Our brains prefer invented visual information to the real thing

By Clare Wilson

Seeing shouldn’t always be believing. We all have blind spots in our vision, but we don’t notice them because our brains fill the gaps with made-up information. Now subtle tests show that we trust this “fake vision” more than the real thing.

If the brain works like this in other ways, it suggests we should be less trusting of the evidence from our senses, says Christoph Teufel of Cardiff University, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Perception is not providing us with a [true] representation of the world,” he says. “It is contaminated by what we already know.”

The blind spot is caused by a patch at the back of each eye where there are no light-sensitive cells, just a gap where neurons exit the eye on their way to the brain.

We normally don’t notice blind spots because our two eyes can fill in for each other. When vision is obscured in one eye, the brain makes up what’s in the missing area by assuming that whatever is in the regions around the spot continues inwards.

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