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Seeing Beyond the Visual Cortex

"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, albeit without any awareness." explains Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at The City College of New York. Ro is artificially recreating the condition in his lab. Ro. 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 these alternative pathways could be the key to new rehabilitative therapies.