Suppose you have at an old analog clock with a second hand that ticks. Look somewhere else in the room, then look at the clock. The first tick as you're looking at it takes much longer to occur, or at least that's the way it will seem to you.

The human eye doesn't move continuously, but moves in short rapid jumps. [0]. Your eye isn't perfect, and during those rapid jumps it produces blurry images. Rather than feeding those blurry images to the image recognition centers of the brain, those images are thrown out. That prevents your brain from using known-faulty data, but now you have a problem because motion tracking requires continuity. So you cheat. You take some of the images that arrived after the blurry images, extrapolate backwards to make an estimation of how things looked before, and then feed those to the motion tracking [1].

The neat thing is that this depends on how the second hand of your analog clock moves. If it ticks every second, then the brain's back-extrapolation to fill in the missing images sees a stationary second hand, and assumes that it was stationary in the past. If it rotates smoothly instead of ticking, then the brain's back-extrapolation sees the motion, assumes that the motion was constant during the past, and back-extrapolates accordingly. So if you glance over to a ticking clock, the first tick feels like it takes longer, but you don't have the same effect glancing over to a smooth motion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Aside of what the other commenters replied (in support of the assertion), please bear in mind "Blindsight" is a scifi novel. Peter Watts is not a scientist, he's a writer of fiction. Whether he believes what he wrote in his book is uncertain, but remember this is primarily a work of fiction.

He's a marine biologist, but not a neurologist.

It's a work of fiction but it is one that folks in graduate neurophysiology courses have been encouraged to read.

and it has a bibliography at the end

Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.

And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.

Those are not necessarily unimportant things. These are just things we don't have a capacity to notice because of crap hardware we have to process this information. We don't conciously process 2% of what we see because only 2% is relevant. We do that because hardware needed to process more wouldn't pass through birth canal.

The 2% off visual data that we process is essentially just the stuff that is changing. It’s not some secret hidden knowledge, we can still intentionally examine things closely and see all there is to see.

How many dots are in this image?: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsG6MSpWAAAdTob?format=jpg&name=...

After you give up counting them, here is an explanation: https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-why-you-can-t-see-all-12...