> We did a test with a peice of paper to see our blind spot, and directly observe how our brain makes up information. While this little spot may not seem like that big of a deal, it shows how our sense of reality can be distorted by our brain. This small distortion can lead to serios concequences. In the evolutionary scheme of life, a small blind spot would not that detremental. But in our complex life, where so much input is being taken in, and all of it is important, a warped sense of reality can be bad. A specific eaxmple of this is the rear view mirror in a car. if you are focused on the road, the road is like the x we drew on our paper. And depending on how yu are sitting, the rear view mirror can be in the exact place of your blind spot. People have had many car acidents because they do not see a car in the rear view mirror.

Also, this makes us wonder whether there are other things which are present in our world which we are not aware of. Obviously, we have no sensors for them, so we would not even know that we re missing them. We know that there are many levels of sound which we cannot hear, and we don't have night vision like cats and other animals. So perhaps there is a limit to the amount of sensory input one brain can hadle. We have a large range of input, but perhaps if we had the hearing range of dogs, and night vision like cats, and magnetic sense like birds there would be too much information to correlate.

Interesting thought, that our sensory limitations (and those of other animals) are because otherwise "there would be too much information to correlate". On the other hand, we (at least) are constantly striving to increase our sensory abilities (glasses, telescopes, microscopes ....). Does that give us too much information to correlate? Maybe. Yes, blind spot only a small example of wide array of ways the nervous system "makes things up" (actually the CAR blindspot is a different thing, having to do with how the car is built and what it blocks from view). And, in general, it may be not so much "warping" and "distorting" as improving on the information we have available (as in the checkerboard constancy despite varying illumination). PG