A patient with bilateral damage to the striate cortex, who would be expected to be blind, could detect colored objects, especially red ones, and reported full awareness of the color despite a slow and effortful process. This ability cannot be explained by traditional type 1 or type 2 blindsight, raising questions about the boundaries between objective and subjective blindness and the nature of visual experience. The findings suggest blindsight may play a role in understanding how higher cortical functions are involved in emotions and feelings, highlighting the need for further exploration of visual features contributing to affective blindsight.
Phenomenal consciousness—the felt, subjective quality of sensory experience that underlies sentience—likely emerged late in evolution, after non-phenomenal conscious access to a global mental workspace had already become widespread for cognitive processing. The article proposes a step-by-step neural sequence through which sensory representations could have acquired phenomenal content via small brain changes. It argues that a phenomenally conscious self provides crucial psychological benefits to animals. Blindsight, where patients respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness, is presented as a model for the non-phenomenal cognition that characterizes most insentient species.