When the Blind Can See

Neuroscientists believe they have located the part of the brain that allows some blind people to process visual information to sense the presence of objects without seeing them. “Some blind people have the remarkable ability to navigate physical obstacles without consciously perceiving them. It now looks like they have their lateral geniculate nucleus — part of the thalamus in the middle of the brain — to thank for this ‘blindsight’. That’s according to a team at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They used macaques in which the primary visual cortex had been destroyed. The monkeys’ eye-focusing movements revealed that they were ‘seeing’ images shown at the periphery of their visual field, but only if their LGN was intact.”