On my podcast, Fifty Words for Snow , my co-host Emily John Garcés and I usually explore words from other languages that have no direct English equivalent. Words that open windows into other ways of perceiving the world. But in one recent episode, we tried something different. We borrowed words from the field of vision .

The Human Eye Source: TheStudioLab/Pexels

The word we focused on was scotoma , a term from ophthalmology that means a patch of blindness in the field of sight. Every human eye has one. It is the point where the optic nerve exits the retina and no image can form. We do not see the hole because the brain fills it in. Ralph Levinson, a retired ophthalmologist and our guest that week, called this “a profound statement on life and cognition .”

Our eyes edit reality

See Full Page