BLINDSIGHT

Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see due to lesions in the primary visual cortex, also known as the striate cortex or Brodmann Area 17. The his- term was coined by Lawrence Weiskrantz and his colleagues in a paper published in a 1974 issue of can-Brain. A previous paper studying the discriminatory capacity of a cortically blind patient was published in Nature in 1973.