Subconscious eye, while not technically wrong I guess, is not the mystic qualia some might think of.<p>This phenomenon is called Blindsight (also mentioned in the article) and not that rare. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight</a>
If you want to read about many of these kinds of cases, I would suggest "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett. In light of that book this kind of thing is not that surprising (though still very interesting). The book highlights many examples that show that being consciously aware of something is not the be all and end all of the brain's function. There is no central Cartesian theater where the "I" watches the world through the eyes.
Pretty awesome, but one part of it stood out and jarred - perhaps because of my subconscious sense of language.<p><i>"He never touched any of it. We were like totally amazed,"</i><p>How old are these scientists? 12?
Many/most blind people also have their circadian rhythms regulated by light taken in by the eye - there are cells that respond to light in a non visual way.
Reminds me a lot of the split brain phenomena (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain</a>).<p>"Split-brain patients may sometimes confabulate a rational account of their behavior, if the true motivations cannot be reported since they may depend on processing in the linguistically inaccessible right side of the brain."<p>For example, when they are shown a picture of a door in their left visual visual field, they will get up and walk towards the door. When asked why, they will always have an unrelated reason (e.g., to get a glass of water), and are unaware of the visual cue.
Interesting, but I was hoping this story would deal more with psychic abilities. Headline should read: "Brain-Damaged Man Doesn't Know He Can See"<p>Journalists, always over promising...
"<i>We were like totally amazed</i> says de Gelder" ... and then I suspect she added "<i>but lulz aside I was like wtf, dude ?</i>" but that got edited out.
Interesting finding. It truly hurts me to know that even if I lived another 80years, I will most likely not witness the most interesting discoveries about the mind, consciousness, the human psyche and all related subjects. If I could trick Time.
I think this is great confirmation of Dan Dennett's "becoming famous" model of consciousness, that various "threads", much like program threads, are happening and competing all of the time in the brain, and the ones that "become famous", i.e. a thread that can be seen or accessed by broad areas of the brain, is what is consciousness, i.e., a famous thread does not correspond to consciousness, but rather is consciousness.<p>In this case, the thread of the visual stimuli became only famous enough to control the subjects feet and so forth to help him avoid the obstacles, but did not become sufficiently famous to be recorded or reported by the subject as a "conscious experience". This is because the visual stimuli did get passed to the extrastriate visual cortical areas but not to the primary visual cortex.<p>So this perfectly fits Dennett's model: a signal becomes famous enough to control muscles, but, because of injury, does not become so famous (or so globalized a thread, in programming terms) that the subject is able to report an experience of it.<p>For my money, qualia does not exist. It is a remnant of Cartesian dualism that has no place in the 21st century. Here the subject did not "miss out" on some hocus pocus qualia, rather, the visual stimuli simply did not become famous enough to be able to be reported by him, but, it did become famous enough for him to be able to avoid the objects in his visual path.<p>Dennet 1; Dualist Philosophers 0<p>:-)