I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html
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A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
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Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#12https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-not...
^ This article (reporting on the same research) seems to be a bit better.
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#13I knew an older woman who had a hard time remembering freeways by their numbers but could remember them all by their names (e.g. "Santa Ana" freeway instead of "5"). That seemed odd because to me the number was the name, so why be any different?
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#14I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html
It is the phenomenon called blindsight, mentioned in this article. (Edit: but not explained, so your question is reasonable)
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was pretty jarring. You’re reading along, fascinated if you’re me, then jarringly reminded of the fact that this was a human being, not a Petri dish. Empathy’s gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social psychologist.
>Empathy’s gotta be one of the most important skills for an experimental social psychologist. Or maybe the exact opposite? I would find it very hard to do research and empathize with the subject of my research at the same time. This has also just made me realized that this problem with empathizing with my research is actually highly problematic when it comes to the research I am actually doing at the moment.
An EMT friend described her take as, you need empathy in order to help people, but you need to be able to switch it off because sometimes what you're about to do is going to hurt them.
It's like any of our instinctual responses. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it's in the way.
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#16> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct, Koch says. “You can get one without the other.”
I think this misses another possibility besides "cognitive processing and consciousness are distinct".
Namely, "the part of them that is conscious of the cognitive processing is not well-connected to the part of them that is generating speech and controlling their motor systems."
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#17I knew an older woman who had a hard time remembering freeways by their numbers but could remember them all by their names (e.g. "Santa Ana" freeway instead of "5"). That seemed odd because to me the number was the name, so why be any different?
They weren’t always numbered. Up north, there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway.
I’ve heard a couple of LA natives say that’s an explanation for SoCal’s affinity for calling them “the 5”: they switched from “the Santa Ana”.
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#18> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…
Sometimes I read about split-brain experiments and wonder, if my brain were to split, which side I'd end up on?
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#19https://www.livescience.com/nueroscience-patient-who-can-not... ^ This article (reporting on the same research) seems to be a bit better.
Maybe so, but the ads were so annoying I couldn't keep reading. It was almost comical how they kept popping up every few seconds, like some kind of parody.
Fortunately, https://outline.com/5nJgjL
Curiously this article presents a different hypothesis about why he is able to read 0 and 1:
> It's also "surprising" that his brain doesn't have problems with "0" and "1," McCloskey added. It's not clear why, but those two numbers might look similar to letters like "O" or "lowercase l," he said. Or those two numbers might be processed differently than other numbers in the brain, as "zero wasn't invented for quite a long time after the other digits were," he said.
Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness
#20> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…
Sometimes I read about split-brain experiments and wonder, if my brain were to split, which side I'd end up on?
Both.