Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision

Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our conscious visual experience of the world is so rich and detailed that we can hardly distinguish it from the real thing. But as Goodale and Milner make clear in their prize-winning book, Sight Unseen, our visual experience of the world is not all there is to vision. Some of the most important things that vision does for us never reach our consciousness at all.In this updated and extended new edition, Goodale and Milner explore one of the most extraordinary neurological cases of recent years--one that profoundly changed scientific views on the visual brain. It is the story of Dee Fletcher--a young woman who became blind to shape and form as a result of brain damage. Dee was left unable to recognize objects or even tell one simple geometric shape from another. As events unfolded, however, Goodale and Milner found that Dee wasn't in fact blind -- she just didn't know that she could see. They showed, for example, that Dee could reach out and grasp objects with amazing dexterity, despite being unable to perceive their shape, size, or orientation. Taking us on a journey into the unconscious brain, the two scientists who made this incredible discovery tell the amazing story of their work, and the surprising conclusion they were forced to reach. Written to be accessible to students and popular science readers, this book is a fascinating illustration of the power of the 'unconscious' mind.

Table of Contents:
1: A tragic accident 2: Doing without seeing 3: When vision for action fails 4: The origins of vision: from modules to models 5: Streams within streams 6: The anatomy of conscious and unconscious vision 7: Why do we need two systems? 8: How do the two systems work? 9: Getting it all together 10: Postscript: Dee's life twenty-five years on

About the Author :
Melvyn Goodale, Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience, The University of Western Ontario, Canada, David Milner, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Durham University, UK

Review :
`Review from previous edition Given the authors' clear and precise language and their stated aim to write an accessible book (which they achieve), this volume is a perfect Christmas present for anyone even remotely interested in the brain... Sight Unseen is not just a book for readers of popular science, demonstrating how much can be learned about brain function from patient studies; even specialists in neuroscience and neuropsychology could learn something... The book illustrates the enormous amount of knowledge to be gained from analysing deficits of specific stroke patients. It closes by stating: "Studying the way the brain reorganizes itself in response to severe damage presents one of the most important challenges to neuroscience in the twenty-first century." How true.' Nature `Goodale and Milner's book is a detailed but non-tech survey of the state of the art. There's more going on than you think, and they do an excellent job of explaining it.' Focus (Science and Technology) `Sight Unseen is an intriguing and important book, stemming as it does from beautifully observed clinical detail combined with a range of ingenious experiments. Melvyn Goodale and David Milner present a persuasive and original argument for the essential doubleness of our visual system, in writing that is vivid and often delightful. It is a valuable and fundamental contribution to our understanding of visual processing.' Oliver Sacks `A rare combination of humanity and important, seminal neuroscience - masterfully accessible.' Lawrence Weiskrantz, University of Oxford `This follow-up to the authors' influential 'Visual Brain in Action' will make their important work on the 'two visual systems' more widely accessible, as it clearly deserves to be. It presents the empirical case for their seminal theory in a delightfully readable manner, treating the evolutionary basis for the dual-stream organization of the visual system, and discussing its far-reaching implications for understanding conscious and unconscious visual perception. Even those who do not agree with their entire comprehensive story will be impressed by the breadth of the case that they make for the claim that vision for action is a different, and perhaps a more primitive system of the brain than the one that gives us our conscious experience of seeing.' Zenon Pylyshyn, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science `Sight Unseen is one of the most fascinating and engaging accounts of visual experience that I have ever read. Goodale and Milner's scientific work over the last decade has caused a revolution in perceptual neuroscience. This book explains many of the details of this revolution in a way that is accessible to interested laypeople and will be of interest to specialists as well. It also shows the warm humanity that lies at the base of every successful doctor-patient relationship. Whether you are a neuroscientist, a philosopher, a poet, a journalist, or just someone who thinks about experiences instead of merely having them, this is a book that you must read.' Sean Kelly, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University `A rewarding book... The approach is refreshingly humane... There is much information of interest in Sight Unseen.' Times Literary Supplement