Why Don’t You Rarely See Your Nose?
- Close one eye and focus straight ahead, without moving your eyes. You'll notice a fleshy blur in your peripheral vision - your nose.
- "You can see your nose," said Michael Webster, a vision scientist and co-director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nevada, Reno.
- The main reason our noses don't take up space in our vision comes down to a surprising fact: We don't see the world as it is indeed, but...
Close one eye and focus straight ahead, without moving your eyes. You’ll notice a fleshy blur in your peripheral vision – your nose. It’s there every waking moment,yet you’re hardly ever aware of it. So why can’t we see our noses, even though they’re literally right in front of us?
“You can see your nose,” said Michael Webster, a vision scientist and co-director of the neuroscience program at the University of Nevada, Reno. We’re just not aware of it most of the time.
The main reason our noses don’t take up space in our vision comes down to a surprising fact: We don’t see the world as it is indeed, but rather as a model our brains have constructed to help us survive.
“Vision is actually a prediction about what you think the world is,” Webster said. “You want to be aware of, ’How does the world differ?’ ’What are the surprises and errors and the things that I didn’t predict?’ Normally, you’re not aware of your nose as you already know about it and you just don’t want to be aware of it. … It’s a big disadvantage to waste some of your energy attending to that.”
This makes sense from a survival perspective. Constantly processing unchanging features, like your nose, would be a waste of limited mental resources.