
Attention without awareness in blindsight (1999) [pdf] - benbreen
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.1999.0850
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mikelevins
I'll offer a personal experience (that I've described on HN before) that is
more or less related.

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.

~~~
minerjoe
Wow. That is wild. The brain never ceases to amaze.

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?

~~~
mikelevins
Yeah, I'm not sure how it really works, just that I couldn't see the book (or,
I guess, couldn't experience seeing the book), but that didn't stop me from
reading it.

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.

------
CapmCrackaWaka
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the takeaway from the experiment is that
someone with blindsight can help their subconscious determine the location of
objects inside their 'blind spot' by focusing their attention to that spot.
The paper then implies that consciously 'attending to a spot' gives rise to
subconscious awareness.

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.

~~~
Boxbot
"attention" in this case being an unconscious phenomenon that can but not
necessarily lead to conscious awareness.

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.

~~~
CapmCrackaWaka
Ahh the part I missed was that the arrows were in the subjects blind spot too.
Very interesting.

~~~
Boxbot
your original takeaway was correct too =). there were multiple experiments
covered by the paper, the earlier ones involving cues that the subject was
aware of directing attention into the blind spot, and the later ones dealing
with cues and targets both in the blind spot.

------
pessimizer
Extremely related, along with the rest of Schwitzgebel's work which is in the
same vein:

 _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.

[http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm](http://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm)

