The brain "fills in" the missing information from the blind spot. Notice what you see in the location of the dot when it's in your blind spot. When the dot disappears, you do not perceive a hole of whiteness or blackness in its place; instead your brain invents a patch of the background pattern. Your brain, with no information from that particular spot in visual space, fills in with the patterns around it. You're not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

This is what consciousness does: it sets the goals, and the rest of the system learns how to meet them.

There are always wonderful mysteries to confront.

As we develop better technologies for probing the brain, we detect more problems.

We spend our lives on a thin slice between the unimaginably small scales of the atoms that compose us and the infinitely large scales of galaxies.