Hello, I don't understand how a person can see something when the necessary part of his brain is damaged. I can imagine smelling sweet flowers, dream of seeing somebody I love, but I don't think, I can ever see anything by just practice. It seems to me just another instance of parascience or pseudoscience.
Best regards, Amiyo Biswas. Cell: +91-9433464329 Skype ID: amiyo11 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mohammed Asif Iqbal" <asifmaiq...@hotmail.com> To: <accessindia@accessindia.org.in> Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 1:41 PM Subject: [AI] Interesting Article > Interesting read > Brain has subconscious visual sense > 24 Dec 2008, 0013 hrs IST, Benedict Carey, NYT News Service > The man, a doctor left blind by two successive strokes, refused to take part in the experiment. He could not see anything, he said, and had no interest in navigating an obstacle course - a cluttered > hallway - for the benefit of science. Why bother? > When he finally tried it, though, something remarkable happened. He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything > clearly. > "You just had to see it to believe it," said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on > the patient in the journal Current Biology. > The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight, the native ability to sense things using the brain's primitive, subcortical - and > entirely subconscious - visual system. > Experts have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes - one in each hemisphere, > under the skull at the back of the head - were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice. > "It's a very rigorously done report and the first demonstration of this in someone with apparent total absence of a striate cortex, the visual processing region," said Richard Held, an emeritus > professor of cognitive and brain science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who with Ernst Poppel and Douglas Frost wrote the first published account of blindsight in a person, in 1973. > Scientists have long known that the brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits. Cells in the retina project not only to the visual cortex but also to subcortical areas. > In an earlier experiment, researchers also found that the same African doctor had emotional blindsight. When presented with images of fearful faces, he cringed subconsciously in the same way that > almost everyone does, even though he could not consciously see the faces. The subcortical, primitive visual system apparently registers not only solid objects but also strong social signals. > 0 > Line up > Position > Page down > Line down > To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. > > To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at > http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
