This mini-review briefly documents the phenomenon of blindsight and investigates evidence for a comparable state in olfaction. Blindsight evokes an appropriate response to a visual stimulus without any conscious visual experience or awareness of that event. For olfaction, we describe many routine aspects of perception that may occur without conscious awareness, arguably paralleling key aspects of blindsight. We then describe the limited neuropsychological evidence suggesting that people can apparently respond appropriately to odours that they cannot subjectively smell - what we would term "blindsmell".
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/tnsci-2015-0002 | DOI Listing |
J Neurosci
January 2025
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging; Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Oxford.
Damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) results in visual field deficits on the contralateral side of the world corresponding to the damaged region. Patients with such loss nonetheless show varying residual vision within this apparently blind region, with the neural mechanisms underlying this ability obscured by small study populations. We identified lesions on structural scans from 39 patients (12 female) with hemianopia and occipital lobe damage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurr Res Neurobiol
June 2025
Neuroscience Program, Biomedicine Discovery Institute and Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia.
Lesions of the primary visual cortex (V1) cause retrograde neuronal degeneration, volume loss and neurochemical changes in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). Here we characterised the timeline of these processes in adult marmoset monkeys, after various recovery times following unilateral V1 lesions. Observations in NeuN-stained sections obtained from animals with short recovery times (2, 3 or 14 days) showed that the volume and neuronal density in the LGN ipsilateral to the lesions were similar to those in the contralateral hemispheres.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrends Cogn Sci
January 2025
RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Wako, Japan; Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research, Institute for Basic Science, Suwon, South Korea; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, South Korea. Electronic address:
Cereb Cortex
January 2025
School of Psychology, University of Queensland, 24 Campbell Rd, St Lucia QLD 4067, Australia.
Blindsight refers to the ability to make accurate visual discriminations without conscious awareness of the stimuli. In this study, we present new evidence from naturalistic observations of a patient with bilateral damage to the striate cortex, who surprisingly demonstrated the ability to detect colored objects, particularly red ones. Despite the slow and effortful process, the patient reported full awareness of the color aspect of the stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBrain Commun
September 2024
Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, FMRIB, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Oxford, Oxford OX3 9DU, UK.
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