Fabricating Reality: You Can't Fool Your Blind Spot

Right now, you're blind at one particular part of your visual field—because you have no photoreceptors at the location on your retina where the optic nerve begins its journey to visual cortex. Normally, you're unaware of this blind spot because of perceptual "filling-in"—a mechanism by which your brain actively fabricates the perceptual data it's missing.

But this isn't the only case where cognition manufactures perception. In the case of the Kanizsa triangle, you will sense the presence of a full triangle although none truly exists. In other words, your brain has fabricated "illusory contours" that seem to define the edges of an apparent, but actually nonexistent triangle.

In both these cases, believing is seeing—your brain is effectively determining its own perceptual data. A new article by Maertens and Pollmann investigates how these two phenomena might interact—finding interesting evidence that the brain might fabricate reality just one step at a time.

Read full story in Developing Intelligence