Attention without awareness in blindsight (1999) [pdf]
royalsocietypublishing.org
royalsocietypublishing.org
I have a history of migraine. One commonly-reported symptom of migraine--one that I also experience--is "scotoma": a vivid moving visual hallucination that obscures a large portion of the visual field.
I discovered a few years ago that I could read books that I couldn't see because of scotoma.
The details of my scotoma have changed over the years. In my late teens and early twenties they tended to be large, whirling pinwheels of light occupying about half my visual field, usually off-center to the lower left. In recent years they've moved around a little and more closely resemble vivid, shining triangular prisms with iridescent zebra stripes scrolling over and radiating from the surfaces.
Whatever their shape, they're extremely vivid--generally much more vivid than anything in the real world. They're also distracting, and when they occur, I can't see anything past them at all, except around the edges of my visual field where they don't appear. That's maybe less helpful than it might be, since the scotoma moves with my eyeballs, so I can't look around it effectively.
I discovered the peculiar interaction with reading one day when I was reading a book that I found engrossing tell-tale symptoms alerted me that a migraine with scotoma was incoming. I was vexed because I didn't want to stop reading, and I resolved to just continue until I couldn't read anymore.
That point never came.
The scotoma blossomed into its full glory, a vivid, scintillating prism that obscured most of the center of my visual field. I couldn't see the book at all, nor the hand holding it. I could still read, though.
I became preoccupied by the unexpected phenomenon of reading text that I couldn't see, and started reading aloud from the book.
Eventually, the scotoma faded, as it always does, and I was able to confirm that what I had been reading during its effects was in fact what was actually on the page.
I take my experience to mean that the process of reading and interpreting the text and the process of being subjectively aware that I'm doing it are two different processes, and it's possible for one to continue even when the other is prevented.
I had always before assumed that the two processes were one and the same. It never occurred to me that they could be different until the scotoma demonstrated it to me. On another occasion I discovered another crack in my naive model of reality, when exhaustion plus a stimulant offered me the chance to be both awake and asleep at the same time, but that's another story.
In your case the scotoma was causing interference to the visual signal after or ouside or ?? the part of the brain that is processing the vision for reading. Or like in a hologram (which the brain is sometimes likened), you can remove any part of the hologram and still get back the origional image as it is distributed through the entire thing?
I figure our brains sort of cobble together an illusion of selfhood out of a whole bunch of partially-independent processes. Most of the time the illusion is reasonably well supported by decent coordination among the processes, but the coordination isn't instant or perfect, and the gaps become more noticeable if something messes with one or more of the underlying processes.
There are a few other odd effects that seem to me like maybe they're examples of similar kinds of mess-ups. There's the simultaneous waking/sleeping I've experienced--that was a combination of extreme fatigue due to chronic fatigue syndrome, plus a strong alertness-enhancing drug.
And there's the absolute conviction someone close to me occasionally had that an invisible person was in the room with us (even though she was simultaneously aware that no such thing could be true). I think maybe that one was the effect of a brain injury she'd suffered in a car accident.
Not going to lie, I skimmed this paper because I thought the idea from Peter Watt's novel was interesting. This paper was a fun read.
100000 words, estimated reading time 8.4h
in the study both the visual cues (possibly misleading) and targets were purportedly presented within the subject's "blind spot". the subject did better than chance at correctly signaling whether a target was presented or not and, additionally, was faster at signaling when the cue was helpful than when it was misleading indicating that attention was being directed to the probable location of the target subconsciously.
in short, it appears that some neurological mechanisms were processing visual cues and directing attention accordingly without any (reported) conscious awareness of the the cues or the targets.
How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation, Philosophical Topics, 28 (2000), 235-246 by Eric Schwitzgebel and Michael S. Gordon
Abstract:
Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like' to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mistaken about our own current phenomenology.