Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
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Following certain kinds of brain lesions, patients report an inability to see objects, but if pressed to guess at their location they display a capacity to point at them with reasonable accuracy. The phenomenon, called "blindsight", is one of the more dramatic of a number of lines of evidence suggesting that being aware of doing something is distinguishable from doing something, that areas of the brain underlying the experience of doing at least some things are distinct from those needed to actually do those things.
Such a dissociation has a number of interesting implications. In a general sense, it provides evidence for the existence and significance of an "unconscious" as a contributor to human behavior (and hence for "consciousness" as distinctive part rather than synomous with the totality of brain function). Blindsight also provides a possible explanation for some experiences of "magical" or "transcendent" abilities, at least insofar as these relate to performance characteristics of individuals for which the individuals themselves cannot account. A dissociation between unconscious and conscious processing is also of significance in an educational context, since the two sorts of processing may acquire, process, and make use of experiences in different ways.
Blindsight - the ability to respond appropriately to visual inputs while lacking the feeling of having seen them - might be something which only occurs in cases of brain damage, but seems much more likely to be a significant phenomenon of intact brain function as well. Indeed, it seems likely that blindsight (and similar phenomena in other spheres) is an important ingredient of of a variety of activities where one wants to move quickly and appropriately, without "thinking about it".
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The display to the left is designed to allow you to try and experience blindsight yourself, in a simple and controllable situation. First you will need to set some parameters.
Now click on the Play button to initiate a series of trails. The summary window that appears when you click the Stop button shows a plot, for all four target locations, of the locations of each of your mouse clicks relative to a normalized target location, Plotted points within the circle correspond to trials when you successfully put the target within the cursor circle. This would be expected to occur about twenty-five percent of the time if you clicked randomly at the four target locations. It should be (of course) be well above twenty-five percent on trials where you know you saw the target (green dots in the summary window). |
What's interesting is whether your score is substantially above twenty-five percent on trials where you're less certain whether you saw the target (blue dots) and trials where you're certain you didn't (red dots). Values in the vicinity of fifty percent and above for the last case are pretty good evidence of blindsight.
Try the game, see how you do, and let us know. Our own experience is that some people do better than others, and that people who do less well frequently get better after playing the game for a while. The tough part seems to be getting oneself to stop worrying about whether you actually saw the target and just click. Which, of course, raises some interesting questions about the relation between conscious and unconscious processing.
The general "problem" of consciousness, what it is and what it is (and is not) useful for, is increasingly being treated as a serious scientific issue. The Brain Project provides extensive background and a good entry point into current activity in this area.
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(to contribute your own observations/thoughts , write Serendip) |
Exhibit by Paul Grobstein and Bogdan Butoi. Java applet by Bogdan Butoi.
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