Right now, your brain is spackling over details in your blind spot, where a bundle of nerve fibers inconveniently pierces the array of photoreceptor cells in the back of your eye. Recent computer-vision algorithms, like Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill, can often convincingly extend or fill in missing parts of a picture by imitating the surrounding colors, textures, and patterns. There's some evidence that your visual cortex reconstructs low-resolution imagery of your peripheral vision and blind spot in a similar way. We usually take for granted that our rich experience of the world is built from a narrow stream of sensory data which our brains synchronize, sort, and paint in to create a gestalt. Are machines editing our experiences the same way?
Credit: Olof Mathé