December 23, 2010

Blindsight and blindness blindness

Blindsight is a phenomenon in which people who are perceptually blind - who can't see - are able to respond to visual stimuli. 

In type 1 blindsight there is no awareness of visual stimuli, but subjects are able to 'guess' with high levels of accuracy such things as location, patterns or movement type.

Subjects with type 2 blindsight  have some awareness of, say, movement but there is no visual perception. This seems to be the result of such things as a person's awareness of his or her eye tracking motion which is functioning normally. Blindsight is the result of injury to the visual processing parts of the brain. 

Anton's Syndrome is a rare condition in which people who are blind deny their condition. Often, sufferers will make excuses for their lack of information, for instance by claiming that the light is bad, but they are not lying; they genuinely believe that they can see. 

Another form of the condition occurs when people who are paralyzed claim that they can walk; it is just that they are a little tired at the moment.

These conditions point up some of the problems with representative realism. In the first case people think they can't see but are plainly receiving some form of visual information and in the second two cases evidence from the senses is either ignored, fabricated or radically re-interpreted by the perceiver. 

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