A compelling argument for including the human perspective within science and for how human
experience makes science possible. “This is by far the best book I've read this year.”
—Michael Pollan Professor of the Practice of Non-fiction Harvard University #1 New York
Times bestselling author “(A) stimulating manifesto for changing the way we look at things.”
— Wall Street Journal It’s tempting to think that science gives us a God’s-eye view of
reality. But we neglect the place of human experience at our peril. In The Blind Spot
astrophysicist Adam Frank theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser and philosopher Evan Thompson
call for a revolutionary scientific worldview where science includes—rather than ignores or
tries not to see—humanity’s lived experience as an inescapable part of our search for objective
truth. The authors present science not as discovering an absolute reality but rather as a
highly refined constantly evolving form of human experience. They urge practitioners to
reframe how science works for the sake of our future in the face of the planetary climate
crisis and increasing science denialism. Since the dawn of the Enlightenment humanity has
looked to science to tell us who we are where we come from and where we’re going but we’ve
gotten stuck thinking we can know the universe from outside our position in it. When we try to
understand reality only through external physical things imagined from this outside position
we lose sight of the necessity of experience. This is the Blind Spot which the authors show
lies behind our scientific conundrums about time and the origin of the universe quantum
physics life AI and the mind consciousness and Earth as a planetary system. The authors
propose an alternative vision: scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from
the world and our experience of it evolving together. To finally “see” the Blind Spot is to
awaken from a delusion of absolute knowledge and to see how reality and experience intertwine.
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes urging us to create a new scientific culture
that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s
self-understanding so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
