If it even does capture in ‘frames’. Not sure how else to phrase the question.
We know that standard video is captured at 30 fps (I believe).
The human brain must capture at a ‘frame rate’ or else the processing ability and storage space required would be enormous, correct? I mean, you can’t capture ‘contiuously’ because you’d have an infinite amount of data correct?
Or am I way off?
This article in Scientific American: Mind issue has some insite. Different parts of visual processing take different ammounts of time.
There is the snapshot hypothesis about human vision.
From A framework for consciousness:
I would guess the rate is fluid, dependent on stimulus change, and probably varies from 3 to 30.
Addendum: i.e. 3 to 30 per second. The link is a PDF. The paper is by Crick and Koch.
Definitely correct that vision is analogous to a rapid series of frames. You know the example of the movie of a wagon wheel appearing to rotate backwards because of the positions of the spokes relative to the exposure of each successive frame? Well the same effect can be noted with the naked eye and a spoked wheel.
16 fps or more, approximately, is the frequency to shoot for if you want to create a reasonable illusion of smooth motion for the human eye. The more exposures you can slip into a second (30 is common for film) the better you will be able to give that effect by not letting the eye percieve the same image twice (which would suggest jerky motion).
Which is why silent film settled on 16fps. That was as slow as they could get it (save film, save $) and still show perceived smooth motion.
Sound film shoots @ 24 fps (Europe 25) for reasons of, well, sound.
30 fps is the electronic standard in the U.S. This has to do with the 60-cycle electricity. Overseas where the 50-cycle electric systems exist the electronic standard is 25 fps.
Saccadic eye movements occur at ~3 per second. During a saccade, the length of which is measured in milliseconds and depends on the angle to be traversed, no information is tansmitted to the primary visual cortex or elsewhere via the optic nerve. Microsaccades occur at around 60 per second and serve to update the scene before you. I’d say that’s a reasonable “frame rate,” although it is incorrect insofar as you do not actually consciously reperceive the entire frame during each saccade or microsaccade.
Elaborate. What’s this again?
They are tiny movements of the eye that you probably can’t even see in a mirror. I was once in the unique position of being in an fMRI machine while wearing eyetracker + present visual display goggles and the “experimenter” (a friend of mine) plugged the output of the eyetracker into the display. The eyetracking software kept a bright yellow circle on my retina and showed the path information. I could clearly see my eye jumping around (“saccading”) several times per second.
If you did not have saccades and you were to hold your eyes still, you would lose all visual input to the primary visual cortex. If you did not have saccades and you were moving your eyes about, you would experience extremely slow and isolated frames. There is a neurological disorder whose name escapes me of this nature.
I believe I meant iris (definitely not retina).
Blast it I meant pupil (definitely not iris). Sorry, I know more about the functioning than the anatomy.
Bah…the pupil would not exist but for the grace of the iris. Cool info, thanks.
Oh I don’t know. The old cartoon Speed Racer seemed to get by with about 2 fps, tops. 
An aside: Bill Plympton’s animations are produced with a frame rate of something like 6 or 8 fps. (He hand-draws every frame.) I certainly wouldn’t call the motion smooth, but it is still convincing, and has a kind of “staccato” feel to it. Better for slapstick comedy, maybe, and exaggerated motions. It probably also helps that the characters and landscapes tend to be surreal and outlandish. A realistic film, on the other hand, made at 6 fps would be almost unwatchable.
To elaborate further, your eye adapts to constant stimuli. If you could hold your eye perfectly still and focus on one point for a while, your whole field of vision would just fade out as you adapted to it. (You can actually do that with the right drugs…)
That’s why you don’t see all the blood vessels in your retina, even though they’re right between your rods/cones and the incoming light. They’re always in the same place in your field of vision, so they become invisible. When the eye doctor shines a bright light in your eye, they get highlighted against the surrounding tissue and you can see them again.
Tiny involuntary movements keep your vision from fading out entirely when you’re looking at something, by moving the image around just enough to keep those cells interested.