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Snipped from the Blog.SCIAM.com.
This article was really interesting to me for many reasons. One, I think any new discovery about the brain is REALLY cool. I don’t think that needs much explanation. Second, I have noticed a very strange way that I process information in comparison to that of “normal” people. Not that I am a genius or anything, ha ha, but I do tend to “think” outside my “consciousness”. My problem solving is more like a reaction than a act of “thinking”. If that confuses you even further, let me give you a story that led me to this strange conclusion.
Below is an article snipped from Scientific American, and it discusses a new finding called blindsight. This is a phenomenon that has been recently discovered, and it explains how people that are blind due to an injury to their visual cortex may actually be able to see without knowing it. Sounds strange? Here is some of the article to help you understand it:
When can you see what you can’t see? When you have blindsight, a “condition,” says the Oxford Concise Dictionary, “in which the sufferer responds to visual stimuli without consciously perceiving them.” Here vision researcher Susana Martinez-Conde describes how a man named DB perceives flickering Gabor patches (see illustration above) much more accurately and consistently in his “blind” eye than in his sighted eye — even though he denies ever seeing anything with the blind eye. Sacksian stuff here; read it and wonder. …
Astonishingly, DB performed better in his blind field than in his sighted field, and by a wide margin. He correctly identified the time span containing the stimulus 87 percent of the time in his blind field as opposed to only 50 percent of the time in his sighted field — a rate consistent to that he would achieve if he were guessing. …
An interesting aside concerns DB’s reports of subjective awareness during the experiments. In Experiment 1, DB was asked to report any feelings of subjective awareness of the stimuli, or lack thereof, after each stimulus presentation. He reported no awareness of stimuli presented to the sighted field (confirming that he was essentially guessing), but he had subjective awareness of 80 percent of stimuli presented to the blind field. However, this subjective awareness was nothing like a visual experience; he denied having any experience of vision in his blind field, but described his subjective awareness of stimuli as “feeling as if a finger is pointing through the screen.”
Okay, now that you are aware of what I am talking about [pun intended], what if we could all process information outside of our consciousness? Does our consciousness muck up our decision making? Does it create an emotional bias? Can we train the mind to “think” outside our “awareness”, so that we can “think” faster and more efficiently just as DB has done above? Let’s think about this … okay, now without “thinking” about it!
If you would like to read the full article click the image below.
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