"The word we focused on was scotoma, a term from ophthalmology that means a patch of blindness in the field of sight. Every human eye has one. It is the point where the optic nerve exits the retina and no image can form. We do not see the hole because the brain fills it in. Ralph Levinson, a retired ophthalmologist and our guest that week, called this "a profound statement on life and cognition.""
"He mentioned a book called The Blind Spot: Why Science Can't Ignore Human Experience, which argues that even science, for all its precision, has its own blind spots. Instruments can measure neural activity, but not the private experience of pain. We can record a brain's reaction to chocolate, but not the flavor as it melts on the tongue. The measurable and the meaningful do not always align."
Scotoma denotes a patch of blindness in the visual field where the optic nerve exits the retina and no image can form; the brain fills that gap so it is not perceived. Scotoma functions as a metaphor for psychological blind spots: parts of awareness that cannot perceive their own omission, appearing as habits, prejudices, or unexamined assumptions. Scientific instruments can record neural activity but cannot access private qualitative experience, so measurable data and subjective meaning may diverge. The term umwelt names the species-specific sensory world, emphasizing that perception is shaped by the organism and its instruments.
Read at Psychology Today
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