(ISNS) -- When the area of the brain responsible for processing vision is destroyed, does some visual ability still remain? The answer is yes, surprising even to human patients who have experienced this condition, but researchers are looking to monkeys to determine what, and how much, exists.
The long-documented phenomenon of blindsight has shown that though much is lost, much can abide. Even though a blindsight patient doesn't consciously know it, his or her visual attention is still being guided by stimuli like movement in their "blind" field, according to Laurent Itti, a researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who studies blindsight.
A medical officer attending to soldiers wounded in World War I had first described blindsight as a phenomenon resulting from wounds in the occipital lobe. This is the area of the brain that contains most of the visual cortex, which processes visual signals. The term "blindsight" itself was coined in the 1970s.
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