The experiment began with Allen placing a magnet over the back of my skull, just above V1. (You can see a video of the procedure below.) Keen to know how it feels, I recently took part in one of those experiments at Allen’s lab in Cardiff, UK. To test their ideas, scientists can use a form of non-invasive brain stimulation that disrupts different brain regions, in an attempt to induce a reversible form of blindsight in healthy participants. Of all the questions these studies have posed, the most pressing has been why? What causes the conscious and unconscious to decouple so spectacularly? Tellingly, all the blindsight subjects had suffered damage to a region known as V1, at the back of the head, suggesting that it is this region that normally projects the stream of images into our awareness. “There’s a lot of controversy about whether those reports truly reflect visual experiences,” says Kentridge. But even then, he could not describe the content itself, meaning that his experience lacked almost everything we would normally associate with vision. For instance, one subject was able to distinguish movement in fast, high-contrast films he described it as being like “ a black shadow moving against a completely black background” – a “sense of knowing” that there was something beyond. Only in very rare circumstances do they come close to being aware of what they are seeing. The participant is still perceiving, but they lack awareness of perception.” “What you want to do is to look at something that is as close to consciousness as possible, but which is lacking that specific quality, that subjective experience,” says Christopher Allen at Cardiff University.
How can you pick apart the rich fabric of our minds to find the one thread that gives rise to the vivid sense of awareness, of feeling and “being” and experiencing the world, without unravelling everything else around it?ĭaniel, whose name has been changed for this article and is known in the literature simply as DB, offered some of the first clues. “They offer a view to functions that are difficult to observe – that are normally silent.”Ĭonsciousness is so deeply intertwined with everything we do, that many scientists had previously believed it would be impossible to study. “These cases open a window into parts of the brain that are normally not visible,” says Marco Tamietto, who is based at Tilburg University. Just how many of our decisions occur out of our awareness, even when we have the illusion of control? And if the conscious mind is not needed to direct our actions, then what is its purpose? Why did we evolve this vivid internal life, if we are almost “zombies” acting without awareness? And over the following decades, the condition has come to answer some fundamental questions about the human mind. “Some were sceptical, of course, but it has held its own and become an accepted phenomenon,” Weiskrantz says today. Publishing a report in 1974, Weiskrantz coined the term “blindsight” to describe this fractured conscious state. Again, Daniel was adamant that nothing had appeared before his eyes, yet his accuracy was around 80%, much more than if he had been guessing randomly.Ĭlearly, despite his blindness, Daniel’s healthy eyes were still watching the world and passing the information to his unconscious, which was guiding his behaviour. Or Weiskrantz and Warrington would present a single line on the screen, and Daniel had to decide whether it was horizontal or vertical. Surprisingly, he was almost always right. Daniel was adamant that he could not see a thing, but Weiskrantz persuaded him to just “take a guess”. They placed a screen in front of Daniel’s blind spot, for instance, and asked him to point at a circle, when it appeared in different places.
#Michael mind project blinded by the light series#
Intrigued, Sanders referred Daniel to the psychologists Elizabeth Warrington and Lawrence Weiskrantz, who confirmed the hunch with a series of clever tests. It was as if some kind of “second sight” was guiding his behaviour, beyond his conscious awareness. And yet, as Sanders began testing him, he noticed something very strange: Daniel could reach out and grab Sanders’ hand, even when it must have fallen right behind his blind spot.