Blindsight

Readings

[required] Ramachandran on blindsight
See also NewsBlindsight
de Gelder, B., Tamietto, M., van Boxtel, G., Goebel, R. Sahraie, A., van den Stock, J., Steinen, B.M.C., Weiskrantz, L. & Pegna, A. (2008). Intact navigation skills after bilateral loss of striate cortex. Current Biology, 18, 1128-1129.

Blingsight = a phenomenon in which people without conscious visual perception in a certain area of their visual field can still demonstrate some response to visual stimuli in that particular field.
A kind of 'cortical' blindness - patients claim that they are blind, and they seem to loss all visual functions, but their eyes and optic nerves are still normal. Blindness is due to brain damage.
Documented by Poppel, Held, and Frost (1973), coined by Weiskrantz.
Patient DB can (under force choice)
- point to the location of stimulus
- detect movement
- discriminate the orientation of lines and gratings
- discriminate shapes such as X's and O's.
Others
- affective blindsight (See Tamietto, M. & deGelder, B. (2008)) - successful forced-choice discrimination of positive versus negative facial expressions
- Intact navigation in patient TN.