Retinal persistence is a characteristic of the human eye that gives us the illusion of motion when we watch a cartoon, for example. The cells in the retina retain the memory of a picture for a tenth of a second after we’ve seen it. So when a series of images is flashed by rapidly, at the rate of 24 per second, each picture is kept in mind before the next picture appears and so the eye is unable to see the blanks between two consecutive pictures. The zoetrope is a kind of rotating cylinder with a strip inside featuring a series of pictures that break down a movement into its component phases and slits all around that let through
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