east of eden paper
Explore your blind spot
Discover how the mind hides its tracks by Tom Stafford
Smashwords Edition (version 1.36, 24 January 2012)
Copyright 2011 Tom Stafford
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.
Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends.
This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes. You can even modify it, as long as the modified version is covered by the same licence. http://creativecommons.org/ Tom Stafford lives on the internet at http://idiolect.org.uk
Your guide is Tom Stafford:
This is a picture of the back of my eye, you can see the blood vessels and the optic disc, the light circle where they converge. It is this disc which produces the blind spots in our vision.
You will need: pen, paper, eyes
Your journey will take: minutes
Category: perception
Trig points: 3
The Treasure:
Proud of your sharp sight? Perhaps you should think again. For each eye, there is a blind spot, an area near the middle of your vision for which you cannot see anything. Normally the way your vision works hides these blind spots from your awareness, but it isn't hard to show they're there. Visual blind spots are a good example of how our conscious experience is fundamentally based on our biological machinery. But they also have important lessons to teach us about how our minds deal with missing information.
Your guide says:
Light enters the eyes through your pupils, and is focussed on the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is covered with receivers, called photoreceptors, which convert light into neural signals. A funny thing about the way the eye is constructed is that the wires carrying these signals are in front of the photoreceptors - between them and the light. This appears to be a quirk of evolution (evidence that it doesn't have to be this way comes from octopuses –
Discover how the mind hides its tracks by Tom Stafford
Smashwords Edition (version 1.36, 24 January 2012)
Copyright 2011 Tom Stafford
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.
Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends.
This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes. You can even modify it, as long as the modified version is covered by the same licence. http://creativecommons.org/ Tom Stafford lives on the internet at http://idiolect.org.uk
Your guide is Tom Stafford:
This is a picture of the back of my eye, you can see the blood vessels and the optic disc, the light circle where they converge. It is this disc which produces the blind spots in our vision.
You will need: pen, paper, eyes
Your journey will take: minutes
Category: perception
Trig points: 3
The Treasure:
Proud of your sharp sight? Perhaps you should think again. For each eye, there is a blind spot, an area near the middle of your vision for which you cannot see anything. Normally the way your vision works hides these blind spots from your awareness, but it isn't hard to show they're there. Visual blind spots are a good example of how our conscious experience is fundamentally based on our biological machinery. But they also have important lessons to teach us about how our minds deal with missing information.
Your guide says:
Light enters the eyes through your pupils, and is focussed on the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is covered with receivers, called photoreceptors, which convert light into neural signals. A funny thing about the way the eye is constructed is that the wires carrying these signals are in front of the photoreceptors - between them and the light. This appears to be a quirk of evolution (evidence that it doesn't have to be this way comes from octopuses –