Science!

I'll be off the internet tomorrow and Monday, so I figured we'd do our Science post today.

RFS, as this man is known, has a degenerative condition known as corticobasal syndrome.  Typically this affects motor circuitry, with a decline in movement and speech.  However, this patient became unable to see numbers 2-9 as well.  He described what he saw as "visual spaghetti" and you can see above how off his representations are.

He cannot see the shape, and while his tactile sense is intact, it's too confusing to his brain and he is unable to tell what it actually is.

The researchers working with him have written a paper asking how neural activity evoked by visual stimuli supports visual awareness. "When presented with stimuli containing faces and target words - regardless of whether the patient was aware of their presence - the neurophysiological responses were indistinguishable."

When they placed faces on top of or near these digits, he wasn't able to recognize anything, although his brain would show a response to the face.  The detection of the digit distorts the information so that RFS can't make sense of what he sees.

There is an interview with the researchers Here

Abstract