I stumbled upon a fascinating section about our brain blind spots in Stumbling into Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Did you know that our eyes don’t see everything? There is a blind spot, and our brain fills it in with the information around it. We don’t notice that our brain is filling in this information. The brain’s blindspots are what magicians use to make us see things that aren’t there.
Our visual field isn’t the only sense with blind spots. Our ears can hear things that aren’t there as well. There was an experiment where they said a statement, “The state governors met with their respective legislators convening in the capital city.” They then put a cough in at the S in legislators. People in the experiment heard the cough, after the word not where they placed the cough. The phenomenon happened even when instructed there was a missing letter.
Another study had researchers having a cough then preceded by the word eel. When the researchers placed the word orange after it, the participants heard the word peel. Then they listened to the sentence “, the ‘cough’ eel was on the shoe.” The participants thought they heard the word heel. The astonishing thing with this is that the brains were filling in information after the fact. The participants weren’t even aware this was happening. It shows how powerful the brain is.