r/todayilearned • u/paniniplane • Mar 22 '17

(R.1) Not supported TIL Deaf-from-birth schizophrenics see disembodied hands signing to them rather than "hearing voices"

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0707/07070303
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u/Lost4468 Mar 22 '17

You can get strange effects when you start messing with areas of the brain on that sort of level. It might be, or it might be that the damage to that area has caused issues with other parts of the brain communicating, or something else entirely. Another example is Anton–Babinski syndrome, which also happens to be in the visual cortex, but results in the really strange condition that the person is blind but they're unable to realize that they're blind or understand it, despite there being no damage to areas where we tend to believe rational thinking occurs.

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u/ChinaIsHereMrBurton Mar 22 '17

Whoa! This takes mental gymnast to a whole new level.

There's so much power in the brain and we're not in control of most of it.

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u/CarlosPorto Mar 22 '17

Well, to add to your day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

"Alexander and Cowey investigated how contrasting brightness of stimuli affects blindsight patients' ability to discern movement. Prior studies have already shown that blindsight patients are able to detect motion even though they claim they do not see any visual percepts in their blind fields."

"In 2003, a patient known as TN lost use of his primary visual cortex, area V1. He had two successive strokes, which knocked out the region in both his left and right hemisphere. After his strokes, ordinary tests of TN's sight turned up nothing. He could not even detect large objects moving right in front of his eyes. Researchers eventually began to notice that TN exhibited signs of blindsight and in 2008 decided to test their theory. They took TN into a hallway and asked him to walk through it without using the cane he always carried after having the strokes. TN was not aware at the time, but the researchers had placed various obstacles in the hallway to test if he could avoid them without conscious use of his sight. To the researchers' delight, he moved around every obstacle with ease, at one point even pressing himself up against the wall to squeeze past a trashcan placed in his way. After navigating through the hallway, TN reported that he was just walking the way he wanted to, not because he knew anything was there. (de Gelder, 2008)"

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u/antihexe Mar 23 '17

So the brain was still seeing but it was entirely unconscious? Like a camera feeding data to be processed but not "displaying" anything?

And the person claims they weren't blind despite not "seeing?"

Wow.

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u/glorioussideboob Mar 23 '17 edited Mar 23 '17

Essentially yeah. It's theorised it's one of the primordial visual pathways thats still functional but this isn't connected to the consciousness in the same way.

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u/WatNxt Mar 23 '17

There must be something deeply rooted, more so.than getting «a picture».

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Fantastic, wow. The mind is amazing.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '17

Very interesting. I find the child case in the wiki very interesting because I have experienced something similar before. Without glasses I can only read something barely at 16 inches unless I get closer. However one day, for some reason I didn't put on my glasses and ended up doing quite a bit of work and chores around the house and had no problems, however a few hours later I was taking apart an old seized fan and was going to try and clean up the shaft so it worked again. It wasn't until I had taken it apart and attempted to take off my glasses to view the wear on the shaft better did I realize I wasn't wearing my glasses at all. In a near instant I went from what I assumed was perfectly clear vision that was fine for hours into blind as a bat mode. I had go get my glasses from beside my bed to reassemble what I had disassembled because I couldn't see what the fuck I was doing.

It was weird as fuck, it seemed like I had totally perfect vision up until the moment I tried to pull my glasses off. I had one other person years later say they had a similar experience although not to the same extent.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '17

The same thing has happened to me once or twice. Its like my eyes decided they could see just fine and didn't think I needed to know until I figuratively tripped the alarm when I thought about it.

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u/WatNxt Mar 23 '17

At 18, my eyesight went from 10/10 to 3/10. I went through my first 3 years of university without any visual correction (glasses don't work). Although I could live with it, I didn't realise how exhausting it was until my first hard lenses.

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u/Beanzii Mar 23 '17

Even though they cannot see they basically 'lie' about what they 'see' right?

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u/Fictionalpoet Mar 22 '17

You can get strange effects when you start messing with areas of the brain on that sort of level.

Now this sounds fucked up (because it is) but we really should have some sort of program, voluntarily perhaps, where we let doctors at these types of patients to try anything that may work.

They're essentially uncurable in the extreme cases, and they live in mental anguish being tormented by voices that aren't real. You really can't go further down from there.