Scientists prove blind people can 'see' with sixth sense

[Celebration]

http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=2176562005

Scientists from the University of Houston in Texas, temporarily blinded a group of 12 volunteers by using an electromagnetic field to shut down the primary visual cortex. Images were then flashed in front of them on a screen.

In one experiment, volunteers were shown either a horizontal or vertical bar. In another, a red or green dot appeared.

Most of the time, the volunteers were unaware of the images with which they were presented. But they guessed either the orientation of the bar or the colour of the dot correctly more often than would have been expected by the law of averages.

The researchers wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: "Despite unawareness of these 'targets', performance on forced-choice discrimination tasks for orientation and colour were both significantly above chance."

[xchrom]

1. cool.

[HereSince1628]

3. Yeah a story about 6th sense is fun, but

how do you feel about scientists knowing how to make you blind using an electromagnetic field?

Frankly, in a nation where both the chief executives advocate the use of terror...it makes me quite nervous.

Imagine how terrifying it could be to lose your vision?

[Celebration]

10. No kidding!!

Gives me the absolute creeps.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. probably used the third eye

it is sensitive to light, and I have "seen" things with it when my eyes are closed and I am in meditation.

[whatever4]

4. I wonder

If they were temporarily blinded by emf, maybe they didn't see well enough to see an image, but I wonder if enough of the rods/cones picked up a difference to give their brain an "educated" guess. Like, barely hearing something said, and not understanding the words, but recognizing it as a voice. Maybe just a few were able to pick up the shape/color, or maybe they were only able to detect differences slightly, overall. Either case could have given their brains enough information to know, even though it felt like a guess, but more often than not, was a unconscious link to less-processed generalized environmental brain information.

Like, when people can remember things through hypnosis, like car license plates. They aren't aware of how much information their brain is really picking up without trying, and had no idea they "read" the license plate.

I have heard of the third eye though, and recent stories about it, I don't mean to discount that theory either.

[SmokingJacket]

5. This story isn't about a "sixth sense," but about the adaptability of

the brain. Note that these people's eyes were still functional -- but another part of the brain appeared to be doing the work of the visual cortex.

And as an above poster noted, the idea that scientists can shut off people's vision with an electromagnetic wave is... disturbing.

[Skinner]

8. Exactly. It's not about a sixth sense.

The subjects weren't blindfolded; their eyes were still capable of "seeing," but the visual part of their brain was turned off.

Still, it's a very interesting finding.

[trotsky]

18. Thank you.

The EM wave thing isn't so bad, though. I saw a story on TV where they used it for another study - it just looked like one of those wands they wave you down with at the airport, and it's held up in contact with the back of your head. Very close range. The field temporarily (and harmlessly) disrupts the visual cortex neurons.

[leveymg]

6. So, that's why I'm going blind staring at this damn screen all day!

Knew there was a scientific basis for it. Kinda hard to really laugh this off.

[eShirl]

7. why didn't they do the experiment with blind people

That only proves that people who have their vision tem,porarily disturbed by an EMF field can guess right more often than expected. Use actual blind people who have learned to use their non-vision senses over a long period of time.

[Skinner]

9. I think the point is that they needed subjects with working eyes.

They could guarantee that the subjects' eyes worked properly by using people who are not blind.

As SmokingJacket said above, this isn't about a sixth sense. It's about the adaptability of the brain.

[Celebration]

11. from another part of the article

"In tests, the blind have been able to distinguish basic shapes of objects they cannot see, as well as their orientation and direction of motion. On other occasions a blind person has reported experiencing a "feeling" that an object is present, while not being able to see it."

So I don't know anything about these experiments. People can obviously be blind for different reasons. If the eyes are functioning but the visual cortex is not, then this explanation would hold.

[greyl]

14. That's been shown to be a hearing adaptation - like radar.

The increase in auditory sensitivity enables the person to distinguish shapes based on how sound reflects around them.
I saw this demonstrated on a tv program a couple of years ago, so no link at the moment. :) The sensitivity was so acute that the gentlemen could identify a lamp that was behind him, as I recall. He never claimed it was anything other than "radar".
--I just remembered, the guy made a chirping noise to really hone in on something.

[preciousdove]

12. 2 kinds of vision, 2 different parts of the brain..

A story a couple of years ago in Discover magazine talked about a more primitive hard wired sight that does not register consciously. It makes you to duck before you "see" something is coming at you. It is also involved when you are driving and you realize you have not been paying attention and you wonder how you managed not to tbone another car.

Some "blind" people have this available to them and it allows them to be more active than those whose eyes don't work at all.

[htuttle]

13. This is very interesting...

...in regards to how the brain 'sees'.

I don't have any links handy, but it's been my impression from reading about research into cognition that what we consider 'vision' is actually about 50% 'hardware' input from the eyes, and 50% 'software' processing by the brain.

It's interesting that the 'software' seems to be almost optional. A visual sense can still exist, but without going through the processing 'programs'. I wonder how human visual cortex processing compares to that of other animals? I imagine we do quite a bit more.

<TANGENT>
I've often wondered whether the feeling of deja vu wasn't connected to something like this. Reasoning being: Processing your raw visual data takes a certain amount of time (just milliseconds, in most cases). Most of the time, our conscious brains probably ignore the raw visual data, waiting instead for the 'enhanced' images from your visual cortex. Perhaps deja vu is felt if your conscious brain processes sense the raw visual data just before your visual cortex makes it into 'sight', hence the feeling of 'having been through this before'. Without really realizing it, most of the time we are probably 'living' (as far as your consciousness knows) a few miliseconds behind the 'actual present'.
</TANGENT>

[kurth]

15. Wonder what kind of legal paperwork they made them sign

Blindness - temporary or otherwise - is just about the most dreaded disability in medical experiments.

[DrGonzoLives]

16. In any test, they have a 1 in 2 chance of a right answer?

Sorry, that's not "proof" of anything.

[Celebration]

17. beg to differ

If, they have a one in two chance of a right answer, and they are asked 100 times for the right answer, and they give the right answer sixty five times rather than the expected value of 50 times, that is significant!! If I had statistics notes with me I could figure out the exact level of significance........someone else here I am sure could compute that as an example.

[DrGonzoLives]

19. 12 people is not a representative sample

You could have 12 people that are just good at guessing, or very lucky. If this were, say, 100, or 500 people, then I might be impressed.

And if we're going to talk level of significance (or confidence), with only 12 samples, it's awfully hard to have anything very high at all.

[Celebration]

20. Here is another article

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9879390/

But, the researchers said, when the patients were told to guess which way the line was oriented, they were right 75 percent of the time. And they got the color of the ball right 81 percent of the time. Random guessing would be expected to result in a 50 percent correct rate.

Some of the participants said they were guessing randomly and were surprised with their high success rates, the researchers said. Others reported they had a “feeling” about what had been there.

Asked to rate the confidence of their guesses, the higher confidence ratings tended to correspond with more accurate guesses.

“These findings demonstrate that while certain brain areas are necessary for awareness, there is extensive processing of information that takes place unconsciously,” Ro said via e-mail.

Then there is a skeptic quoted--read it yourself since I can't get over the four paragraph limit. His arguments actually make some sense to me. Note that he does NOT attack the statistical method used.

"Good at guessing" and "just lucky" aren't particularly scientific terms. I suppose you think the researchers were "just lucky" too, to pick 12 people that could "guess" that well? I am not saying that the conclusions of the experimenters here are necessarily correct. However, I feel certain that the statistical methods used were quite scientific.

If you don't agree I suggest you take it up with the publisher, the researchers, or their editor. Unfortunately access to the full article costs ten bucks. Here is the abstract.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0505332102v1

[greyl]

21. Neither article states the number of tests per individual.

Which, imo, is as important as the number of individuals tested when trying to figure out what the results of this study mean.

Is a valid random sample still considered to be 30? That's what I was 'taught' in statistics class. When I asked the teacher "Why 30?", he said something very close to "It just is, it's been proven by mathematicians". After asking again for the reasoning behind it, he said "that's not a question for this class".
:banghead:

edit: Frank Zappa dropped out of this same community college years before I did. Maybe he had the same Statistics 101 teacher.

[Celebration]

23. haha

We've all had teachers like that!! I love teacher stories. A friend of mine had a math teacher that wrote equations all over the blackboard with both his hands at once. Can you imagine? I wonder what an MRI of that guy's brain would show.

The math works out something like this (this is qualitative rather than a quantitative answer). When the difference between the control population (or in this case expected population) sample and the "test" population is small, a greater number of subjects or tests are needed to reach a given confidence level, say p=.05. So, actually, if you look at the details of the studies on SSRIs for depression, the pharmaceutical companies have to have HUGE sample sizes because the actual difference between the test populations and the placebo is relatively small. In that case 30 tests would not be nearly enough.

However, if there is actually a huge difference in the underlying control group, and the experimental group--imagine a study trying to show the difference between the number of situps the average 85 year old can do vs. the average twenty year old--likely the number of samples needed to show a statistical difference would be relatively small--fewer than thirty.

Statistical significance is supposed to negate any argument about sample size being too small. Of course, if the confidence level is just .05, then there is a five percent chance that the differences between experimental group and control group are due to chance alone, whatever the sample size.

[greyl]

22. The scotsman article specifies "objects", when the test was about "light."

To tie-in the "blind radar" ability with this, we can't tell from these articles if the researchers are mistakenly equating light from a screen to 3d objects in space, but the scotsman article sure frames it that way.

It's seems likely to me that because there are degrees of natural blindness, there would be degrees of this 'temporary' blindness experienced by the subjects.
Are the 12 varying results due to variations in the effectiveness of the 'blinding machine' or, as the article implies, are they due to varying abilites in the subjects? Out of the 12 subjects, how many were intently participating?

I think a bigger picture is that the anecdotal evidence referring to the "6th sense" of the blind can be explained by a combination of the degrees of the ability to listen, degrees of the ability for sight, and degrees of the ability to "give a shit" about figuring out reality. :)

[Odin2005]

24. Old News

Researchs have known about this for years, it's called Blindsight if your visual cortex is damaged, you can still see, but not be couscious of what you are seeing, and so functionally blind. But the lower brain centers can still process information. That is why they guess correctly when forced to.