6 thoughts on “Unconscious Sight”

  1. This can’t possibly be the first study of this. It might perhaps be in the framing, but “Speed Reading” is pretty much exactly this. You’re trying to teach your brain to parse information that’s only ever available peripherally.

  2. This sounds very much like a manifestation of blindsight, discovered in the 1960’s I think, where people blind due to certain kinds of visual pathway damage could still unconsciously perceive relative orientation of two objects, e.g., a pencil lining up with a slot. The subjects would just say they had a feeling about the orientation. The best explanation is that there are multiple vision perception pathways in the brain, but not all of them are directly accessible to our consciousness.

  3. Old news.

    It’s only after sections of the brain recognizes objects that that identification is translated to recognition at the conscious level.

  4. I have experience with a somewhat related effect:

    When flying formation as a wingman, it’s very important to focus on the Lead…the Lead is my world.

    But every once in a while it’s good to check the gauges or displays to see if you are on fire or running out of gas or if the electrical system is on the fritz. So what I will do is glance at the instrument and “take a photograph” so to speak, and NOT look at it long enough to interpret it.

    I then immediately return my focus on the Lead. But now I can also retrieve the photograph, in my mind’s eye, and read what it says while I’m watching the lead.

  5. It reminds me of the story that indians could not see the spanish ships perhaps because they had no context for them.

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