Perception2012

Max Lewicki:
What if I told all of you, that your partially blind. That right now you think you see the world as it truly is, but in actuality, you're missing something. It's true. See, every time we open our eyes light shines onto our retina. Nerve cells called photo receptors interpret the light, transmits the information to our brain, and THAT's how we see. But there's a small area on our retina where there are no photo receptors. This is called a scotoma or "blind spot"... we all have them. So if that's true, how is it that we never notice a black area in our field of vision?

Max Lewicki:
The reason you never notice your blind spot, is because your brain is great at guessing what SHOULD be there, and automatically filling in the blanks. Sometimes we know what we want to see, and our neo-cortex turns that expectation into a kind of virtual reality. Which means that some of the world we see is really just an illusion. A scary thought when you consider how vulnerable that makes us. So, how do we uncover our blind spots? How do we ever fully see the truth that's right in front of our eyes? Well, a good place to start is to simply open your mind. Because, as the French philosopher Henri Bergson said, 'The eyes sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.'