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by jerf 4712 days ago
"The object that does not reflect light to you ceases to exist in your vision. Nothing comes from that direction. Your brain would then attempt to compensate -- as it does for the blind spot in both your eyes -- and fill in the void, perhaps with a fuzzy version of continuity of whatever colors and textures surround the object."

This is gibberish. Unless you're high on acid, when you see a black thing, your visual system does not go nuts trying to fill in the missing data... it sees black.

You're trying to explain a phenomenon that doesn't exist. Your brain does not see a black object as a "gap"... it sees it as black. There's nothing complicated to explain here. There's no "illusion". There's no weird perceptual thing to explain, beyond the usual "what is seeing red, really?" (red for some reason being the usual color chosen for this question), which is clearly not what is being referenced. There's no gap here. No optical illusion. Just black.

I mean, find something in your visual field that is black, and look at it for a bit. Do you see your brain "filling in the void, perhaps with a fuzzy version of continuity of whatever colors and textures surround the object"?

The only hard thing about understanding this is that there's no hard thing.

1 comments

It would be interesting to see some ultrablack material in person http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/ultrablack/