see anything at all, if you look indirectly enough. This is the technique used, for instance, to read the writing around the edge of the Ring Nebula ;).