09/05/2026
Your brain deletes the image of your nose every second your eyes are open. Your nose is always within your field of vision, but the brain filters it out to prevent distraction. If you deliberately focus or close one eye, you suddenly notice it again.
Your brain also suppresses sounds and sensations it considers irrelevant. Your heartbeat, for example, is physically loud enough inside your body to create vibrations through tissue and bone, yet most of the time you never consciously hear it. The same happens with tiny eye movements. Your eyeballs are constantly making microscopic movements called saccades, but the brain stabilises the image so the world appears still instead of shaking nonstop.
This process is known as sensory gating or neural filtering. Without it, consciousness would be overwhelmed by internal and external noise every second of the day.
In many ways, you are not experiencing raw reality. You are experiencing a heavily edited version of reality assembled by your brain after deleting, suppressing, and reorganising enormous amounts of information it considers unnecessary.
You just caught it deleting your own nose.
Here is another fascinating part. Have you ever sat in a very quiet place and noticed a faint ringing sound? That is literally the sound of the brain working, often comes from activity within the auditory system itself, such as nerve activity or blood flow being interpreted by the brain in silence.
Your brain also operates on two levels. It gives you control over some organs and muscles, like your arms, legs, and speech. But it keeps control over vital systems it cannot trust you with like your heartbeat, breathing patterns, liver function, kidney filtration, digestion, hormone balance, and thousands of other processes happening silently in the background every second you are alive.
