Blindsight refers to preserved visual abilities in people with damage to the primary visual cortex who report no visual awareness. This phenomenon has been crucial for studying consciousness. Two main models have been proposed: blindsight as perception without consciousness, or as degraded conscious vision. This article re-examines the debate using recent findings. It defines blindsight subtypes—type I, type II, and blindsense—and stresses the need for sensitive methods to reveal dissociations between perception and awareness. The authors argue that the patterns of dissociation are richer than either model suggests, and they discuss implications for current theories of consciousness.
The same auditory stimulus can produce either sustained or brief brain activity around 250–300 milliseconds after the sound, even when people are not performing any task. This bifurcation in electroencephalographic dynamics predicts whether people later report having consciously perceived the stimulus, both when they are asked to report on a task and when their conscious contents are sampled randomly during passive listening. Source localization shows that task-free conscious access engages the same neural networks as explicit report, except for frontal executive components. Studying variability in brain dynamics may help identify the core signatures of conscious access independently of decision or report processes.
Advancing scientific research on consciousness is important for addressing clinical and ethical issues in neurology and mental health. To support this field, funding priorities must be set carefully, and challenges such as job creation and media misrepresentation need to be addressed.