vision express advert

[steveb]

in an advert current on tv theres a vision express advert which says that during our lifetimes our eyes capture 24 million images, how can this be true, watching 4 hours of television is about 345,000 isnt it?

[kags]

I was having this same conversation with my son earlier this evening. On the basis there are 31.5 million seconds in a year, and assuming you are asleep for a third of the time, then I reckon 24 million would be around a year's worth - and one image a second is undoubtedly an underestimate anyway!

[rojash]

It's nonsense, because the eye doen't capture images at all! The rods and cones in the eye react to changes in light and colour. The brain then interprets these changes, but not as discrete images.

Even if you stretch a point and pretend for the purposes of analogy, that what you see is made up of discrete "frames" like a movie, then you have to consider this. When you watch a film at 35 Frames per second you cant define individual images. If you watch a movie at 10 Frames per second, you can.

So it would be reasonable to assume that the brain processes more than 10 but less than 35 images per second. So, for the sake of argument, say it's 25 images per second, then do the math. By Kags' reckoning that would be about 600 million per year.