Blindside

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

On PBS right now is a "Nature" show about consciousness. They just did a segment on a person with blindsight. He can see normally on his left side, but on his right side he can see, but is not aware of seeing. If you draw a shape on a screen on his right side with a laser pen, he says he cannot see it. But if you ask him to trace the shape with his finger and describe it, he does just fine.

They also had a monkey with the same blindsight. There was a panel set up with a green button on the left, a green button on the right, and a blue button in the middle. If one of the green buttons is lit, the monkey presses it. If neither are lit, he presses the blue button. What happens when the right green button is lit? He presses it and the blue button!

What might we say about the vision qualia of these two creatures? Extraordinary.

Here's more information:

http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/faculty/pcarruthers/animal-consciousness.htm

~~ Paul

[ImpyTimpy]

Very interesting. So the person and the animal basically see the action on their right hand side, yet they are not conciously registering it... It's fascinating as to how they are aware of it happening if conciously they don't know it happened. :)

I personally can't imagine it.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That article I posted talks about the fact that the retina is connected to two parts of your brain. The first is an evolutionarily older midbrain segment that deals with motor function. This portion is apparently unconscious. The retina is also connected to the newer visual cortex, where you are conscious of what you see. If you lose the latter function, then you can react to visual stimuli, but are not aware of them.

Every had the feeling that you just drove a distance without any conscious awareness of it? I think things would feel like that.

~~ Paul

[aggle_rithm]

Ramachandran wrote about this in "Phantoms of the Brain". He described a woman who could not see a mail slot in a door, yet if asked to put a letter in it she could easily find it, orient the letter in the proper direction, and push it through.

He used the term "zombie" to describe that part of the brain that performs tasks without conscious awareness. That's the part that drives me home from work every day, for instance.

[Yahzi]

This phenomona is extremely common. It happens every time an attractive, scantily clad woman walks by a man and his wife.

:D

[Dancing David]

Wow, so they are unable to verbaly process the image on the one side of the visual field, this happens in brain trauma but one, just one side of the visual field!

[thaiboxerken]

This is evidence of clairvoyance!!

Sure, it's limited by such mundane things like.. blindfolds, LOS, eyelids and light... but, yea, this is psychic powers being revealed.. yea, that's the ticket.

[JesFine]

Blindsight is pretty cool. I remember learning about this in college and watching a film (don't remember if it was dramatized or the actual event) where the researchers asked the subject to point to the object even though he couldn't see it.
The subject kept saying "I can't see it!"
The researchers kept saying "Well, just point to it anyway."
"But I CAN'T SEE IT!"
"We know -- just humor us, point to it anyway"
"Fine!"

Then he pointed right to it. Cool.

This link is supposed to test your own blindsightedness, but so far, my blindsight is terrible (ie exactly chance).

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/blindsight.html
Originally posted by thaiboxerken
This is evidence of clairvoyance!!

Sure, it's limited by such mundane things like.. blindfolds, LOS, eyelids and light... but, yea, this is psychic powers being revealed.. yea, that's the ticket.

It has been too long since my psych classes to remember for sure, but I believe this phenomenon is also known as psychic blindness. Of course this has nothing really to do with psychic powers, it just happens to be what they called it.

[Janus]

I'd never heard of this type of blindness - very interesting. There are other kinds of partial blinds:
- Motion Blindness
- Colour blindness
- unable to recognize faces.
- unable to recognize shapes.

From what I understand, depending on the nature of the damage, the effects can be very distinctive:
- able to recognize some shapes but not others.
- blindness to slow (or to fast) moving objects.
- colours that vary dramatically with a minor change in light.

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
What might we say about the vision qualia of these two creatures? Extraordinary.

Given the track record of this board, do you really want to know?