Vilayanur Ramachandran - The Emerging Mind - The Reith Lectures 2003

We primates are highly visual creatures and it turns out we have not just one visual area, the visual cortex, but thirty areas in the back of our brains which enable us to see, perceive the world. It's not clear why we need so many, why do you need thirty areas, why not just one area? But perhaps each of these areas is specialised for a different aspect of vision. For example, one area called V4 seems to be concerned mainly with processing colour information, seeing colours, whereas another area in the parietal lobe called MT or the middle temporal area is concerned mainly with seeing motion. How do we know this? Well the most striking evidence comes from patients with tiny lesions that damage just V4, the colour area, or just MT, the motion area.

So for example, when V4 is damaged on both sides of the brain, you end up with a syndrome called cortical colour blindness or achromatopsia, and patients with cortical achromatopsia see the world in shades of grey, like a black and white movie, but they have no problem reading a newspaper or recognising people's faces or seeing direction of movement. Conversely if MT, the middle temporal area is damaged, the patient becomes motion blind. She can still read books and see colours but can't tell you which direction something is moving or how fast.

For example there was a woman in Zurich who had this problem, she was terrified to cross the street because unlike of us here, she saw the cars on the street not as moving but as a series of static images as though lit by a strobe light in a discotheque. She couldn't tell how fast a car was approaching even though she could read its number plate or tell you what colour it was. Even pouring wine into a glass was an ordeal; you and I gauge the rate at which the wine level is rising and slow down appropriately but she can't do this - so the wine always overflows. All of these abilities that seem so simple and effortless to all of us normal people -- it's only when something goes wrong we realize how extraordinarily subtle the mechanisms of vision really are and how complex a process it really is.

Now even though the anatomy of these thirty "visual" areas, the "seeing areas" in the brain looks bewildering at first, there is an overall pattern which I will now describe. The message from the eyeball on the retina goes though the optic nerve and goes to two major visual centers in the brain. One of these I'll call it the old system, the old visual centre, it's the evolutionary ancient centre, the old pathway that's in the brain stem and it's called the superior colliculus. The second pathway goes to the cortex, the visual cortex in the back of the brain and it's called the new pathway. The new pathway in the cortex is doing most of what we usually think of as vision, like recognizing objects, consciously. The old pathway, on the other hand, is involved in locating objects in the visual field, so that you can orient to it, swivel your eyeballs towards it, rotate your head towards it. Thereby directing your high acuity central foveal region of the retina towards the object so then you can deploy the new visual pathway and then proceed to identify what the object is and then generate the appropriate behaviour for that object.

Let me now tell you now about an extraordinary neurological syndrome called Blindsight discovered by Larry Weiscrantz and Alan Cowey at Oxford. It's been known for more than a century that if the visual cortex which is part of the new visual pathway, if that's damaged you become blind. For example if the right visual cortex is damaged you're completely blind on the left side if you look straight everything to the left side of your nose, you're completely blind to.

When examining a patient named GY who had this type of visual deficit, one half of the visual field completely missing, where he was blind, Weizcrantz noticed something really strange. He showed the patient a little spot of light in the Blind region. Weiscrantz asked him "what do you see"? The patient said "nothing" and that's what you would expect given that he was blind but now he told the patient "I know you can't see it but please reach out and touch it" The patient said well that's very strange - he must have thought this is a very eccentric request. I mean, point to this thing which he can't see.

So the patient said, you know I can't, I can't see it how can I point to it? Weiscrantz said well just try anyway, take a guess. The patient then reaches out to touch the object and imagine the researcher's surprise when the patient reaches out and points to it accurately, points to the dot that he cannot consciously perceive. After hundreds of trials it became obvious that he could point accurately on 99% of trials even though he claimed on each trial that he was just guessing. He said he didn't know if he was getting it right or not. From his point of view it might as well have been an experiment on ESP. The staggering implication of this is that the patient was accurately able to point to an object that he denied being able to see. How is this possible? How do you explain his ability to infer the location of an invisible object and point to it accurately?

The answer is obvious. As I said GY has damage to his visual cortex - the new pathway - which is why he is blind. But remember he still has the other old pathway, the other pathway going through his brain stem and superior colliculus as a back-up. So even though the message from the eyes and optic nerves doesn't reach the visual cortex, given that the visual cortex is damaged, they take the parallel route to the superior colliculus which allows him to locate the object in space and the message then gets relayed to higher brain centres in the parietal lobes that guide the hand movement accurately to point to the invisible object! It's as if even though GY the person, the human being is oblivious to what's going on, there's another unconscious zombie trapped in him who can guide the hand movement with uncanny accuracy.

This explanation suggests that only the new pathway is conscious - events in the old pathway, going though the colliculus and guiding the hand movement can occur without you the person being conscious of it! Why? Why should one pathway alone or its computational style perhaps lead to conscious awareness, whereas neurons in a parallel part of the brain, the old pathway can carry out even complex computations without being conscious. Why should any brain event be associated with conscious awareness given the "existence proof" that the old pathway through the colliculus can do its job perfectly well without being conscious? Why can't the rest of the brain do without consciousness? Why can't it all be blindsight in other words?

We can't answer this question directly yet but as scientists the best we can do is to establish correlations and try and home in on the answer. We can make a list of all brain events that reach consciousness and a list of those brain events that don't. We can then compare the two lists and ask, is there a common denominator in each list that distinguishes it from the other? Is it only certain styles of computation that lead to consciousness? Or perhaps certain anatomical locations that are linked to being conscious? That's a tractable empirical question and once we have tackled that, it might get us closer to answering what the function of consciousness might be, if any, and why it evolved.

Now I should add that the blindsight syndrome in GY seemed so bizarre, when it was first discovered that it was greeted with scepticism and some of my colleagues don't believe that it even exists. Well partly this is because the syndrome is very rare but also partly because it seems to violate common sense. How can you point to something you don't see? But actually that's not a good reason for rejecting it because in a sense we all suffer from blindsight. Now that sounds cryptic so let me explain that.