Winter on Elba Island

by Angelo Mazzei Di Poggio

Today I found myself attending a wide range of tasks. I went over some family finances, then stopped at the pharmacy to collect my mother’s enoxaparin injections. After that, I opened the Archaeological Museum of Marciana, had a coffee with the museum’s neighbor, and chatted briefly with the woman who makes the local jams. I took another coffee at the bistro, then gave instructions to my friend Ruti for preparing lunch. I contacted two guests who are currently walking the GTE to check on their progress, went to collect water from the spring, and later led a guided tour of Poggio, focusing in particular on Piazza del Pesce and explaining the history of tuna fishing and tuna traps in the Poggio area. I then retrieved a scarf we had left at Alessandro’s house—he was leaving for Chianti that day and had dropped it off at his mother’s place—and picked up some glasses for my guests. Finally, I completed the remastering of the album Discoteca Dark for a new release. Over the course of this same day, I also articulated and systematized a concept that is at once scientific, humanistic, philosophical, psychological, and at the same time gnoseological, epistemological, and even biochemical in scope. I refer to it as CSB, Cognitive Selective Blindness. The concept already exists in the scholarly literature, but what follows is my own structured exposition of it.
Cognitive Selective Blindness (CSB) constitutes a central phenomenon in the study of perception, knowledge, and the dynamics of scientific systems. It does not represent a sensory deficit nor an individual pathology, but rather a structural property of human cognitive processes, through which available information is filtered, selected, and organized according to preexisting interpretative models. Contemporary cognitive science has demonstrated that perception is not a purely receptive process, but an inferential activity guided by hypotheses, expectations, and predictive schemas. Within this framework, the brain operates according to a principle of predictive error minimization, privileging stimuli that are coherent with its internal model of the world while reducing the salience of incongruent signals. CSB thus emerges as the inevitable outcome of a system that must ensure efficiency, stability, and interpretative continuity within a complex and information-dense environment.
This cognitive structure finds a direct parallel in the history of science, where empirical observation is always mediated by theoretical frameworks that determine what can be recognized as a meaningful datum. The notion of the paradigm, systematically introduced by Thomas S. Kuhn, describes the set of conceptual, methodological, and ontological presuppositions that orient scientific research in a given historical period. Within normal science, the paradigm not only guides hypothesis formation and the interpretation of results, but also establishes a form of collective selective blindness, through which anomalies and discrepancies are marginalized, reinterpreted, or absorbed by means of local adjustments. Paradigmatic blindness does not imply a gross error or a lack of rigor, but rather an internal coherence that renders radical conceptual alternatives effectively invisible.
The history of scientific revolutions provides numerous examples of this dynamic. The Ptolemaic system, although grounded in accurate observations, remained for centuries incapable of recognizing the possibility of a heliocentric arrangement—not due to a lack of data, but because of the conceptual impossibility of conceiving the Earth’s motion. Similarly, classical Newtonian mechanics exhibited a persistent selective blindness toward the implications of the speed of light and the relativity of simultaneity, treating experimental anomalies as marginal technical issues rather than as signs of a deeper conceptual crisis. In medicine, the miasmatic theory long prevented recognition of the role of pathogens, despite repeated empirical evidence, because such data were incompatible with the dominant semantic structure of disease. The initial resistance to the theory of continental drift likewise shows how the absence of an acceptable mechanism within the fixist paradigm rendered a convergence of morphological, geological, and paleontological evidence effectively invisible.
These historical cases indicate that CSB is not a contingent accident, but a functional component of organized knowledge systems. It allows for operational stability and the accumulation of results within a shared framework, albeit at the cost of reduced sensitivity to what exceeds established conceptual boundaries. At the individual level, analogous mechanisms manifest through cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, and through the tendency to reduce cognitive dissonance. At the social level, these mechanisms are amplified by institutional structures, educational systems, and, in the contemporary context, algorithmically mediated information environments that selectively reinforce preexisting expectations and beliefs. Everyday society thus appears composed of subjects who, while considering themselves informed and rational, operate within micro-paradigms that define what is visible, sayable, and thinkable, thereby rendering entire portions of reality structurally invisible.
From this perspective, CSB appears as an inevitable epistemic condition that cannot be eliminated, but only recognized and critically examined. The progress of knowledge, both scientific and social, does not consist in a simple expansion of the field of vision, but in a restructuring of interpretative models that makes visible what previously could not be seen. Such restructuring tends to occur discontinuously, through crises, interpretative conflicts, and conceptual ruptures, rather than through the linear accumulation of data.
A significant anticipation of this insight can already be found in Greek philosophy, which explicitly thematized the relationship between vision, knowledge, and the structure of the thinkable. In Parmenides, the distinction between doxa and alētheia indicates that what appears to the senses is already filtered through an order of shared opinions, and that only a radical transformation of logos allows access to what is genuinely thinkable. Heraclitus, for his part, observes that human beings live as though asleep, incapable of grasping the common logos despite being constantly immersed in it, thus suggesting a form of selective blindness that does not arise from a lack of experience, but from an inability to apprehend its underlying structure. In Plato, finally, the allegory of the cave offers a paradigmatic representation of cognitive blindness as the ordinary condition of human existence, in which shadows are mistaken for reality due to a stabilized perceptual and conceptual arrangement. In all these cases, Greek philosophy implicitly recognizes that seeing is always a seeing according to an order, and that overcoming blindness does not consist in a mere act of observation, but in a transformation of logos that makes possible a new regime of visibility.

While reading, listen to

Discoteca Dark (Remastered)