Do you have a black hole in your head?

In my very last post, I wrote about consciousness, agreeing with an article in Popular Mechanics with the title: Consciousness Is the Only Thing That Truly Exists, Scientist Claims, written by Danielle Zickl, that in the words of Christof Koch, PhD, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, “everything we experience in the external world — from seeing the sun set over the horizon or feeling — is mediated by our conscious experience.” To Koch, this implies that only conscious experience truly exists. Everything else, like the material world, is secondary, he says.

And Koch is not the first scientist to suggest that consciousness is fundamental and the world of matter we see around us emerges from it.

Then on May 29, 2026, another article appeared in Popular Mechanics written by Stav Dimitropoulos (whose articles I’ve referred to several times previously), titled You See a Unique Version of Reality, Neuroscientists Say, with the subtitle “Turns out we’re not all watching the same version of the world unfold, just continuously updating our own personal ‘simulation.’”

Here are some excerpts from that intriguing article….

“We would be surprised to learn that each of us carries a tiny “black hole” inside our own personal micro-universe: the human head. Inside the retina, the eye tissue responsible for vision, lies a literal physical gap where visual information simply disappears. While it affects how we see, it also could be the seat of far-reaching implications — even raising provocative questions about the nature of consciousness itself and how we perceive reality.

“Normally, visual regions of the cortex — the brain areas responsible for processing sight — receive direct signals from the retina through the optic nerve, the bundle of nerve fibers that carries visual information from the eye to the brain. But at the blind spot, no photoreceptors, the cells that detect incoming light, exist.

“Yet, we never experience these spots as “holes” or “darkness” because the brain seamlessly fills in the missing information, constructing a continuous picture of the world. ‘In part, that is because our two eyes compensate for each other: the missing patch in one eye is usually visible to the other,’ explains Lars Muckli, PhD, a professor of visual and cognitive neurosciences at the University of Glasgow. Even when one eye is closed, the brain uses surrounding visual patterns to silently rebuild the missing region.”

This is different that the classic blind spots, like the large hole in vision behind our heads, where neither eye receives any visual information at all. “Unlike the tiny blind spots, your brain does not fake an image there. You are consciously aware of the absence,” says Muckli. So consciousness, it appears, sometimes hides missing information from us, while at other times it openly admits the void exists.

“Predictive processing theories, meanwhile, see consciousness more like a skilled computer-generated imagery (CGI) artist, stitching together gaps in perception so expertly that the illusion becomes indistinguishable from reality. In other words, says Muckli, the brain’s internal models have become so adapted to the blind spot that we experience it no differently from fully represented regions of the visual world.

This brings up an interesting question: If the brain can fill in these “black holes” of perception, without us realizing it, are we also fabricating our conscious experiences rather than directly perceiving them?

Ramses Alcaide, PhD, a neuroscientist and CEO/cofounder of Neurable, a “cognitive wearables” technology company, proposes one answer….

“’The brain is not a passive receiver of sensory input. It is an active prediction machine that builds a model of the world and updates it as new information arrives,’ he says. Alcaide describes the retinal gap as a clean proof of concept because at the gap, the update never comes — yet the brain does not show us a hole. Instead, it presents us with a complete scene generated internally from prior expectations and surrounding context.

“If that is true, Alcaide argues, then the implications extend far beyond the optic blind spot itself. The world we consciously experience may not be raw reality, but rather ‘… a continuously updated simulation of the world, and sensory input is primarily used to keep that simulation calibrated,’ he says. And ‘when the input disappears, the simulation [just] keeps running.’

What are the deeper ramifications of such ideas? “If different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality, Alcaide says, people may end up experiencing the same physical world in subtly different ways. “The Dress,” the viral image that appeared blue-and-black to some viewers and white-and-gold to others despite everyone receiving the exact same visual input, is a splendid example of this. ‘We are not all watching the same movie,’ Alcaide says.

“Ultimately, it reveals that what we receive from the outside world and what we experience in our own inner world are not the same thing. ‘Sensory input is the raw data. Consciousness is the interpreted model,’ says Alcaide.

“If the brain can take a literal black hole in perception and cover it up, smooth it over, and fashion it into a believable reality before serving it to awareness, neuroscientists are left confronting a far larger mystery: how much of reality has your brain quietly been rewriting all along?”

At the end of my previous post, I offered a (fairly complex) theory of my own about how consciousness, the Demiurge and our brain might work together to create what we experience in our holographic universe. I will try to summarize that again here (having promised to figure out how to articulate it more simply)….

An individual consciousness sees what’s going on here and chooses to “take a ride” on the Earth Experience, one of many rides in the amusement park. I can imagine purchasing a ticket from the Demiurge who created the ride, whereupon the Demiurge then fashions an avatar for the consciousness through which it can be aware of the physical experiences it will encounter on the ride.

Part of the avatar the Demiurge creates is a holographic brain — a requirement to be able to participate on the ride (like some rides today require 3D glasses). The Demiurge then chooses the 2-dimensional information stored on the boundary of our universe based on what experiences the Demiurge thinks best suit the consciousness — and which the Demiurge wants the avatar to encounter on the ride — and downloads them to the brain.

The brain receives the 2-dimensional information chosen by the Demiurge, translates them into a 3-dimensional reality, and projects them “out there” like a total immersion movie. The brain then receives the movie coming back to its senses from “out there,” and consciousness interprets those inputs based on its beliefs, opinions, fears, and especially its biased judgments (“We are not all watching the same movie,” Alcaide says), and then chooses how it wants to react and respond to what it decides it has experienced.

Depending on the reaction of the consciousness, the Demiurge chooses the next experiences that best suit why the consciousness bought the ticket to the ride in the first place.

Rinse and repeat.

[P.S.] The day after I wrote that, another article appeared in Popular Mechanics quoting Donald Hoffman, PhD, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine: “We’re playing a multiplayer game,” he says. “My body is just an avatar in a VR game.” You should read this whole article yourself here.

Meanwhile, I go back to my original thesis in my first book, Butterflies Are Free to Fly, that our beliefs, opinions, judgments and fears have a major influence on our perception of the experiences we encounter, and it would behoove us to clear those away so that the movie our senses perceive coming back are the most accurate pictures of what the Demiurge has sent us, in order to more effectively choose the most appropriate reaction or response to those experiences.

Instead, many of us alter the experiences we encounter because of our beliefs and opinions and fears, and especially our biased judgments, or as Dr. Alcaide put it, “different brains rely on different histories, expectations, and sensory weighting to construct reality.”

If Dr. Alcaide is correct and we have black holes that our brain fills in automatically, shouldn’t do our best to have those filled in with the most accurate simulations?

It may not matter as much “how much of reality your brain has quietly been rewriting all along” as it does: “how accurate is the simulated rewrite to the actual experience downloaded to our brains?”