Your eyes don't move smoothly. They make quick, jerky jumps called saccades — about three times a second, all day long. Each saccade lasts 30 to 80 milliseconds, during which the visual world is rushing across your retina at speeds that should produce a useless blur.

You should perceive that blur. You don't.

Your brain solves the problem with a trick called saccadic suppression. During each saccade, the visual cortex briefly turns down its sensitivity. You go partially blind, hundreds of times a day. The brain then fills in what should have been there based on what it saw before and after.

You can demonstrate it on yourself. Look in a mirror at your left eye, then at your right eye. Switch back and forth. You will never catch your eyes moving — even though someone watching you can see them move clearly. Your brain has erased the saccade from your conscious experience.

This is one of dozens of edits your visual system performs invisibly. The blind spot in each retina, where the optic nerve exits, gets filled in with assumed background. Color seen in your peripheral vision is largely manufactured — the periphery has almost no color receptors, but everything in your visual field looks colored. The image on your retina is upside down and wildly distorted near the edges. Your brain corrects all of it.

What you perceive as continuous, full-color, high-resolution vision is actually a heavy edit. Most of what you see is your brain's best guess about what was there a fraction of a second ago.

Vision isn't a window. It's a movie your brain is making about the room you're in.