Ramachandran on how "blind-sight" gives us clues about the nature of consciousness

Clip from the fascinating two-part documentary "Phantoms in the Brain" in which neurologist V S Ramachandran describes how the study of patients with certain types of brain damage can give us clues about the nature of consicousness and perception.

Link to the full episodes:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=361F982E5B7C1550

The first episode focuses on blind-sight, phantom-limbs, anosognosia, and hemispatial neglect and the second episode deals with prosopagnosia, the Capgras delusion, and temporal lobe epilepsy.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Ramachandran
• neurology
• neuroscience
• brain
• science
• blind-sight
• consciousness
• perception
• mind
• philosophy
• documentary

[briannloo]

haha ramachandran is so animated when he talks

[karuhime]

Totally awesome... Youtube should have more of these type of videos!

[msnnbc]

Ramachandran is fantastic. Read his books people; they are great.

[marcwagz]

@jeffgrau

because it has no awareness of what is going on which is conciousness as they've defined it. if they wanted to complicate it they could say "it is possible that the reflex sight processor plays a part in what we call conciousness" but it clearly doesn't have conciousness itself, especially not when compared with visual neglect.

[KousAB10]

6:46 lol what i it doing? XD

[abdelrahim123]

Vsauce!!

[evg129]

the iguana agreed



[yoyoboy70]

So the visual cortex in the opticical lobe is damaged, so all the information coming to the visual cortex via the optic nerve goes to the other part, i forget the name. It's lower in the brain.

[jeffgrau]

This is a very biased account. Ramachandran calls the blind-sight observer a zombie. But how do we know that the blind-sight observer is a zombie? Just because it is not the "I"ness in our brain, does not mean it is not a fully conscious specialist that shares some of our hardware. There are many players in the theater of the mind. Unless we have MPD, our "I"ness is just one of them. There is no reason to assume the others are zombies.

[ajnode]

@horbergus

its fluent, not fluid...

[horbergus]

@ajnode If you are so retarded that you cant understand that not everyone speaks english as fluid as you do, go fuck yourself

[ajnode]

@horbergus

if youre so retarded that you dont understand the phrase "animated" you shouldn't be trying to understand this video