#corticalblindness

What if I told all of you that you're partially blind. That right now you think that you're seeing the world as it truly is, but in actuality you're missing something. It's true. You see, every time we open our eyes light shines onto our retinal. Nerve cells called photoreceptors interpret the light transmitting the information into our brain and that's how we see. But there's a small area in our retinal that there are no photoreceptors, this is called the scotoma or blind spot", we all have one. So if that's true, how is it that we never notice a black area in our field of vision? The reason you never notice your blind spot is because your brain is great at guessing what should be there. In automatically feeling in a blink, sometimes we know what we want to see, and our neocortex 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 is right in front of our eyes? Well a good play to start is to simply open your mind, because a french philosopher, Henri Bergson, once said "The eyes sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."