Reply to comment

What we see is obviously not directly correlated to what we experience, otherwise not only would we would see exactly what is projected to our retina. From my understanding much of what we see is based on a sort of filling in process governed by probability and likeliness, probably a result of “short cuts” made in the brain in the evolutionary process. This is not just a visual phenomenon, where we can trick our minds to fill in our blind spot, it is also perceptual. That’s why when we see someone standing behind an object, a tree for instance, we don’t see a segmented person, we see a person standing behind a tree.

            In class we learned that our reality is an educated guess of the brain that is continually checked; though I have no reason to believe so, I think that visual input is not just processed in the visual cortex of the brain, but is sent to other systems and rechecked by other inputs that either confirm or contradict it and affect the resulting picture produced in our head. But what are the implications of this hypothesize, check and recheck system? Could your brain inhibit or create images in your field of vision or alter how you perceive existing images? How would your brain choose to prioritize or completely deny some objects and not others, if this is even possible?

            The only conclusion I can come up with is that, our highly complicated brains prefer the simplest and most probable route. This was seen in the experiments done in class on the blind spot; when a dot bisecting a line is placed in your blind spot, your mind fills the void by completing the line. This is because it is more likely that the two lines would be two halves of a single line segment rather then two lines that are perfectly aligned in space. But how far can we push this idea? Can our mind fill in more complicated occurrences, such as movement? After all we perceive an object as having continual motion even when part if its trajectory is hidden from us, and not as two independent motions of a single object. And does our mind simply omit input that contradicts the “best fit” image our mind creates from other inputs? Our brain can be continually creating new realities to incorporate all deviant input into the best fit image; that would be highly erratic and unorganized. What’s even more intriguing, assuming that either of these suggestions are possible, what if the ability of your mind to either create or inhibit images, perceptions or object was, for some reason or other, giving free range?