If Seeing is Believing, We Might Need to Lower Our Faith
Our eyes process 36,000 bits of information per hour, taking around 65 percent of our brain's capacity, the most out of any organ, in order to deliver our reality to us. In the center, where your optic nerve resides in a small blind spot, the hole in our vision, which, unless you develop certain eye diseases, you would never discover. This blind spot is filled in by the brain through the processes of perceptual filling, using contours in the space, past experiences, and the surrounding colors and lighting to make up the difference for this small region. This skill, while incredibly important to providing us a full field of vision, leaves us vulnerable to visual tricks. See for yourself, hold these cards out arms length, focus on the dots, and take turns closing each eye. You will notice the stars disappear. Traditionally, there are two theories to explain the neurology behind perceptive filling: symbolic and isomorphic. Proposed in 1988 by Kingdom and Moulden, the sym...