Travellers' Tales

Hack #16 in Mind Hacks tells you how to map the shape of your blind spot (everybody's is slightly different, it turns out). Richard Gregory's book Eye and Brain is the classic introduction to the science of visual perception, written with Gregory's much-loved conversational and enthusiastic style. Shortly before his death Gregory wrote the scholarpedia article about blind spots, which you can check out here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/The_Blind_Spot.

If you're mad keen to get up to speed on the latest on blind spots and filling in, you can read reviews by Weil & Rees (2011), Komatsu (2006) and De Weerd (2006)

Filling in relies on our attention (or inattention) in similar ways to other phenomena which can make one part of the world 'disappear'. For fun with this kind of thing, look up the Cheshire Cat illusion or Troxler's Fading.

On wikipedia I recommend the articles on Filling in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling-in and on Troxler's Fading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troxler%27s_fading

Dennett makes his argument in Consciousness Explained.

End Notes

Thanks for Charlotte Codina for taking the photo of the back of my eye and to Vaughan Bell for reading a draft of this guide.

Dennett, Daniel (1991), Allen Lane, ed., Consciousness Explained, The Penguin Press

Gregory, R. (1966). Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. See also http://www.richardgregory.org/

Komatsu, H. (2006). The neural mechanisms of perceptual filling-in. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(3), 220-231. doi:10.1038/nrn1869

Matsumoto, M., & Komatsu, H. (2005). Neural responses in the macaque v1 to bar stimuli with various lengths presented on the blind spot. Journal of Neurophysiology, 93(5), 2374-2387. doi:10.1152/jn.00811.2004

Ramachandran, V. S., & Gregory, R. L. (1991). Perceptual filling in of artificially induced scotomas in human vision. Nature, 350(6320), 699–702.

Ramachandran, V. S. (1992). Filling in the blind spot. Nature, 356(6365), 115-115. doi:10.1038/356115a0

Stafford, T. & Webb, M. (2004). Mind Hacks: Tips and Tricks for using your brain. Sebastapol, CA: O'Reilly. See also http://mindhacks.com/book

Van Lier, r., Vergeer, m., & Anstis, s. (2009). Filling-in afterimage colors between the lines. Current Biology, 19(8), r323-r324.

Weil, R. S., & Rees, G. (2011). A new taxonomy for perceptual filling-in. Brain Research Reviews, 67(1-2), 40-55.