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.

Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.

What a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.

I always bounce my legs when I'm sitting.

Because vision appears so effortless, we are like fish challenged to understand water.

You´re not perceiving what's out there. You're perceiving whatever your brain tells you.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.