Close one eye and focus straight ahead without moving your eye. You will notice a fleshy blur in your peripheral vision, namely your nose. It’s there every time you wake up, but you’re rarely aware of it. So why can’t you see your nose when it’s literally right in front of your eyes?
“You can see your nose,” says Michael Webster, a vision scientist and co-director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Most of the time we just don’t realize it.
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“A vision is really a prediction of what you think the world is like,” Webster said. “I want to know, “How is the world different?” “What are the surprises, mistakes, and unexpected events?” Usually, we don’t think about our noses. Because you already know about your nose and you just don’t want to be conscious about it. …wasting energy for that is a big disadvantage. ”
This makes sense from a survival perspective. Constantly dealing with an unchanging function like the nose when we need to detect threats, find food, or navigate the environment is a waste of limited mental resources. In fact, your brain erases all kinds of information about your body so that you can perceive the outside world.
For example, consider blood vessels in the eye. Photoreceptors, which collect light from the outside world, are located at the back of the eye, behind a tangle of blood vessels.
“It’s like sitting on a tree with dead branches and actually looking at the world through the dead branches,” Webster said.
Normally the brain erases it, but there are ways to make the blood vessels in your eyes pop out so your conscious mind can see them. If you’ve ever had an eye exam, you may have noticed that when the optometrist shines a light into your eyes, a black wavy line appears in your vision. They are the shadows cast by the blood vessels of the eye.
The brain not only erases unnecessary information, but also creates information from scratch. Consider your blind spots. It is the blank area in your visual field that corresponds to where the optic nerve exits the eye. The blind spot is about 5 degrees wide, or more than twice the size of the full moon in the sky. However, we are usually unaware of this huge gap in our vision.
“We’re actually inputting that information,” Webster said. “Instead of looking for an absence, it takes cues from what’s around your blind spot and tells you, ‘Okay, if you’re looking at a white piece of paper, there’s a very good chance that the area in your blind spot is also white.'”
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Recognizing your own nose is even easier. In fact, you may be overly conscious of your nose because you’re simply thinking about it right now.
“If you’re actually consciously trying to look at something, you’re actually noticing it,” Webster said.
Our “disappeared” noses reveal something deep about how we experience reality. Our vision is not like a camera that records what is actually there. It’s similar to artists creating models of the world that are most useful to us.
Webster took this idea further. We may not be aware of reality at all. “Even this model itself is really only necessary information; it doesn’t actually tell us what the reality of the world is.”
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