Eli5 what is happening when an object is missing, but is right there in your vision however the brain blocks it?
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You’re not actually seeing what you think you are seeing. The visual inputs into your optic nerve are sent to your visual cortex where they are broken down, analyzed and then reconstructed.
First off you’re actually seeing everything upside down. Light coming into the eyes is flipped onto your retina at the back of your eyes. In fact it is thought that newborns fail to switch the image the correct way up and thus see the world upside for the first days of their life.
Your brain is trying to analyze what it is seeing and present the consciousness with the most important data that it needs. So it prioritizes information details of the bear in the distance that’s busy charging up on you but actually gives you extremely limited information of the tree that’s right in front of you. The best way to illustrate this is check out this clip on **Change Blindness** by [Professor Bruce Hood](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOF-saZ1XSQ)
Furthermore your vision also has a definite blind spot in it. Unlike a DSLR sensor (in a camera) there is a definite gap in your retina (where the optic nerve is) of about 1.6mm. So why don’t we see it? Because our brains fill it in for us. Not only has it got surrounding data to work with but also data from the other eye.
Our brains break down and analyze what we are looking at in real time in our incredibly complex visual cortex. Our minds are highly sophisticated neural networks that work by employing the equivalent of incredibly vast libraries of pattern recognition to characterize and make sense of what we are seeing.
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