A few blind people can "see", leading to discoveries about consciousness

[oldcynic]

A blind woman describes how she learnt she had one of the world’s most intriguing senses.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170428-i-have-a-strange-second-sight

Some people who have lost their vision find a “second sight” taking over their eyes – an uncanny, subconscious sense that sheds light into the hidden depths of the human mind.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150925-blindsight-the-strangest-form-of-consciousness

[Marie Marie]

1. Amazing.

[Massacure]

2. So in essence, the eyes in these blind people work perfectly fine?

Their eyes sense information, encode it, and send it to a particular region in the brain. Then that region in the brain sends that information to the part used for formulating their "guess" on which way the arrow is pointing or to the part necessary to walk around objects but never sends the information to the part associated with consciousness? Mind blown.

[sakabatou]

5. Her eyes work fine, yes

but her visual cortex isn't. It was hard to parse the rest of the story for me.

[alittlelark]

3. We live in an amazing reality...for those that

can SEE it.

[tinrobot]

4. Makes me wonder what else our brains are hiding for us.

[MountainFool]

6. mind tricks

Reminds me of what happens when the brain is physically divided .. gets spooky. One writeup ...
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5871076/what-happens-when-your-brain-is-split-in-two---and-you-survive

Folks might also be interested in the blind people that train their visual systems to respond to sound. Check out Daniel Kish and his organization that teaches blind people to see with echos. http://www.worldaccessfortheblind.org

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Ramachandran described such a case in "Phantoms in the Brain" ...

a woman who almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning lost the use of part of her brain, and became "blind" as a result. She still responded to some visual cues -- like trying to catch something thrown at her -- but could not describe any of the images formed in her eye. It was only some lower portion of her brain that interpreted the images; her higher brain functions did not share in the signal processing.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31555.Phantoms_in_the_Brain

If you enjoyed Oliver Sacks' books, you'll enjoy this one.

[Warpy]

8. Interesting that it's among formerly sighted people who lost their sight

One of the weirdes things I've seen in neurology is a meeting with some severely apahsic patients, the ones who were pretty much silent and also had poor understanding of spoken speech all singing along to "Happy Birthday," both words and tune.

That phenomenon gave rise to Music Intonation Therapy, a way to deblock alternate pathways to the speech center to restore at least some speech. The whole process was fascinating and quite effective in many patients.

I wonder if something similar might be at work here, the pathway to the visual cortex having been cut but alternate pathways to other parts of the brain left intact, like motor areas. So "blindsight" means your right hand is near your coffee cup and you know that without actually seeing either your hand or the cup.

Brains are weird.