Filling in the blanks

Something I find fascinating about the brain is how efficiently it can function and account for missing information. Take for instance vision and our blind spot. There is a sizable blind spot in the retina of your eye where there is an absence of photoreceptors. Well if there aren't any photoreceptors, why can we see things clearly without random things missing? One reason for that is we have two eyes, and the blind spots are in different, non-overlapping locations and can assist each other to get full coverage of the scene in front of you. Now that isn't really the interesting part. What is amazing is that when you close one eye so that you don't have help from your other eye, you obviously experience your blind spot at some point in time, but we never realize this because our brain "fills in" the missing piece to make a continuous coherent image. Crazy right? And don't believe me? Go here and try the test yourself (http://www.ophtasurf.com/en/blindspot.htm). It's freaky, but where an object once was, at a certain distance the object will be in your blind spot so you can no longer see it, but instead of there being an empty hole, the brain patches the hole with the background pattern, so we don't even realize when something is in our blind spot.

This to me sounds crazy because we're seeing something that we're not really seeing. But that is the truth about everything we "see." We don't see anything with our eyes, we see with our brain. Visual stimulation comes in through our eyes, but the brain takes that information and forms a picture for us. Ever wonder why our eyes deceive us? Our brain makes inferences about visual stimulation from previous experiences and knowledge, so it infers a lot of the things we see. If you ever see those sentences that say it twice in a row but you don't notice it, it's not because you're dumb or blind, your brain automatically files that out because it wants to make everything as coherent as possible. You just glaze over it and don't realize that it's there because it would interfere with the overall meaning. No need for the confusion, so just pretend like you didn't see it. Or take for instance sentences that have words with the letter jumbled up, but the first and last letters are the same. We are able to read them fine, with a little slower reaction time, but not much considering the letters are in different positions. The brain automatically gets rid of the clutter and confusion it sees. The brain is smarter than what we imagine. It does it without any conscious effort. Amazing, right?