Blind spots freaking out my mind.

Want to freak out your mind? Find your visual blind spots and discuss how you think they go unnoticed most of the time and how they seem invisible.

Place your right hand over your right eye while looking at a small object on a wall far away, like a door knob or light switch.

Keep your right hand over your right eye and keep looking at the object with your left eye.

Raise your left thumb out in front of you so your left thumb blocks your view of the object on the wall, then slowly move your left thumb to the left but keep looking at the object.

At about 15 degrees to the left of center your thumb will disappear.

This is your blind spot. You have one in your right eye about 15 degrees to the right of the center in your right eye too. If you move your left thumb around a little bit you can sort of tell where the edges of the blind spot are, but if you move your open hand into the area, it seems to become difficult to see the blind spot at all.

The weird part is figuring out how the empty spaces seems to be filled in like camouflage so you can't see it. It seems to go unnoticed.

Those of us lucky to have both of our eyes don't notice our blind spots because the visual fields of both eyes overlap.

I once thought that there was some process by which the brain fills in the space with surrounding sensory information.

I tried splitting the visual field into two separate colors with a third color for the spot in the center. I moved the colored paper with the center spot into my blind spot but that yielded negative results. I traced on paper the edges of the blind spots. They were vertically oriented oval shapes, tried the colored paper again with larger spots, no luck.

I gradually came to realize that my whole concept of blindness was wrong. I assumed that blindness was like darkness but even the dark has substance and is recognized as something.

For a long time I couldn't grasp the concept of the cognitive gap, that in our field of vision there are empty spots where nothing processes. It doesn't show up as a shadow that one naturally assumes a flaw in visual perception should, like dirt on a camera lens, one can only make sense of it with processed visual information, leaving one unable to articulate the experience properly.

Real blindness is a void that cannot be adequately defined in any way, because it simply does not exist to be processed in our minds. We don't notice it, we only notice the thing moving behind the veils of non-perception.

For those of us with two eyes we don't need to worry because the visual field of the other eye overlaps the blind spot.

Some still say that the brain fills in the detail with surrounding information, but I'm not convinced. I'm certain that there are other such gaps in our general perception of the world that prevent us from sensing what is real. As a species we only earned enough perception through natural selection to allow for our basic survival. If we had more perception than what we needed we might go completely insane.

Currently, our eyes can see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, 400 to 800 nanometers. University of Southern California scientists have unlocked an electronic method of firing neurons in rats that allow them to remember things they forgot.

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

Imagine what would happen if the brain could be enhanced to perhaps see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Meet "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes!

Graves of hopes and dreams

Joe and Mandy both worked. They were also responsible enough to wait until they were out of debt to have children, but it looked like Joe's school loan debt would likely drag on until he and she both were too old to have children of their own.

Joe wanted to pay off his student loan as fast as possible, and he got into tax trouble because he wrote a check too big to Fannie Mae just before tax time, and now the IRS was coming down on the sweet couple who met when their parents dropped them off at college on the first day.

Joe and Mandy had a checkered college experience. They were beautiful, popular, athletic, and beer drinkers. They loved to party. They skated through their college, which was really a meat grinder that printed diplomas, not nationally accredited at all. They both were shocked at the number of employment rejection letters they received. They didn't realize that they had been duped into debt.

Joe and Mandy lived on credit cards and gifts from their parents, but that didn't last. Joe managed to find a job as a janitor for the county which paid above minimum wage. Mandy sold Avon and items on eBay she found at yard sales. Joe's income was steady, and Mandy's was feast or famine, but she had a pretty good eye for antiques although she didn't know it. She didn't really like antiques, but in the dark recesses of her memory  lies her great aunt Emma's house. Aunt Emma was a professional collector of antiques and kept the very best of many for herself. Mandy as a collector would focus on items of high value unconsciously, based on her visits to aunt Emma's house as a child. She knew specific items but didn't really know how to value them. Certain item values were ruined by being refinished or polished, where the original finish or patina might have added value, that sort of thing.

Joe cleaned county offices at night. They all were basically the same. At first he was intrigued by the trash in the trash cans, but he soon learned that it was all the same, and had little time to entertain his thoughts as he pushed his cart along, changing the bags, sweeping, vacuuming, mopping, waxing, stripping, spraying, scrubbing and so on.

Tonight Joe was in the throws of despair. It would be three days before his next paycheck, they were out of food and he didn't have the courage to tell Mandy that the check on the way to Fannie Mae was about to bounce. He finally had enough. He was shaking with frustration, not knowing what to do. He was thinking about the insurance Mandy would get if he committed suicide, and then he pushed his cart passed the door of the county coroner's office. He thought it was ironic as he entered the office.

Joe stood over the trash can in the county coroner's office and noticed something he had ignored ever since he started work as a janitor. Remember he was once intrigued by the kind of trash in trash cans, but not really papers. He was originally interested in little notes, the kind of snacks those people chose from the vending machines, something that might clue him in on an investment somewhere, or some kind of scandalous leavings.

Joe stared into the trash can. He just stood there, took a deep breath and sighed. A white sheet of paper was floated into the trash without being crumpled or folded. It was a perfectly good sheet of paper. It was a death certificate. For some reason an error was made and the sheet discarded.

Joe turned his eyes upward for the first time in a very very long time. It almost seemed a dangerous idea to do so. He looked at the In-Box. Doing so took his breath away. He wondered if there might be surveillance cameras in the room. Gradually the notion became silly. His eyes focused on the documents within.

There was a stack of reports produced by some pathologists, waiting only for a signature from the county coroner. Joe suddenly realized they were death certificates. If he could convince his creditors that he and Mandy were dead, they could walk away from all of their debts, including the I.R.S.

They would need to totally erase every connection with the current living, and create a whole new network with new friends. They would need to determine if there is any connection at all between their new friends and their old friends and hope no connections are made. That would be very tough, unless, everyone close to them was in on it. Joe wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking he could make a profit selling phony death certificates on the streets.

Joe decided he didn't give a crap. He grabbed the death certificate out of the trash that already had the coroner's signature. He was going to cover the names and causes of death with White-Out and make copies, thousands of copies, and he was going to sell them for $400 each. The sales pitch would be "Hey! Tired of the IRS and Creditors coming after you? They will stop if they think you are dead!"

Joe was out of time, however, and he knew it. He thought he should go ahead and do the deed for him and Mandy, to get out of debt first, and then use their experience as a sales pitch for others.

He went to work erasing the names and cause of death, and replacing the names with his and Mandy's name. He placed the copies in the coroner's in-box, but not on top, a few pages below, so as to not draw suspicion.

Joe moved on to the next office. He was thrilled! But, he couldn't just walk away from his job at the moment, otherwise he would draw suspicion to himself. Wait a minute. If he was cleaning offices the night he put fake death certificates about himself and his wife in the coroner's in-box, wouldn't that be obvious? Not to Joe. Joe was an idiot. He was going home in the morning and hugging his dead wife with his dead arms and packing his dead suitcase while she packed here dead suitcase. They were going to call a ghost taxi to the phantom airport and buy zombie tickets to Hell on the credit card of a corpse.

The county sheriff was at their door the next morning. The end.

Reflection

I was sitting in my car adjusting the center rear view mirror. I set the mirror so I could see my eyes for a moment.

I got distracted by something in the distance so my eyes focused out my windshield under the mirror.

As I looked, I became aware in my peripheral vision that my reflection seemed to be staring at me instead of looking down as I was, looking under my mirror off in the distance.

I kept staring under the mirror, but still peripherally sensed the eyes in the mirror looking at me. It gave me chills.

I still remember the morning in the bathroom mirror when I thought I caught my reflection looking slightly away, down and to the left. I was never able to repeat it.

I don't think the reflection knows I caught it. I don't know if it knows that I know, or what it will do if it finds out I know, or even if I can convince it that I know, for it repeats everything I do with near perfect precision. It lives in a delusion of megalomania.

Why do I call it "it?" It creeps me out so much because if it was alive it would be doing better things like a normal human.

I had a friend who smashed a mirror once. I think his reflection escaped because he kept saying he couldn't see himself any more, and a week later he was arrested for a murder.

It was impossible because he was with friends and couldn't be in two places at once, but the police had video of him climbing through a window. Only it was really a mirror but they covered it up.

I spoke to another friend about it and he thought it would be cool to collect mirrors that were owned by serial killers and genocidal maniac tyrants, then break them all and piece them together in a giant art collage. The collection phase is nearly complete.
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