and the blind man sees

holy crap. a completely blind man can identify whether the faces he is "looking" at are happy, angry, sad, or fearful.

the man suffered stroke damage to his visual cortex, rendering him blind. because his optic nerve and retinal cells are still intact, they are presumably still sending signals to the brain, and clearly those signals don't go just to the visual cortex, but also to the amygdala. this indicates that we have an automatic recognition system for certain perceptual cues such as displayed emotion.

update: just realized that some folks might not know what the amygdala does. it is thought to be one of the brain's primary (and more primitive) emotion centers.

Labels: neuroscience