Saccades

The other day, I was watching a reel and realised I had no idea what I had just watched.

It was fast, very fast.

There was a person talking, then a close-up, then some text, then a cut, then another cut. My brain was keeping up just enough to not fall behind. And before I could even decide whether I liked it, my thumb had already moved to the next one.

I laughed at myself and then started thinking about our eyes.

They’re doing something remarkably similar all the time.

We make these tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades. Apparently, we make them hundreds of thousands of times a day. Our eyes keep jumping from one point to another, looking for movement, patterns, faces, changes.

Basically, our brain is constantly going:

Hang on. What’s that?

Did something move?

Is that important?

It makes sense that filmmakers have learnt to work with this.

A character looks to the side, and we immediately cut to what they’re looking at. A door closes, and suddenly we’re somewhere else. A movement in one scene becomes the movement that starts the next.

Our eyes know how to follow it. And when it’s done well, you barely notice the editing. You’re just… there.

But I sometimes wonder what happens when we start expecting everything to work like that.

I notice it in myself.

I’ll read half a paragraph and check my phone. I’ll start a long video and wonder when the “interesting part” is coming. Someone tells me a story and, somewhere in the middle, my brain quietly asks, Okay, but where is this going?

It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten that some things are allowed to take a little time.

And I’m not saying this as someone who has figured it out. Quite the opposite.

I love a good reel. I love a sharp edit. I love when a story pulls me in so completely that I lose track of time. But I also miss the other kind of attention. The kind where you read something slowly and stop at one sentence because it reminds you of something from five years ago.

That’s what I’m craving more of lately.

Not every thought needs a hook.

Not every story needs a twist.

Not every quiet moment needs to be filled.

Sometimes, I want to put the phone down, sit with an idea for a while, and let my mind go somewhere completely unrelated. And that’s not losing attention, that is attention, just a slower, softer kind.