Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at The City College of New York, is artificially recreating a condition called blindsight in his lab. Blindsight is a condition that some patients experience after having damage to the primary visual cortex in the back of their brains. What happens in these patients is they go cortically blind, yet they can still discriminate visual information. With support from the National Science Foundation, Ro is developing a clearer picture of how other parts of the brain, besides the visual cortex, respond to visual stimuli. He says understanding and mapping those alternative pathways might be the key to new rehabilitative therapies.
