We use the information from our senses to make sense of the world. But sometimes, the information can be unreliable. What does our mind do in face of corrupted information?
Benedikt and colleagues wanted to understand how our mind makes sense of the world when faced with unreliable information. They used the model of blind spot, a part of our visual field that does not detect light. Our mind fills-in the blind spot such that we are not aware of its presence. The experiment was set up to find out if we are aware of 'information filling-in', which makes the blind spot a source of unreliable information. Unexpectedly, not only are we not aware of the unreliability of the information, we in-fact prefer the filled-in information from the blind spot over reality. In the words of André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” To know more, please listen to Benedikt.
To know more, please refer to:
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Benedikt Ehinger, et al., eLife, May, 2017
Benedikt and colleagues wanted to understand how our mind makes sense of the world when faced with unreliable information. They used the model of blind spot, a part of our visual field that does not detect light. Our mind fills-in the blind spot such that we are not aware of its presence. The experiment was set up to find out if we are aware of 'information filling-in', which makes the blind spot a source of unreliable information. Unexpectedly, not only are we not aware of the unreliability of the information, we in-fact prefer the filled-in information from the blind spot over reality. In the words of André Breton, “The imaginary is what tends to become real.” To know more, please listen to Benedikt.
To know more, please refer to:
Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones.
Benedikt Ehinger, et al., eLife, May, 2017
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