A man of science and an alchemist

I’m about as stressed out as I get. Work, work, work. I was getting pretty good about writing almost every day — expect that to start up again, maybe, next week, once I’ve finished the semester. Just a few quick things for now.

Zombywoof has an interesting entry on quantum indeterminacy and free will. I don’t know nearly as much as a self-respecting philosopher ought to about quantum physics, so I appreciated the introduction. For the record, I don’t agree with what he says about free will (neither, if I understand his notes to me correctly, does he). I also have come across a really interesting paper about indeterminacy in a Newtonian system, which Zombywoof is skeptical about. I’ll explain it next week, maybe, because it’s interesting and cool.

Speaking of fun sciencey stuff, there’s a COOL new study in the journal Nature Neuroscience (published today, the 13th, actually) about a fun new twist on a fun old cognitive science phenomenon. Here’s the really short version of the fascinating (old) phenomenon:

Ordinary people look at things with their eyes, and see them. Vision is complicated, and uses lots of parts of the brain in lots of interesting ways, and not all of them are conscious. In some odd cases, patients with damage to the visual cortex, but with healthy eyes, go blind in the sense that they have no visual sensations, but still manage to get subconscious information in through their eyes. Typical experiments tend to go like this:

Doctor: Can you see anything?
Patient: No. I’m blind, remember?
Doctor: I am holding up an object somewhere such that your eyes could point to it. Can you see it?
Patient: What part of being blind don’t you understand?
Doctor: Try to point to the object.
Patient: That’s silly. I’d just be guessing. I can’t see a thing.
Doctor: C’mon, just try.
Patient: Ok, whatever.

And then the patient points straight at the object, and can’t believe it when the doctor tells him he’s gotten it right every time. This phenomenon is called blindsight, and it has been observed for some other fairly basic types of visual information, too — subjects have been known to be sensitive to the orientation and shape of objects, such that when instructed to reach out and grasp objects they think they can’t see, their hands orient themselves in the correct way to most efficiently grab the thing. Cognitive science is cool.

Well, the new study points to an even more interesting sort of blindsight. A 51-year-old man who has no visual sensations, ever since losing his eyesight to two strokes, can nevertheless recognize the emotions on people’s faces!

“Although he was clinically blind, he was better than average chance at guessing facial expression of emotions such as anger, fear, sadness and happiness,” Dr Pegna said.

“This was not the case for non-emotional visual features, for example, guessing geometric shapes, male or female faces, real or non-faces, or for non-facial emotional stimuli, such as pictures of threatening animals,” he said.

The study, which is published today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, confirmed that the doctor was completely blind and could not detect movement or colour or even the presence of a strong source of light.

How cool is that? Read more here. Science is fun. In other news, I’m grading like a fiend, and writing like a really slow, uninspired fiend. I leave town Monday — I still have quite a lot to finish before then. Don’t expect to read a lot here until then.

Bedtime.